Nightmare content during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Influence of COVID‐related stress and sleep disruption in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nightmares are often associated with psychiatric disorders and acute stress. This study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic may have influenced the content of nightmares. A sample of N = 419 US adults completed online surveys about sleep and COVID-19 experiences. Participants were asked about the degree to which they agreed with statements linking greater general stress, worse overall sleep and more middle-of-the-night insomnia with the COVID-19 pandemic. They were also asked if, during the pandemic, they experienced nightmares related to various themes. Logistic regression analyses examined each nightmare content as outcome and increased stress, worse sleep and more middle-of-the-night insomnia as predictors, adjusted for age, sex and race/ethnicity. Those who reported greater general COVID-related stress were more likely to have nightmares about confinement, failure, helplessness, anxiety, war, separation, totalitarianism, sickness, death, COVID and an apocalypse. Those who reported worsened sleep were more likely to have nightmares about confinement, oppression, failure, helplessness, disaster, anxiety, evil forces, war, domestic abuse, separation, totalitarianism, sickness, death, COVID and an apocalypse. Those who reported worsened middle-of-the-night insomnia were more likely to have nightmares about confinement, oppression, failure, helplessness, disaster, anxiety, war, domestic abuse, separation, totalitarianism, sickness, death, COVID and an apocalypse. These results suggest that increased pandemic-related stress may induce negatively-toned dreams of specific themes. Future investigation might determine whether (and when) this symptom indicates an emotion regulation mechanism at play, or the failure of such a mechanism.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".