In a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists used artificial intelligence to help analyze the dream content of close to a thousand people and found that the novel coronavirus had infected more than half of the distressed dreams reported.
The researchers crowdsourced sleep and stress data from more than 4,000 people during the sixth week of the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland.
About 800 respondents also contributed information about their dreams during that time - many of which revealed shared anxiety about the pandemic."We were thrilled to observe repeating dream content associations across individuals that reflected the apocalyptic ambience of COVID-19 lockdown," said lead author Dr Anu-Katriina Pesonen, head of the Sleep and Mind Research Group at the University of Helsinki.