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A new study published in the Journal of Emotion looked at whether daily worries about the coronavirus are linked to negative effects experienced during mind-wandering and dreaming.

"We investigated whether and how worry about COVID-19 is associated with the emotional quality of daydreaming and nighttime dreaming,” study author Pilleriin Sikka told us. “Many studies have reported increased negativity of dreams and increased number of nightmares during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of these studies have used questionnaires and asked about whether people think that their dreams are different during the pandemic as compared to the pre-or post-pandemic periods.” 

This is not the same as asking people to report their dreams as they are experienced and remembered every night and morning, Sikka explained. The researchers wanted to address this issue and asked people to keep daily dream diaries in which they reported their dreams every morning as they remembered them happening. They wondered whether they would also see increased negativity of dreams during the pandemic and, especially, whether worry about the pandemic would be linked to more negative dreams. Additionally, there have been very few studies on pandemic daydreaming and so the research team also wanted to find out whether there would be similar links between COVID-19 worry and daydreaming.

“We relied on a theoretical framework which assumes that our waking experiences and sleep experiences lie on a continuum, meaning, that there is no sharp divide between wakefulness and sleep,” Sikka told us. “We also relied on the so-called continuity hypothesis, which assumes that our daily experiences and waking concerns impact our dream experiences, and the latter, in turn, impact our post-sleep waking experiences.” 

Accordingly, it has been proposed that our dream experiences reflect our waking concerns and experiences, and, if this is the case, dreams should also reflect experiences and concerns related to COVID-19. 

“Thus, we expected to see that, the more people worry about COVID-19 on a particular day, the more negative (and less positive) their dreams would be,” Sikka told us. “Given that daydreaming is assumed to be a less intensified version of nighttime dreaming, we assumed we would also see a similar relationship between COVID-19 worry and increased negativity (and decreased positivity) of daydreaming.”

The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on people’s lives across the world, but it was unclear how the pandemic would be reflected in and impact people’s inner experiences, such as daydreaming and nighttime dreaming. It has been suggested that daydreaming and nighttime dreaming are involved in important functions, such as simulating potential threats so as to prepare for those in waking life, problem-solving, emotion regulation. Thus, if COVID-19 pandemic would change the nature of our inner experiences, it may also have downstream effects on our adaptive functioning and wellbeing in general. 

The research team tested a number of preregistered hypotheses (meaning, they published the hypotheses they were planning to test as well as methods for how to test those on a website called Open Science Framework) and expected to find that COVID-19 worry on a particular day would be associated with more negative, and less positive, daydreams and nighttime dreams as well as with an increased number of nightmares.

"We observed a link between daily worry about COVID-19 and increased negativity and decreased positivity of daydreaming,” Sikka told us. “However, our results were surprising in that we found no such relationships with regard to nighttime dreaming. Nevertheless, even though we did not find that worry on a particular day would be associated with more negative dreams the following night, we did find that those individuals who generally tend to worry more about COVID-19 on a daily basis also have more negative dreams.” 

This suggests that there may be some underlying individual differences that may make some individuals more likely to have negative experiences during the night and day. One such individual difference may be emotion regulation, but whether this is the case, should be studied in the future.

The results show that the continuity between waking and sleep experiences may depend on individual differences. However, it is likely that personal concerns during the day (in this case, worry about COVID-19) do not show up in the dreams of the following night, like the researchers tested in this particular study. There may be a time lag and concerns may show up in dreams perhaps a week later. Researchers did not test this but this is something to investigate in future studies.

“Our results also show that we get different results depending on whether we use questionnaires and ask about what people think their (dream) experiences generally are like or whether we use daily diaries, which enable to track experiences as they are happening. In the former case we may be tapping into beliefs about one’s experiences, rather than experiences per se,” Sikka told us. “Irrespective of our particular findings, we need more research on emotional experiences across the wake-sleep cycle."

Research on emotions, dreaming, and daydreaming has developed relatively independently and there is not that much crosstalk across these fields. However, we experience emotions throughout the day and night. If we want to obtain a full picture of our emotional experiences and their mechanisms, and understand how emotions during the day impact our nightly experiences and vice-versa, we need to expand our field of view and integrate findings from all those different fields of research and study emotional experiences from active wakefulness to daydreaming to sleep and dreaming.

"Emotions are like a river--they flow continuously," Sikka told us, "and sampling the water only at some parts of the river, and at some points of time, will only give us a limited understanding of water flowing in the river.”