A California woman in her seventies was dreaming of a grocery store. Her cat had instructed her to buy a specific brand of chicken, but it was too expensive. When she got to the register with her cheaper chicken in tow, the cashier told the woman she’d have to submit the proper paperwork for the chicken later because the system couldn’t find the correct part number. The woman apologized for her stupidity but had to ask: Where was she supposed to find a part number on a chicken carcass?
Erin Gravely, a San Francisco Bay Area resident, has been collecting anxious, Covid-19-related dreams like this one for days and days. They live—dozens of them, complete with illustrations—on a website called I Dream of Covid. Twitter teems with thousands more #pandemicdreams and #covidnightmares, and so does Reddit. Many of these visions are standard anxiety dreams: being chased, being unexpectedly nude, being unable to locate something you desperately need to find. Some are pure, garbled nonsense. Others grapple with the particular terrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, like unscrupulous doctors tricking people into taking hydroxychloroquine or unsuspecting people catching the virus from the pages of a book. Regardless of content, almost all posts about coronavirus dreams wind up at the same place: Weird, commenters say, I’m having crazy dreams, too.
When you read these reports en masse, as Gravely has, the dreams are bizarre and individual, but also strikingly the same in form and tone. To sleep researchers, that makes a lot of sense. “I can’t think of another universal stressor experience like this,” says Jessica Payne, who studies sleep and stress’s influence on memory and psychological function at the University of Notre Dame. “Can you?”
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You’d have to claw back through history to find any comparators, though few have impacted as many people as the current pandemic. The dreams remind Gravely of reports she’s read about dreamers in Nazi Germany, who wove “bureaucratic fairy tales” about nose-shape-verification departments and regulations prohibiting “residual bourgeois tendencies.” As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, more and more people are experiencing nightmares about the new laws of social dista
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