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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, and everyone. We'll do our final 2020 time capsule segments now. One on dreams and one on the new abnormal in your life, dreams. You're at the supermarket, but you forgot your mask. You caught a new strain of the corona virus from an insect. You were about to get the vaccine, but the vial shattered on the floor in front of you. Those are some pandemic specific stress dreams reported on Twitter recently and it turns out that the pandemic has had some effect on our dreams. From what we dream about, to how vividly we remember them.

Here with me to talk about that and to take your calls with some of your COVID dreams is someone who has been researching our pandemic dreams. Dr. Kelly Bulkeley is the director of the Sleep and Dream Database, author of several books on dreaming, including An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, and Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions. He recently conducted a study on dreams and the pandemic. Dr. Bulkeley, so nice to have you. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Kelly Bulkeley: Thank you for having me.

Brian: Before we open up the phones for people's stories of what they experience about COVID while sleeping, you've researched dreams in the wake of multiple collective disasters. I see, most notably, 911. In general, how do mass tragedies or disasters affect the way we dream, and is there anything distinctive about this pandemic when it comes to dream and dreaming as sort of a top-line headline?

Dr. Kelly: Well, a big question. Yes, the nature of dreaming is to reflect not only our personal life experiences, but in some cases, our collective life experiences as well. In times of disasters, whether natural earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, or human-caused wars, terrorism, and such, those are times when we see vividly how the collective aspects of dreaming come to the fore. In this current time with the pandemic, yes, we see that times 10. It's really a remarkable and, of course, troubling phenomenon because many of the dreams are nightmarish. People's sleep has been very disrupted. Yes, all of that.

Brian: Listeners, has the pandemic changed the way you dream? 646-435-7280. What are some specific ways that COVID-19 has infected your dream life? 646-435-7280. Do you have dreams where you don't have your mask? I've had those dreams. Do you have dreams where else isn't wearing one? I've had those dreams. Are you dreaming about getting sick or losing somebody or maybe something else like forgetting your pants on Zoom? Anybody had that dream?

What are your COVID-related stress dreams, nightmares and we can find some good ones too. Are there good ones? Maybe you're dreaming about escape to an Island or a big party where all your friends are together and happy. What are you dreaming about and how has your dream life changed in 2020? Put this in the time capsule. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 with dream expert, Dr. Kelly Bulkeley. Dr. Bulkeley, I see you conducted a study back in May surveying more than 3,000 American adults about their dreams. What were you looking for?

Dr. Kelly: Well, that study was basically an initial snapshot of what even at the time we could see was going to be an ongoing, unfolding collective disaster. I wanted to get just an immediate sense in the American context of how people's dreams and sleep behaviors were responding to the first wave of things, and it was dramatic. Follow-up studies are showing the ongoing effects, but that even as early as May, and this was asking people about their dreams for the previous month.

It was the March, April timeframe people were having exactly the kinds of dreams you were mentioning now. People were already dreaming about masks, having them, not having them, social distancing, how close should I get to someone or not? Of course, catching this invisible unpredictable deadly disease. That quickly and deeply impacted people's dreams.

Brian: Are there are some most common ones? If masks is one, one that I've had a couple of times, is that I accidentally forget my mask and I only realize it when I'm out in public. I have twin reactions to this in the dream. One is, "Oh my God, I'm not protected." The other is, "Oh my God, people are going to judge me and think I'm irresponsible for not wearing a mask," both things at the same time. Is that a common dream? Are there certain ones that rise to the top of commonality?

Dr. Kelly: A big part of this pandemic as a disaster and the way it impacts our dreams is that the pandemic has so profoundly disrupted our social lives and dreaming is actually very social. 95 plus percent of our dreams include other characters. Our dreams have lots of social interactions, lots of other characters, and to have our social lives in the waking world so profoundly disrupted by all these new rules and things we have to do and not do, that has also disrupted people's social lives in their dreams.

That, I would say is a category of pandemic dreaming. Social anxieties, embarrassment, shame, fear, confusion, all of that has been thrown into question whether or not we catch the disease. This is just a fact of living in the pandemic era and it's affecting all of us, I think.

Brian: Mark in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hello. I had COVID in March and when I had COVID, I had wildly vivid, sometimes, crazy violent dreams that would just-- I'd wake up and go, "Oh my God. Thank God I'm awake." Now that I don't have COVID, but have suffered from some lingering effects, I've had a bunch of dreams that are like just, I think, anxiety over the effects that COVID have had on me. I had a dream the other night where I was seemingly losing all my capabilities mentally to keep myself organized. To me, that's just like, okay, I'm just having an anxiety dream about the effects that this virus had on me.

Brian: Dr. Bulkeley?

Dr. Kelly: Yes, that's fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. This is going to be a new, I'm sure, research genre of people who had the virus, like yourself, and the effects on various kinds of things like sleep and dreaming. I'm not a therapist. I'm not trying to provide therapy, but it would be a common thing and following an experience like this to have dreams and nightmares that are akin to post-traumatic stress disorder nightmares, not saying that that's what's necessarily going on here, but that dreams that reflect a very scary traumatizing event are likely to echo through one's dream life for months and years to come.

Brian: Mark, could I ask you to say a little more about the dreams that you've had that you said were so vivid while you had COVID?

Mark: Well, that was back in March, and do I remember them very well? No. Again, they were-

Brian: Were they different in nature than what you're having now these many months later?

Mark: Oh, yes. What I'm having now, I think, is just anxiety of the effects that this thing has had on me, and then it was just-- I can only compare it to one-- 20 years ago, I was on a drug called Lariam for anti-malarial purposes whilst traveling in Africa. I had wildly vivid dreams. It was so bad and so disruptive, I had to stop taking the drug because it was-- Just gamble on getting malaria because I would thrash around at night and sometimes it's like, fall out of bed. There were similar in intensity to that.

Brian: Mark, thank you so much for checking in. People can definitely learn from your call. [unintelligible 00:09:31] in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, [unintelligible 00:09:34].

Speaker 4: Well, hi.

Dr. Kelly: Hi.

Speaker 4: I was suffering from COVID-19 in April and I was having problems sleeping because I would have a nightmare of quicksand, I'm going down, then I would wake up quickly just to find myself I was still alive. Then recently, I have a dream that is repeated. I'm being chased by two white Bengal tigers. I feel these are vaccines. I feel comfort that I survived the chase by two Bengal tigers. I named them Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccine.

[laughter]

Dr. Kelly: Nice.

Brian: That would mean the tigers were going to vaccinate you rather than harm you.

Speaker 4: I think so.

Dr. Kelly: That's wonderful. The quicksand nightmares, that's a very vivid and in a way, eloquent image of I think the impact many people described of having the virus and its impact on their breathing, on their respiratory system. Quicksand being a threat of pressure and suffocation, then suddenly waking from that, and with the relief of, "That's not happening to me, actually. I am alive," and that being the effect of that. That's interesting.

Brian: A number of the callers that we're getting on our board are far away in their dreams. Pfizer was just describing that somebody else is calling and saying their COVID dream takes place in Vietnam. Todd on the Upper West Side is somewhere in Europe, let's take that one. Todd, you're on WNYC.

Dr. Kelly: [laughs]

Brian: Hello.

Todd: Hey, Brian, how are you? Everybody okay, and your family, I hope?

Brian: All right, thank you very much.

Todd: Good. I had a dream that really encapsulates both issues. In the dream, I'm in a fantasy version of Paris, I'm going through lovely underground passages, looking at storefronts, and really enjoying myself. I'm alone, but there are other people on the streets when all of a sudden, I'm seized by a terror that not only am I not wearing a mask, nobody is wearing a mask. I go from this lovely experience of being away in Europe to abject terror.

I think the dream as I explained to the screener, I think the dream encapsulates everything that we're all experiencing, which is, on the one hand, the clear obligation to be responsible and wear the mask, which is still by definition a confinement, and then the real physical confinement, the lack of mobility and being able to even exercise fantasies. We can't even exercise fantasies without there being impacted.

Dr. Kelly: Right. Even a happy wish-fulfilling dream is ruined by the virus. Even in your dreams, you can't get to Paris and just enjoy yourself, you have to worry about masks again in your dreams. That's a funny commentary on the whole pandemic era.

Brian: Todd, thank you very much for sharing that. Well, doctor, can you do anything in your waking life to have happy dreams and to minimize nightmares?

Dr. Kelly: Well, ironically, the more I think we pay attention to our dreams, the more that effect happens because a lot of times, the most nightmarish dreams are the ones we're trying to deal with the least that we want to keep at bay. There is an effect of by allowing what is really just our own unconscious emotions and feelings into our waking awareness,

that itself can sometimes break the spell of the most nightmarish dreams and elicit more hope for these more adaptive, creative, and forward-looking dreams.

I should say, of course, with this topic, anybody who's suffering recurrent, just highly distressing nightmare should really see a mental health professional. That's very important these days, and probably more people need it than are seeking it. I just want to make sure that's part of the conversation.

Brian: Why do we dream? Is there an evolutionary reason for it?

Dr. Kelly: Absolutely. Dreams are one of the ways that our minds make sense of the world. They process our experiences during the day, they correlate things that we've encountered with past memories, and they anticipate how we are going to face future challenges and future opportunities. This goes as primal as how to avoid being prey or being prey of another predator. This is why we have so many-

Brian: Like Bengal tiger from AstraZeneca.

Dr. Kelly: Which is wonderful, exactly. That's a modern adaptation of what is actually a primal nightmare found in ancient cultures all over the world, being attacked by wild animals. This also comes to the social nature of dreams. Dreaming is very important for processing our social life. Again, with the pandemic era, our social world has been just turned upside down and that, I think, is in some ways the story of dreaming during this time. It's disrupted social dimensions of our dreams.

Brian: Lisa in Forrest Hills, you're on WNYC with Dr. Bulkeley. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call [inaudible 00:15:31].

Dr. Kelly: Hi.

Brian: Lovely musical accompaniment to your phone call, we don't get that often enough. Go ahead, Lisa.

Lisa: I've had dreams that I remember much more than normal. Normally, I don't remember my dreams at all. What I was wondering is, I'm much less distracted because I'm not doing that much. My days are super routine, I literally haven't left Forest Hill since March. I'm wondering if that has anything to do with why I have a lot of recurring dreams. Nothing negative, it's just a lot of my daily life is coming into my dreams. It almost seems like my dreams are struggling for material. [laughs]

Dr. Kelly: Right. [laughs]

Lisa: I'm just curious if there's anything to that.

Dr. Kelly: Yes, absolutely. The rise in dream recall, it's just the volume, the quantity of dreams remembered has been a big story of the past several months as well. I think it's largely for the reason that you suggested that people are at home more, they're getting to sleep more for better or for worse, that a lot of people consider that boring and worse, they're constrained, they can't go out.

One of the effects is more time to reflect on one's dreams. The key really is waking up slowly. Dream recall often will increase simply by letting oneself wake up slowly and not snapping out of the sleep state. You can usually remember more dreams and just give yourself that little bit of extra time. Now, everybody has that just because.

Brian: That's a hilarious line, Lisa, by the way, that your dreams are struggling for material. It's like your dreams have writer's block.

Dr. Kelly: [laughs]

Brian: Lisa, very much for calling. Dr. Bulkeley, how long is a typical dream if there is such a thing as a typical dream?

Dr. Kelly: Well, there isn't really a typical dream. It varies from person to person. Some people dream in imagistic fragments. Other people have just epic Tolstoy narratives every night. It's interesting. Some people, their aperture is narrower than others, but it doesn't seem to signify greater psychological, I don't know, maturity or superiority to have more dreams. It's an individual characteristic, it seems.

Brian: Well, do dreams happen at the beginning or at the end of the night, most typically, all night long? Is there a point? You say waking up slowly will help you remember the dreams. Is that an indication that dreams tend to happen shortly before we wake up?

Dr. Kelly: Yes. Generally, the mind doesn't ever turn off. The mind is active all the way through the night. It goes through cycles of activity and arousal, REM sleeping, many people are aware of the phase when it seems most dreaming is happening. Indeed, the longest REM phase of the night tends to be right before we wake up. The final hour or so asleep, let's say, for most people is probably largely in REM sleep.

Yes, if you can awaken out of that in a natural non-alarm clock triggered way, you will probably be waking out of your longest REM sleep of the night, which from an evolutionary perspective fits my idea that-- Not other people's ideas that indeed there's a reason for this, that yes, you are dreaming right before you wake up to help the transition of that information from the sleep state into the waking state.

Brian: If you're just joining us, we're talking about your COVID era dreams with Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, director of the Sleep and Dream Database and author of several books on dreaming including An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming. Connor in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Connor.

Connor: Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Brian: Do you have a dream?

Connor: Yes. At the start of the pandemic in March, I at the time was a bartender and musician, and I had traveled to Virginia several days before things hit the fan, so to speak. I was preparing for a tour with my musical partner this summer, which did not happen. I was essentially left in my childhood house, which was deserted because my parents were in Florida for a couple months, which was very strange. I had a lot of anxiety being separated from New York, but the most vivid dream I experienced was April 17th.

I actually wrote it down-

Brian: You remember the date.

Connor: -immediately upon waking up. Yes. Essentially, drove back to New York on i95 and by the time I reached the turnpike, the Statue of Liberty had collapsed and its remnants were dismantled along the expressway. There was something about the legs no longer being able to support itself. Finally, I arrived back at my apartment in Chinatown and there's a great deal of anxiety and a dream about food shortages.

I'm sitting on the curb of the entrance to my building when I realize enthusiastically that I can eat the sidewalk. It was just like a big soft chewy gingerbread cookie and at first, it was just absolutely delicious. Then I realized the sanitary implications of eating a New York sidewalk and felt completely ill and was just truly disgusted and I can still remember the taste. The interesting side note, a couple of weeks later, my dentist diagnosed me as grinding my teeth.

[laughter]

Brian: That's new for you?

Connor: Yes, definitely. Just every night, I'd say I have something involving a mask or returning to my former job as a bartender. Again, the social life thing you guys were talking about really resonated with me. I think for a lot of people in the service industry, your job is your social life.

Brian: Absolutely. Dr. Bulkeley, any thoughts on the Statue of Liberty's legs crumbling beneath her on the New Jersey turnpike part of that dream?

Dr. Kelly: Well, yes. This is an important thing and it gets into some of the more collective dimensions of this. To see the Statue of Liberty in that condition is not just a personal tragedy or an image of personal tragedy. That's an image that can resonate with the whole nation. There's a category of dreams at this time I would say are apocalyptic inequality, end of the world type dreams that, of course, there's a lot of that language in the waking world. A lot of people have experienced 2020 as an apocalyptic year, as a year when things have been falling apart in a fundamental way. Our dreams are deeply primed for that.

This is not the first time humans have felt scared that the world is ending. There's a long history of this in various religious traditions and cultures and deep down, I think we are primed to be sensitive to conditions that create that kind of fear and that kind of threat. Here we are dreaming about it. I would say that to toss into an apocalyptic scenario, this funny comedic moment of eating a New York sidewalk which has this kind of ambivalent taste is a sign of some creative hope that that's-- Humor is surviving even at the end of the world and that that's one of the messages of dreaming in these times, is that we can think beyond the limit to the here and now, the horrors of the here and now to imagine other possibilities.

Brian: Connor, thank you very much for an interesting call. We're going to run out of time soon. Let me go through a couple of more points that might be interesting. Dream researchers talk about metaphors within dreams like a swarm of insects could be a metaphor for the coronavirus. You were just talking about the Statue of Liberty as a metaphor for national collapse. Why do we dream in metaphors rather than more literally?

Dr. Kelly: Well, the mind works in more complex ways than we often are aware, and dreaming taps into deeper unconscious processes that sometimes express themselves in propositional terms, linear, logical terms, and sometimes, in imagistic terms. In terms of visions, alternative ways of experiencing the world that can't be put in a conventional language. This is where to think of dreaming and the waking state is engaged in a kind of dialogue, that we go back and forth trying to learn what's going on overtime. That seem to be the best way to approach a dream.

Brian: Are there any differences in what men and women are dreaming about more in 2020. I read and I'm not sure if it was in your pandemic dream study or another one, that in some cases men are dreaming about getting sick more and women are dreaming about secondary effects of the pandemic, more like say money issues or childcare.

Dr. Kelly: Yes, I've seen research along those lines in my own work and the work of other people. I've seen generally confirms the idea that women compared to men are suffering a broad array of pandemic related effects, not just health-oriented, but again, in terms of employment, family life, child-rearing, et cetera. Women tend to have more dream recall anyway and tend to have more disrupted sleep, anyway, just in as a baseline. The pandemic in some ways seems to have magnified exacerbated some of the trends we already see with dreaming between men and women.

Brian: Lastly, children. I think about stress dreams that I still have once in a while where I didn't actually finish grad school and I have to move back to Columbus, Ohio for a course that I didn't complete. One of my producers was telling me she has similar dreams about her schooling, and I think these dreams are pretty common. I see that you anticipate that kids in school right now might have stress dreams about distance learning decades from now. Is that right?

Dr. Kelly: Yes. Generally, I'm quite concerned just seeing the trends of how specifically in the research I did showing how nightmarish dreaming, disrupted sleep, it was a very steep line from older people suffering that less to the youngest age group that I was looking at, 18 to 34, having by far the most. It just made me think, well, my view research didn't cover children, but children tend to dream more, remember more dreams than adults do, and they'll be more prone to sensitive situations involving trauma. I'm speculating here because we don't have the research, but I have a strong suspicion there's going to be a lot of disrupted sleep and dreaming among children now and as they grow older for many years to come.

Brian: We will have to leave it there. Well, I have to follow up on that. Is there anything parents can do to ease the burden of that right now?

Dr. Kelly: Yes. I think it's simply sharing dreams, writing them down. I think one of your callers has mentioned writing a dream down. Just bringing the dream out into the world keeps it from brooding inside and being this haunting presence. Just chatting with your kids, checking in with them periodically about their dreams, how are they sleeping? Do they have any weird dreams? That can be enormously helpful?

Brian: That was enormously helpful as we leave it there with Kelly Bulkeley, psychologist of religion who also specializes in dream research and director of the Sleep and Dream Database. Just tell me that we will all wake up and discover that 2020 was all a dream.

Dr. Kelly: Yes, that will be a wish-fulfillment for the ages.

[laughter]

Brian: Sigmund Freud, are you listening. He said dreams are a wish-fulfillment. Dr. Bulkeley, thank you so much.

Dr. Kelly: Thank you. Have a good day.

 

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