COVID-19 POPPING UP IN NIGHTMARES

Researchers in Finland say a majority of the bad dreams people are having this year are now related to COVID-19. A team led by researchers from the University of Helsinki found the virus is overtaking all other themes when it comes to a person’s nightmares. The researchers gathered sleep and stress data from over 4,000 people starting in the sixth week of Finland’s lockdown. After transcribing the dreams into lists of words, researchers used an artificial intelligence algorithm to compile a group of themes appearing in the dreams. Some themes fall into the nightmare category and 55 percent of those were specific to the pandemic. These bad dreams revolve around failures in social distancing, masks, dystopia, and apocalyptic outcomes during lockdown. Some of the words that kept popping up in describing the dreams were word combinations like mistake-hug, hug-handshake, distancing-crowd, crowd-restriction, and crowd-party.
* In one person’s nightmares about falling, he now finds himself falling out of the sky and landing in an illegal college frat party.
* An even more recent nightmare study found word pairings like debate-watch, watch-mistake, sad-watching, ear-noise, and orange-shouting.
* Are they talking about sleeping nightmares, or the nightmare of just waking up in the morning and turning on the news?
* Fun fact: Finland has the world’s highest per capita consumption of coffee … so at least they’re trying to keep the sleep to a minimum.