When dreams turned contagious: Experts explain how Covid synchronised our dream worlds

Masked faces, people in hazmat suits, swarms of bugs, invitations from the dead—if any of these images popped up in your sleep back in 2020, you weren’t alone. People across the world had such dreams during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. The content of our dreams, much like the virus, seemed almost contagious.

Harvard professor and dream researcher Deirdre Barrett was among the first to systematically track these “pandemic dreams”. When terms like ‘quarandreams’ emerged on social media and hashtags like #covidnightmares and #quarantinedreaming trended online in March-April 2020, she launched a large-scale survey, which was later featured in her book Pandemic Dreams. What she found was a rare glimpse into how “nearly everyone on earth” was immersed in the same waking reality.

“It wasn’t that our psyches were mystically connected; it was that for once, nearly everyone’s daily life and emotional tone were synchronised,” Barrett tells THE WEEK. “A dangerous, invisible virus, combined with a shared set of restrictions—lockdowns, masking, social isolation—produced dream themes that were far more globally similar than usual.”

But why did people have longer, more vivid and more bizarre dreams during the pandemic? Barrett says it is not unusual for big global events to shake up our dreamscapes, making them more intense and emotional. She had seen a similar surge in vivid dreams in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, with people reporting visions of plane crashes, fires and collapsing buildings. During wars, dreams often featured bombs or attacks. People also dreamt of earthquakes, tidal waves, wildfires and hurricanes after the 9/11 attacks and during the pandemic. Barrett says these natural disasters are stand-in metaphors for the crisis the dreamers went through. Also, during the pandemic, as the enemy was invisible to the eye, “dreamers imagined monsters, swarms, fogs and dark mists—metaphors for an unseen virus rather than physical destruction,” she says.

If you dreamt of creepy bugs crawling out of nowhere—bedbugs, armies of cockroaches, or perhaps a giant grasshopper with vampire fangs—Barrett’s research suggests your subconscious might have been playing word games. Dreams could represent words metaphorically, like the use of the slang word ‘bugs’ for virus.

Another defining pattern involved the imagery of lockdown—“being trapped, lost or cut off from others, sometimes softened by comic or surreal twists like Zoom nightmares or endless grocery aisles with nothing to buy,” says Barrett. Others feared overcrowding, contamination and failing to wear a mask in public.

Death was also a common imagery. One dreamer who dreamt of a family picnic realised that the attendees were her deceased relatives. Another woman booked an Uber, but a hearse arrived to pick her up instead in the dream. 

People usually have trouble staying asleep during wars or disaster, points out Barrett, because of which they may not remember their dreams. But during Covid-19, most people were able to recall their dreams as they had more time to sleep. People also had spare time to journal dreams and share them with their close ones.

Kelly Bulkeley was another dream researcher who identified patterns of pandemic dreams at an early stage. “People were so scared and confused. Their dreams reflected very clearly these negative emotions,” he tells THE WEEK. “In dreams of war or terrorism, the threat is external and relatively clear. But Covid dreams reflected a sense of an unknown threat inside our communities. Instead of a foreign enemy, it was our normal daily interactions with family and friends that posed a danger.”

​Some of the dream themes he identified were similar to Barrett’s. These included fear of catching the virus, worrying about spreading the virus to others, frustration at the masking and social distance requirements and anger at people with different views about how we should respond to the virus. “Like the ancient Greek myth of Cassandra, who is cursed to speak truths that no one will heed, these dreams expressed people’s despair about the personal dangers of the pandemic,” says Bulkeley.

Pandemic dreams didn’t just reflect anxieties, they sometimes shifted people’s perspectives. Barrett recounts the story of an Australian woman who had dismissed distancing rules until she dreamt of hosting an overcrowded party. 

“A comically large number of people attended—it was so crowded I didn’t realise how risky throwing a party was until later in the dream when Scott Morrison [then Australian prime minister] sent out secret agents to bust people breaking the isolation rules,” the woman is cited as saying in Barrett’s book.

Many others had hopeful dreams like discovering a cure for Covid-19. One of them saw leeches being used to cure the disease. Another dreamt that microwave transmitters were able to block the virus from multiplying. A third one saw saliva of house cats being used to treat the infection.

Barrett says anecdotes from different countries reflected their specific experience. For example, people in New York City and Italy were struck early and hard by the virus. So people dreamt of invisible killers, contamination and death of loved ones. However, in countries like India, the worst Covid wave came later and these dreams weren’t seen much till then, she adds. 

Government policies also seeped into dreams during the pandemic. “In the US and the UK, political conflict filtered into dreams—arguments over masks or chaotic government briefings. Chinese dreamers reported more images of surveillance, testing and the bureaucratic machinery of control,” points out Barrett.

Health care workers across the world shared another layer of horror. Some of their haunting dreams included desperately trying to get malfunctioning breathing tubes into people who couldn’t breathe, Swiss cheese masks as protective gear and patients trying to infect them as zombies, says Barrett.

For all their uncanny imagery, the pandemic dreams revealed how our inner worlds were quietly resonating with one another: the fear of contagion, the restrictions of confinement and the yearning for connection. In that shared struggle, our dreams became a kind of collective diary of how ordinary people experienced, absorbed and interpreted a global crisis, one night at a time.