Stuck in a lockdown: Dreams, bad dreams, nightmares, and their relationship to stress, depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: An upsurge in dream and nightmare frequency has been noted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and research shows increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety during this time. Growing evidence suggests that dream content has a bi-directional relationship with psychopathology, and that dreams react to new, personally significant and emotional experiences. The first lockdown experience was an acute event, characterized by a combination of several unprecedent factors (new pandemic, threat of disease, global uncertainty, the experience of social isolation and exposure to stressful information) that resulted in a large-scale disruption of life routines. This study aimed at investigating changes in dream, bad dream and nightmare recall; most prevalent dream themes; and the relationship between dreams, bad dreams, nightmares and symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety during the first COVID-19 lockdown (April-May 2020) through a national online survey. METHODS: 968 participants completed an online survey. Dream themes were measured using the Typical Dreams Questionnaire; stress levels were measured by the Cohen's Perceived Stress Scale; symptoms of anxiety were assessed by Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scale; and symptoms of depression were assessed using the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology. RESULTS: 34% (328) of participants reported increased dream recall during the lockdown. The most common dream themes were centered around the topics of 1) inefficacy (e.g., trying again and again, arriving late), 2) human threat (e.g., being chased, attacked); 3) death; and 4) pandemic imagery (e.g., being separated from loved ones, being sick). Dream, bad dream and nightmare frequency was highest in individuals with moderate to severe stress levels. Frequency of bad dreams, nightmares, and dreams about the pandemic, inefficacy, and death were associated with higher levels of stress, as well as with greater symptoms of depression and anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: Results support theories of dream formation, environmental susceptibility and stress reactivity. Dream content during the lockdown broadly reflected existential concerns and was associated with increased symptoms of mental health indices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".