Corona effect: why we dream so intensely in this time

I wake up soaking wet: I was stuck in a lift on the three hundredth floor of a hospital where I was trying to sell face masks in a swimsuit again.

We dream more intensely in these bizarre times of quarantine. I'm not the only one who dreams strangely and especially so vividly; I can recount the night's adventure exactly in the morning. Recognizable? Many people say they can remember their dreams even better. What I also experience: as soon as I wake up in the morning, the words COVID-19, corona, and quarantine are immediately in my head. Am I slowly going corona crazy? Maybe.

But sleep experts know why this extreme dreaming is a corona effect. In the mornings, you often dream the longest, about fifty minutes in a row. Your sleep consists of multiple phases, and in your REM sleep, your dreams come by, and precisely because you almost wake up in the morning, you often remember that last dream of the night well. Because the corona crisis has a significant impact on our daily lives, it's not strange that you unconsciously think about it in your sleep. Also, you are now sleeping just a bit longer than average (unless you have children, of course; I get woken up every day at seven o'clock). You don't have to travel to work, so you give your morning dreams a better chance of success. Waking up without an alarm clock, therefore, plays a big role in this corona effect. You simply have more time for those dreams that you remember well. Note: you are not dreaming more, you just remember them better.

That you wake up and immediately think of corona or now dream intensely about corona is logical. It is present now, for all of us. You no longer go to the pub, eat out, or visit friends. Your life is different; you are forced to stay at home and that is on your mind, all day, all night. Dreams are there to process things: and this is something that needs new processing every night. They are usually not pleasant dreams: we are not sleeping better now. About thirty percent of people report having nightmares and sleeping restlessly since the crisis began. This is mainly due to financial worries and concerns about keeping a job. And ultimately, it is also the unconscious fear in your dream that you will get the virus. Whether you are rich or not, whether you are a successful CEO or not, wherever you live in the world, whether you are attractive or slim or have six Chanel bags lying in your closet: you can be next. That creates fear, unprecedented fear, that you have never known until now.

Corona, COVID-19, quarantine, it brings a lot of emotions. Emotions that you process at night. The uncertainty you feel during the day about life, about what awaits us, is what your brain works on at night. During the day, you process only two percent of everything happening around you; the other 98 percent of your emotions you process while you sleep. So go to sleep, do it for your brain, and therefore do not sleep in. Because if you don't want to wake up in your bikini in a broken lift: definitely set that alarm clock, experts say. Or have children, I say as someone with experience.