Pandemic Dreams: Network Analysis of Dream Content During the COVID-19 Lockdown
Frontiers in Psychology October 1, 2020 A. Pesonen, J. Lipsanen, R. Halonen et al.
During the sixth week of COVID-19 lockdown, a crowdsourcing survey of 4,275 respondents found that people slept substantially more (54.2%) but reported an average increase in awakenings (28.6%) and nightmares (26%) compared to before the pandemic. Analysis of dream content from 811 respondents using computational network and cluster analysis identified 33 dream clusters, including 20 bad dream clusters, 55% of which were pandemic-specific (e.g., Disease Management, Disregard of Distancing, Elderly in Trouble). Dream-association networks were more accentuated for those reporting increased perceived stress, introducing novel, collectively shared COVID-19 bad dream contents.