What Your Dreams Might Say About How You Should Handle COVID

Source: Teresa DeCicco, used with permission

The events that occur in our day-to-day lives are filled with excitement, stress, hope, and disappointment. These occurrences, as well as our feelings surrounding them, are processed subconsciously while we dream. In this interview, Dr. Teresa DeCicco explains the correlation between our dreams and waking lives while demonstrating their relationship in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Teresa L. DeCicco is a professor, author, and researcher in the field of psychology. Her major focus of work links sleep mentation (dreaming) to waking day life, which, in turn, helps people with waking day challenges through dreamwork. Her research and applied work has included breast cancer patients, men recovering from alcohol and drug abuse, and soldiers returning from war, to name a few. Her book The Giant Compass: Navigating The Life of Your Dreams helps many people make necessary changes in waking day to ultimately find deep meaning and purpose in their lives.

Jamie Aten: How did you first get interested in this topic?

Teresa DeCicco: This study came about by accident. I had a student, the co-author of the paper, collecting data in the Sleep and Dream lab, and she was to be collecting data in the first 3-4 months of 2020 for another study. The study was halted abruptly due to the pandemic and the university shutting down in March. I realized, however, that we had captured data from the period before COVID-19 was really an issue in Canada and before lockdown. We then went to work on comparing the pre-COVID data to a matched sample that was collected long before the pandemic.

JA: What was the focus of your study?

TD: The question we were asking is: What did the dreams reveal about people just before the pandemic was an issue in Canada? Since we know from previous research that dreams reveal the thoughts, feelings, and waking day experiences of individuals, we wanted to investigate this more specifically.

JA: What did you discover in your study?

TD: Interestingly, the dreams of those before the pandemic hit Canada looked very much like the dreams of individuals with high anxiety levels. That is, the imagery from individuals with high anxiety levels was evident in the dreams of those just before COVID-19 was a big issue here in Canada. For example, people who are highly anxious tend to have racing waking day thoughts, and then this shows up in the dreaming mind as changing locations often in the dream. We found this very thing in our study group, as they had significantly more location changes in their dreams. We also found pandemic-related imagery such as grocery store line-ups and imagery of the head, which is related to COVID as fever, coughing, and temperature-taking.

JA: Is there anything that surprised you in your findings, or that you weren't fully expecting?

TD: We were not expecting the dreams from our study to look like anxiety dreams since the pandemic was not a big issue in Canada during our data collection period. For this reason, we were also surprised to see pandemic imagery specifically in the dreams. Our Canadian sample was obviously very emotionally involved with what was happening globally in the very early stages.

JA: How might readers apply what you found to their lives during COVID-19?

TD: Readers can ask themselves if perhaps they are especially anxious given the pandemic and the effects it has on waking life. Many new stressors are introduced in the way of work, family, social life, and potential health issues, so if people feel this is a factor for them, they should not ignore this. This is perhaps an indication that help should be sought from medical practitioners or social support.

JA: How can readers use what you found to help others amidst this pandemic?

TD: The findings of this study reveal that people should take control of their waking lives as much as possible as to not feel helpless and decrease anxiety. The best thing we can do is take personal control, such as wearing a mask, hand washing, sanitizing, and keeping social groups very small. Also, getting outside when you can is best, too, with social distancing. Following these guidelines will help us all feel that we can act in a preventive manner and have some semblance of control.

JA: What are you currently working on that you might like to share about?

TD: We are currently working with a team of researchers at the University of Naples, Italy in order to investigate sleep mentation (dreaming) in relation to the second wave. We hope to see how people in our sample feel in the second wave and compare that to Italians, who were hard hit in the first wave since they were the first country outside of China to have COVID-19.