![]() Current definitions acknowledge that many nightmares are not followed by an awakening ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013). ![]() They can be defined as repeated occurrences of extended, extremely dysphoric, and well-remembered dreams that usually involve threats to survival, security, or physical integrity ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Nightmares are a special case of dreaming. In order to understand whether the stress of the pandemic influences dreams and results in collectively shared dream content (i.e., whether shared experiences, such as COVID-19 and the lockdown, produce similar dreams), it is crucial to solicit the dream reports during a very short timeframe. Evidence converges to suggest that the incorporation of experience into dreams is characterized by a circaseptan process, such that dreams include events from both the preceding day ( day-residue effect) and a week earlier ( dream−lag effect) ( Nielsen et al., 2004). Indeed, dreams reflect waking consciousness by spontaneously incorporating daytime experience ( Koulack et al., 1985 Stickgold et al., 2000 Nielsen et al., 2004 Malinowski and Horton, 2014 Solomonova et al., 2015). Seizing on the opportunity and collecting dream content during a carefully selected time window during the COVID-19 lockdown allowed for a unique natural experiment to study dreams and nightmares. Thus far, preliminary reports suggest that poor-quality sleep and insomnia-related symptoms have indeed increased in the general population ( Casagrande et al., 2020 Huang and Zhao, 2020 Xiao et al., 2020) however, the impact of the pandemic on the content of dreams and nightmares remains unexplored. Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a threat to health and well-being, causes worries and fears, alters behavior and everyday life, and has a lasting impact on how we perceive the world ( Zhou et al., 2020). An increase in nightmares has been previously observed with regard to wars, terrorist attacks, and during earlier pandemics or infectious diseases ( Nielsen et al., 2006 Hartmann and Brezler, 2008 Sandman et al., 2013). While sporadic changes in sleep and dreaming are normal, and sleep naturally responds to environmental fluctuation, extreme factors and traumatic experiences can lead to severe changes in sleep patterns, including altered dream content or more nightmares. Significant events and threatening situations change the way people sleep and dream, and pandemics are no exception ( Nielsen et al., 2006 Hartmann and Brezler, 2008 Sandman et al., 2013 Cenat et al., 2020). On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 is a pandemic ( World Health Organization, 2020). This CS survey on dream-association networks and pandemic stress introduces novel, collectively shared COVID-19 bad dream contents. The dream-association networks were more accentuated for those who reported an increase in perceived stress. We transcribed the content of the dreams into word lists and performed unsupervised computational network and cluster analysis of word associations, which suggested 33 dream clusters including 20 bad dream clusters, of which 55% were pandemic-specific (e.g., Disease Management, Disregard of Distancing, Elderly in Trouble). ![]() Overall, respondents slept substantially more (54.2%) but reported an average increase of awakenings (28.6%) and nightmares (26%) from the pre-pandemic situation. Over the course of 1 week, 4,275 respondents (mean age 43, SD = 14 years) assessed their sleep, and 811 reported their dream content. The CS took place on the sixth week of the lockdown. We used crowdsourcing (CS) to examine how COVID-19 lockdown affects the content of dreams and nightmares. 9Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.8Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA, United States.7Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States. ![]() 6Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States.5Visiting Researcher, Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.4Department of Social Psychology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.3Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.2Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.1Sleepwell Research Program, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.Anu-Katriina Pesonen 1*, Jari Lipsanen 2, Risto Halonen 1, Marko Elovainio 1, Nils Sandman 3,4, Juha-Matti Mäkelä 1, Minea Antila 1, Deni Béchard 5, Hanna M.
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