If you’re experiencing unusual or scary dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s simple ways to get a better night’s sleep, says neurologist Patrick McNamara.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some confess to crawling into bed at an earlier hour, while others have found themselves running on just a few hours of sleep to keep up with work and personal responsibilities.
Whether you’re getting a full eight hours, or drifting off for a quick snooze, many people have reported stirring restlessly in their sleep, disturbed by the strange figures, unusual places, or frightening scenarios that have appeared in their dreams.
Here, McNamara, associate professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine and the VA New England HealthCare System, digs into how the coronavirus pandemic has affected our dreams. He also explains what we can do to prevent even the most intense ones from negatively affecting our sleep schedule and well-being:
Q: Why are some people experiencing more vivid or unusual dreams during the coronavirus pandemic?
We normally process intense emotions, especially fear and threat, in or via REM sleep dreams. We can better integrate intense fear when the memories associated with that fear are simulated or symbolized in dreams, and then transferred into long-term memory stores.
If that threat is unusual, it takes longer to integrate it into long-term memory. As a result, dreams have a harder time processing the emotions, and the fear memory sits in working memory stores of REM sleep while waiting in line to get transferred into long-term memory—and in the meantime, keeps producing scary dreams.
We are more prone to these kinds of dreams if we are alread ..
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