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7 Powerful Themes from Pandemic Dream Research
Collective dream analysis illuminates the mind in troubling times.
KEY POINTS
- Dreams serve many functions, and reflect collective experience, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
- We can learn from dreams about underlying feelings and thoughts, and use dreams to learn about ourselves.
- Key narratives define pandemic-related dreams and add to our collective experience.
Since time immemorial, when important events are happening, when we are living in times of change, our dreams come alive, blending over into waking life and capturing our attention. The COVID-19 pandemic, grueling in its persistence and tragic in its destruction, is present in our sleeping and waking lives.
Italy was one of the first and hardest-hit countries. At that time, researchers from Sapienza University of Rome designed a study (2021) exploring the dreams of people during COVID in order to better understand how collective trauma plays out in the unconscious mind, as reflected during sleep.
Dreaming and sleep have been shown to serve important roles in memory and learning, part of our nocturnal housekeeping to clear out toxins, and also reflective of repetitive brain activity related to digesting…
