Global Dream Lab – The New York Times


One thing everyone agrees on is that sleep, and especially REM sleep, is important. For one thing, evolution wouldn’t have favored such a dangerous activity if it weren’t so beneficial for survival, where we’re disconnected from reality, sitting ducks for accidents or predators. It can’t be a coincidence that many animals, including humans, devote a large part of their lives to sleeping. In fact, science has yet to discover an animal that never sleeps. (One outlier is a 1967 study suggesting that frogs don’t sleep; this is now considered flawed.) Migratory birds and swimming dolphins manage to sleep by resting one hemisphere of their brains at a time while on the move. Sitting ducks also do this – they take turns keeping watch. There’s also a less successful version of what’s known in humans as the “first night effect,” which occurs when our left hemisphere refuses to fully rest when we first sleep in a new and uncertain environment. It causes us to wake up tired. Even jellyfish sleep without a brain, and worms that don’t get a chance to sleep for a few hours after experiencing a stressful event such as extreme heat, cold or exposure to toxins are less likely to survive. One study using a magnetic device called the Insominator tested the effects of sleep deprivation on honeybees and found that it made them worse at communicating with the rest of the hive. Another found that all sleep-deprived mice would die within a month.

In humans, shorter sleep is associated with heart disease, obesity, stroke, and Alzheimer’s, and various studies have revealed why: Sleep does most of the brain’s “cleaning” job, allowing our bodies to secrete growth hormone, produce antibodies, and regulate. insulin levels and to repair nerve cells and remove waste proteins that build up in our brain. It is also critical to many intellectual and emotional processes; Without adequate sleep, it is more difficult for us to learn new things, assess threats, cope with change, and generally control our emotions and behaviors.

Yet none of this means that dreams that occur during sleep – their content or even their existence – are meaningful in their own right. As Zadra explained to me, “Sleep could do anything without us having these virtual simulations,” these elaborate narratives unfold in our heads each night. Therefore, anyone who claims dreams are important must grapple with this fundamental question of content. Is there any point in spending our nights in strange, fanciful stories that we rarely remember the next day?

in a week Barrett posted an online survey about the library dream. Along with basic information about the filled dreamers – where they lived, whether they worked in healthcare, whether they were sick – it gave people space to describe recent dreams they believed were related to the pandemic. For many, the connection was clear: dreams of working in an intensive care unit or getting a positive Covid test or hiding from the disease. (Barrett was collecting dreams in English, conceiving that this creates biases in the data, just as self-selected participants—probably—who care about the pandemic, are interested in dreams, and consume the kind of news media that can signal them. Other dreams were more figurative but still offered intuitive connections. The kind of emotional transference he was accustomed to describe. A common dream of this kind involved monsters lurking out of sight or attacking people around them invisibly; in a dream, the invisible monster could only kill people within one and a half feet of its most recent victim. noticed an increase in their swarms, and noted that the dreaming mind was looking for visual representations appropriate to the fear it felt and fell into a wordplay—a virus, after all, is known as a bug.

Other supposed links to the pandemic were not clear to Barrett, although he was intuited by the dreamer. (For example: A dream in which Oprah Winfrey threatens a gym with a handsaw full of people.) However, many people have taken care to explain the connections they see in their dreams as if a bat enters a dreamer’s house. and the dreamer used a thick copy of The Washington Post to crush it. There was a fear of rabies during the dream, but waking up made it instantly clear that bats are also a possible source of the virus that causes Covid-19. The dreamer said that the dream “symbolizes the need to be armed with knowledge, data and knowledge, perhaps to protect against an invisible virus that is rapidly circulating very close to home.”

Some days hundreds of dreams came and it took Barrett hours to read them all. He then began to note the themes and similarities he discovered through statistical and linguistic analysis. Women who experienced more job loss and more pandemic stress than men, according to other research, also found their dreams changed more: Their levels of anxiety, sadness, and anger were much higher than the pre-pandemic dreams that Barrett compared his new sample to. (Women also had many of the anxious dreams about homeschooling.) And as is common when the body is battling fever, the patients’ dreams were the strangest and most realistic—vivid yet strange. hallucinations that make it difficult to separate sleep from waking life. A Covid patient named Peter Fisk described feeling wide awake, curled up in his bed and looking fondly at his days living in a cozy study by the river. “But then,” he wrote, “it occurred to me that I had never actually done this. I had misconceptions about being an otter.”

As with dreams after 9/11, the dreamers most affected were those closest to the trauma. More than 600 healthcare professionals who were sent in dreams, which Barrett generally considered to be the same story, recounted it with minor modifications: “There’s a critical patient in their care, something isn’t working and the patient dies. They feel hopelessly responsible and yet have no control over death.” Research has shown that dreams of trauma survivors often begin by replaying the traumatic event in great detail, but over time often contain more new elements and story lines, dulling the emotion of the original dream. (Some therapists encourage this evolution, coaching patients to imagine and then try to imagine stronger endings to their trauma.) However, this process is disrupted in cases of PTSD; The classic PTSD nightmare is a realistic, flashback-like trauma repeated over and over with a few changes.



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