Why You're Suddenly Remembering Your Dreams in the Morning
Dreaming in vivid detail that's haunting you all day? Here's what that means.
Photo Illustration/InStyle.com, Images: Getty Images
Nearly three weeks into isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve noticed something: My dreams have become incredibly vivid, and I remember them upon waking.
The only time I remember having such vivid dreams was during my pregnancies, when I had recurring sex dreams about Pitbull. That was (mostly) explained by hormone shifts that impact emotions and anxiety. But now, I’ve seen person after person tweeting about their own out-of-the-ordinary dreaming and wondering if others were experiencing it, too. When I sent my own tweet about the phenomenon, it received almost 200 replies. People are dreaming about their exes breaking quarantine to go to the ball with Kanye West, and running screaming down long dark hallways; saying they don’t remember waking up with such clear dream recall at any other point in their lives.
Yes, vivid dreaming is common during this pandemic, and there is good reason for it, according to the experts in my inbox. “This is global,” Robert Bosnak, a psychoanalyst and past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, tells InStyle. “I’m working currently in the U.S., Australia, India, China, and Japan. Story is the same everywhere. People are dreaming up a storm.”
There are five phases of sleep, and dreaming is most likely to happen during the REM (rapid eye movement) phase. A 2010 study found that vivid, bizarre, and emotionally intense dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts of the amygdala and hippocampus. Bosnak shares this theory, positing that all this remembered dreaming “has to do with strong activation of the limbic system governing dread and rage,” which happens predominantly in the amygdala.
However, he says it’s impossible to know whether people are actually dreaming more vividly, or if they’re dreaming just as much but sleeping more lightly, which can result in remembering dreams more than usual. A survey of nearly 1,000 adults conducted by the website Sleephelp.org found that 22% of respondents reported worse sleep quality during the coronavirus quarantine, because of fears or stress about COVID-19.
This jives for Joe Dobkin, an audio producer in New York. “I’ve actually been remembering fewer dreams than usual, since I’m sleeping less deeply,” he says. “Even though I’m very lucky to be in a comfortable and safe situation, I’m just saturated with a constant sense of dread.” (Cue the amygdala, firing on all cylinders.)
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Others on Twitter have hypothesized that it is a trauma reaction, a stress reaction, a reaction to being isolated. All of these are likely true, to some degree. Dreaming is “a powerful way that we process intense experiences,” says Martha Crawford, a licensed social worker who started a blog to collect dreams about the Trump presidency, and has begun doing the same for the current pandemic. Nightmares are a common symptom of trauma and, according to a Nature and Science of Sleep report from 2018, they're considered the “hallmark of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)." Bosnak explains that there are two kinds of them: those “PTSD nightmares,” which tend to be recurring and not change much in content, and what he calls “digestive nightmares,” which can change wildly from night to night because they’re the way our brains are digesting our trauma and anxiety. Indeed, one 2011 study found that a reduction in REM sleep (where most dreams happen) affects our ability to understand complex emotions in daily life.
“We're dealing with a very intense cluster of very primal, existential anxieties right now — fear of loss of loved ones, fear of our own potential death, fear of suffering, fear of watching other people suffer, loss of contact with people we love,” says Crawford. “We're trying to keep our lid on and contain ourselves during the day and so at night, [dreaming] is the way we release that repression mechanism and start processing how we are making sense of these things.”
Experiencing intense dreams during times of collective crisis has happened throughout history. One person replied to my tweet to say they’d experienced the same thing after Hurricane Katrina. Charlotte Beradt’s book The Third Reich of Dreams catalogued the dreams people experienced in Nazi Germany. After 9/11, Bosnak and his colleagues tracked the content of dreams, too. Multiple people have started projects cataloguing the dreams during the pandemic. In addition to Crawford’s website, Dobkin has started gathering dreams for a podcast called “QuaranDreams,” and Erin Gravley has created the submission-based website I Dream of Covid.
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