Dreaming Our Way Through the Pandemic

I have been focused on doing everything I can to improve my sleep, especially since my neurologist expressed concern about my sleep.  We were concerned with some erosion of my cognition that was occurring during the spring and summer of last year, and sleep problems were likely the culprit.  Part of trying to improve my sleep has been reading and studying what we know about sleep, including the thoughts that Freud and Jung had about dreams.

So I had been paying attention to my dreaming, noticing that I recently had been dreaming more -- or at least remembering more about my dreams when I awoke.  I very rarely have nightmares, perhaps less than one a year that I will remember.  But I recently had two relatively mild ones in the same week.  This caught my attention.

Those of us who use the Firefox web browser are treated to new, interesting stories every day when we first open it.  Yesterday one story popped up about an upswing in remembered dreams all over the world -- and an upswing in nightmares.  So I didn't seem to be alone in my experience.

Firefox brought the story over from InStyle, an online magazine that generally focuses on fashion and popular culture.  But this topic is probably of interest to all of us.  The article was "Why You're Suddenly Remembering Your Dreams in the Morning."  Of course, the cause of the change in our dreaming behavior seems to be the anxiety being produced by the covid-19 pandemic.

The article associates our recent behavioral changes with reactive activity in the hippocampus and the amygdala structures of the brain.  Both are members of the limbic system and so are associated with both memory and emotion.  They are generally subservient to the structures associated with reason.  The article suggests that reactions of "dread and rage" in the limbic system are responsible for changes in our dreaming behavior.  Dreams are a way in which we process intense experiences.   Therefore, unusual stresses and uncertainty lead to reactions of dread and rage which prompt increased dreaming activity.

As an aside, I recently experienced some confusion when talking with a friend in Spanish.  It turns out that the word "amygdala" means the same thing in both Spanish and English in reference to the brain, but it can also be translated from Spanish as "tonsil."  So when we used "amygdala" in our conversation, we were talking about two different things.  The conversation got very strange very quickly.