ArticlePloS one2020
Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion.
Article in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- An observatory on changes in dreaming during a pandemic: a living systematic review (part 1).Journal of sleep research · 2023Pooled it
- Low-dose LSD and the stream of thought: Increased Discontinuity of Mind, Deep Thoughts and abstract flow.Psychopharmacology · 2022Trial
- Individual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Dream content and slow waves benefit prey against predator in a video game confrontation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The return to normal life: sleep, anxiety upon awakening, and nightmares following the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in sleep · 2026Article
- Family lexicon: Using language models to encode memories of personally familiar and famous people and places in the brain.PloS one · 2024Article
- Dreams Shared on Social Networks during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Tower of Babel or Noah's Ark?-A Group-Analytic Perspective.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Human emotional evaluation of ancestral and modern threats: fear, disgust, and anger.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Dreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic: Support for the threat simulation function of dreams.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- COVID-19 nightmare response and stress: A new Mexico sample based survey.Sleep medicine · 2022Article
- Dreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic: A narrative review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- The Rough Road: A Single Case Study of Dreamtelling in a Group during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Military Conflict.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- The COVID-19 pandemic, an environmental neurology perspective.Revue neurologique · 2022Review
- Changes in sleep pattern and dream activity across and after the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy: A longitudinal observational study.Journal of sleep research · 2022Observational
- The Oneiric Activity during and after the COVID-19 Total Lockdown in Italy: A Longitudinal Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Nightmare content during the COVID-19 pandemic: Influence of COVID-related stress and sleep disruption in the United States.Journal of sleep research · 2022Article
- Changes in dream features across the first and second waves of the Covid-19 pandemic.Journal of sleep research · 2022Article
- The impact of the end of COVID confinement on pandemic dreams, as assessed by a weekly sleep diary: a longitudinal investigation in Italy.Journal of sleep research · 2022Article
- Epidemic dreams: dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Nightmares in People with COVID-19: Did Coronavirus Infect Our Dreams?Nature and science of sleep · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming effectively reveal mental suffering and changes in social behavior? To address this question, we applied natural language processing tools to study 239 dream reports by 67 individuals, made either before the Covid-19 outbreak or during the months of March and April, 2020, when lockdown was imposed in Brazil following the WHO's declaration of the pandemic. Pandemic dreams showed a higher proportion of anger and sadness words, and higher average semantic similarities to the terms "contamination" and "cleanness". These features seem to be associated with mental suffering linked to social isolation, as they explained 40% of the variance in the PANSS negative subscale related to socialization (p = 0.0088). These results corroborate the hypothesis that pandemic dreams reflect mental suffering, fear of contagion, and important changes in daily habits that directly impact socialization.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.