This article appeared in the September/October 2021 issue of Discover magazine as "Sweet Pandemic Dreams." Become a subscriber for unlimited access to our archive.
You find yourself at a crowded party. People are dancing and drinking and sweating and — wait — why isn’t anyone wearing a mask? You wake up, anxious and confused, and realize it was all a dream: Fears from daily pandemic life just crept into your mind when you were asleep.
Early last year as the COVID-19 pandemic began to unfold, Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher and psychologist at Harvard University, started looking into how this chaotic — and largely collective — experience was affecting our dreams. In March 2020, Barrett created an online survey asking participants from around the globe to describe the dreams they had about the pandemic. By the following March, she had collected and analyzed more than 15,000 dreams from more than 5,000 individuals.
Pandemic dreams have been more vivid and bizarre than those observed during normal times, she’s found. And with disruptions in work schedules and disappearance of commuting for many, dream recall increased for a period at the beginning of the pandemic — typically, an alarm interruption doesn’t allow us the same chance to remember our dreams as when we awaken naturally.
