We’ve probably all had that dream about showing up for a class decades after we’re out of school, unaware that there’s an exam. Or the one about losing control of a car, or being chased by scary people. You might wake up with a start, heart racing, brow moist, wondering, What was that about?! Sometimes you can go back to sleep; at other times, the adrenaline makes it nearly impossible.
Anxiety-related dreams are common and often include themes of being humiliated, threatened or attacked by someone or something; getting lost, sick or stuck in a bad situation; and being chased or involved in some kind of accident or disaster. They’re not generally literal representations of our lives, yet “dreams can be a fairly broad but accurate barometer of our waking levels of well-being,” says Antonio Zadra, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and a senior researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. “Our brains take emotionally salient events from our waking lives and weave them into a dream narrative” that may reflect what we’re stressed or concerned about, he says.
And since we’re living reported that people who were personally affected in some way by COVID-19 had more bad dreams at night—and if they themselves had been sick, the more severe their disease, the more nightmares they had. “Given that we have more anxious thoughts during times of stress, it’s hardly a shock that we have more anxiety dreams and night mares,” says Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. In fact, some experts believe dreams play a role in emotional regulation—that their narratives serve as a form of offline processing of daytime drama.
