With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (and especially sensitive people – and much earlier), millions of people around the world began to dream of various kinds of apocalyptic catastrophes – a zombie apocalypse, world war, an asteroid fall or some similar grandiose space event.
Since the bulk of modern citizens do not attach particular importance to dreams, everyone dismissed the phenomenon, reassuring themselves with explanations such as “I have seen” or “seen enough films.”
However, as sciencealert.com reports with reference to a scientific publication by Brazilians, not everything is so simple.
Scientists have found that the number of dreams that are associated with negative emotions and anger has increased significantly. This is confirmation that pandemic dreams express people’s suffering, fear, and numerous changes that affect daily habits. Experts wrote about this in their article published in the scientific journal PLOS One.
“ There was a statistically significant increase in the number of dreams associated with anger and discouragement, as well as an increase in dreams associated with pollution and cleanliness. These results support the hypothesis that pandemic dreams reflect mental anguish, fear of infection, and important changes in daily habits that directly affect socialization,”
For example, people really had such bad dreams in 1918 – at least among the inhabitants of the Russian Empire.
The last epidemic in the world was in 1918.
Since 1914, people began seeing all kinds of nightmarish visions in their dreams everywhere. No one talked about the zombie apocalypse and meteorites – the dreams were about rivers of blood, plague and hunger.
On the eve of 1939, the world was also captured by not very good dreams – people in one interpretation or another were somehow warned about the impending global world changes.
That is, it seems that the problem with dreams and bad forebodings among people is some kind of universal and ubiquitous, if cartoons about the zombie apocalypse are seen everywhere and the age and color of people are different here.
In short, people simply sense that some CHANGE is impending on the world and these changes are unlikely to be very good … !!!
Dream Keepers project
The Museum of London has asked the residents of the British capital to share the dreams they saw during the pandemic.
The Dream Keepers project is being implemented jointly with the Dream Museum of the University of Western Ontario (Canada). Forteini Aravani, digital curator at the Museum of London, said the museum wants to capture London’s history during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Sleep and the patterns associated with it became one of the first habits that immediately changed a lot in quarantine. I wanted to show that the pandemic affects not only our consciousness, but also our subconscious life, including dreams,” she explained it.
Londoners who are willing to tell their dreams, are invited to get in touch with curators until January 15 by email address.
Further, their words will be recorded on audio or video.
“Museums traditionally collect dreams, but not the stories themselves, but rather visualizations: drawings and paintings. This time we want to include stories in our collection, thus slightly expanding the idea of what can be a museum object”, – she explained.
The project does not imply an immediate analysis of dreams, but later they can be studied. One of the psychologists at Queen Mary University of London, Valdas Nareika, welcomed the initiative.
Many important lessons can be drawn from dreams, he said. So, people say that in their dreams there is more anger and sadness, ideas of infection and purity are often encountered. He suggested that the new project will be of significant interest to historians and scientists of the future.
