How Coronavirus Infected Dreams
Tags: Humanity, Covid 19, Dreams, World, Pandemic

While the coronavirus affected the lives of everyone around the world, various consequences occurred in the dreams of people. Even before the virus infects the country in many places, people were affected by the news they learned from the media and started to have direct or indirect dreams about the virus. So the virus first got into our dreams.

To understand the source of the themes that emerge in dreams, it is useful to look at this corona epidemic, perhaps the most important and large-scale in world history.

Dreams establish deep patterns between past experiences and today’s reality. The panic and anxiety of the coronavirus, which surrounded the whole world, took place in the thoughts and feelings of individuals, perhaps faster than the rate of spread of the epidemic. So much so that even the region or the series where no positive cases have been seen yet, the virus started to appear in people’s dreams. Perhaps the virus was first transmitted by dreams and then physically spread throughout the world.

According to all-important dream studies that have been accepted from the past to the present, most of the dream themes refer to the past and the remaining parts to the reality of the present and the expectations of the future.

Although the existence of the virus coincided with a very short time in the global memory, it has transmitted to all people at an extraordinary speed thanks to the media and created a ground that triggers past traumas and anxieties. What is important here is that perhaps for the first time in such a short time we witnessed the structuring of dreams around a common theme on a global scale.

Human beings are common to the traumas of the society they live in as much as their personal lives, and they enter into a conscious and subconscious process by being affected by all experiences, whether they are directly or indirectly caused by a digital experience. The coronavirus has created a global dream in common in dreams as a common anxiety and trauma element that surrounds the whole world.

The results I encounter are of course themes that existed before the coronavirus. What I want to focus on here is to explain how people’s dream themes tend to be with the virus and how they place the virus into images. Viruses from the date of 03.11.2020 can be seen in Turkey, I constantly looking at how to investigate an impact in dreams. I will try to explain the important results I encountered in the survey I conducted with 112 participants aged 13–20 years and in the 500 dreams, I read.

In the survey I conducted, I asked the participants how often they had seen topics in different situations in their dreams in the last 4 months. The answers are below.

While 22% of the group stated that they did not feel the tension in their dreams, the remaining 68% experienced a feeling of tension at different rates. While 35% stated that they never felt lonely, 65% stated that they always felt lonely. 60% of the group stated that they had the feeling of losing an important person in their dreams. 68% stated that they did not see the coronavirus in their dreams.

It has been observed, the dreams lead to a happy moment of childhood are more intense than dreams that lead to bad memory. This shows that people are trying to develop a positive view to counter the negative impact of the process. It was striking that there was a great similarity between dreams of imprisonment and quarantine. It can be said that there is a remarkable number of dreams of death.

Interestingly, when asked directly about coronavirus, the answers were mostly low scored, while when asked about the indirect effects of the virus, it was observed that the answers were higher.

By researching the effects of the virus on dreams, we are, in a sense, equipped to investigate the invisible sides of visible society reactions. We are not looking at the showcase of the society, which leaves excellent impressions on social media, exhibits its skills, reveals that it is not struggling but struggling, sharing the good old moments with its followers and masking today’s moments, we are looking at the dusty places behind.

Death Anxiety

I can say that the most important dream theme that increases in dreams is the past experiences that trigger death anxiety. Dreams about the death of himself, his family, relatives or people in his social circle started to increase as the virus entered the country. In addition, it can be said that there is an increase in themes such as injury, lack of news and fading. If anxiety is not a direct theme, it is at the center of all themes that may be related to anxiety. For this reason, I can say that more than one dream theme occurs in parallel with the source and intensity of anxiety.

The last and biggest problem the world was experienced in terms of its global effects was World War II. Since then, wars and epidemics have always remained at the local level and have not turned into a worldwide problem. For this reason, interestingly, dreams that take back to 1944 occurred. For example:

“A friend of mine told me,” Will the coronavirus stop giving birth? “From a book called 1944: The History Book of Coronavirus. He opens a section titled and reads it to me. “

“Two nights in a row, a man whose I don’t know and whose body I can’t see is asking me: “Do you know what the difference between dead people from others during World War II?” These two dreams, whose style is seen one week apart, refer to World War II.

In some dreams, the death anxiety of the person has increased so much that he experienced death in his dream and even arranged a funeral ceremony for himself.

Sometimes, the censorship and reflection mechanism of the dreamer tried to make himself believe that the corona epidemic we went through would turn the corona epidemic into a previous bird flu epidemic and pass as easily as the bird flu. He tried to move the ego away from anxiety by making a thought that was more difficult to accept by making it acceptable.

Viruses are invisible, so they are represented in dreams by other visual objects. For example, half of the world’s population, who in some dreams turned into a towel instead of contaminating the virus, had the chance to continue life as a towel instead of dying. The reason why he wonders whether his family has a towel in his dream is the representation of his concern about the coronavirus transmission.

Anxiety affects dreams with positive content as well as negative dreams. Defense mechanisms such as reflection, change of direction and the need for censorship can take their place in dreams as more vivid, happy, colorful and energetic images instead of negative images of anxiety. After the virus seen in the world therefore be said that these two poles begin to occur in the dream images.

Quarantine — Loneliness — Social Distance — Social Isolation

It can be said that the themes of isolation, loneliness, stuck, distance, coldness and numbness in dreams have increased somewhat as a result of people’s distancing from their social lives with the quarantine process and the excessive decrease in all their communication.

In order to cope with the negative emotion created by the quarantine, it can be said that the themes of hugging, sharing and being loved also come to the fore. In some dreams, it comes to the fore when some famous people come and go on an adventure with the dream owner and this makes the dreamer very happy.

Dreams that portray the days of happiness, daily routines, meeting with loved ones, having fun, traveling freely, adding new excitement to photographs and wandering around the crowd without worry are among the other noteworthy dream themes.

Another consequence of the quarantine, the travel obstacle, was tried to be overcome with dreams. In this period, through dreams, the world’s seas that turned into deep blue by combining with turquoise, wide and green canyons, historical streets from different centuries, highways without speed limits, and mountain shores with flowers were visited by people in the dreams. People who were in the house all day, went on long journeys in their dreams to get away from this feeling of captivity.

Hunger

Hunger is one of the main motives of man. Although we learned about the hunger of times of famine in the past from history books, we have never experienced this. The coronavirus has prompted the world to rethink this issue.

Hunger anxiety arose when consumers realized that the existing ready food would not be enough for the world for a long time due to the cessation of production. People rushed to grocery stores to stock the maximum amount of food, and they didn’t even want to think that other people might need it.

The hunger motive was so overwhelming that there were food wars in the markets that could destroy all the splendor of civilization.

On the one hand, there was a primitive man who could become cruel while looking for food in the wild, and on the other hand, a modern man could become too blind to leave 1 box of toilet paper in the markets. This profound paradox has occupied a prominent place in people’s minds.

The difficulties in production and distribution activities due to the quarantine triggered people’s hunger anxiety. Dreams of finding food, grocery shopping, checking the number of supplies in the house were dreamed.

There was a dream I was reading. The dreamer, referring to the dream of “7 years of abundance, 7 years of famine”, which was seen by the Egyptian Pharaoh Nabuketnetzar, there was a dream that he and the Pharaoh were putting food in his bag in the huge stone-built supply stores of Egypt.

There is an interesting connection here. Today’s anxiety about finding supplies can be combined with the same anxiety experienced nearly 4,000 years ago.

Feeling threatened

Dreams of avoiding, exposing, or fighting threats from the known or unknown are remarkable.

In a dream, someone who went to the airport for a trip had seen the airport transform into a large hospital.

In another dream, the dreamer set up a virtual foreign country in the middle of the hall and wanted the virus to gather there, keeping him and his loved ones away from danger.

The human mind has a perfect imagination ability as a result of all the complex algorithms. Dreams are one of the most successful results of this visual art. The aesthetics of the images used even in fearful or threatening dreams are quite successful.

Digital Experiences

There was an increase in the need to receive news since everything was so sudden and fast in the virus process.

Due to the need to get news about the breaking news in the world, the situation of the people in our social circle and to state that they are good to the environment, the amount of phone, computer and TV usage increased and this was reflected in dreams.

As a result of digital experiences through the screen, such as phone calls, video calls, messaging, watching movies, participating in online activities, developing computer programs or learning efforts instead of real experiences, there have been some changes in the perception of reality and an increase in digital images, especially computer games, instead of real experiences in dreams.

It can be said that such dream experiences have an important role in keeping people away from global anxiety experienced in the real world. In this way, digital reality has been created where everything is a game that can be controlled with a remote, and that he can overcome the difficulties he will encounter with the game’s tools.

It can be said based on the analyzed data that such dreams, which existed before, intensify and increase somewhat during the virus process.

Change in the Amount of Dreaming

It is not easy to understand whether there is an increase in the number of dreams seen, but it is common to think that there is some change in people’s sleep, dream, waking and dream recall rituals due to the daily life cleansing from many stimuli and the increase in time spent at home.

Accordingly, it can be said that there is an increase in reported dreams as there is plenty of time and opportunity to pursue the meaning of their dreams.

Results

The coronavirus has rapidly affected people’s entire daily rituals, lifestyles and quality, death anxiety, past traumas, and future expectations.

It opened up a great and not easy to compensate area within the concepts of yesterday, today and tomorrow. People who became increasingly lonely, isolated and retreated into their own world have struggled or defeated the virus in many different ways in their dreams.

While negative manifestations of dreams could be seen more prominently in people with less social support, more manageable dream themes came to the fore in people with strong social support.

To understand the time we live in, it is more possible to understand the worlds that people do not express and to understand the dimensions of the trauma experienced on the social scale by looking at dreams that carry important data.

It is possible to see how much the sentence “I wish all these things were dreams” when you write “dreams” and list the results on Twitter since 11.03.2020.

To wish all this to be a dream to get rid of the painful reality of the process reveals the hidden truth under all those pleasant and creative posts made at home during the quarantine process from social media accounts.

The images of people who reinvent themselves, reveal their different skills, watch and read more, compose or paint, were reflected on the social media screens. But deep grief, fear of death, the possibility of being in the last days of his existence, his desire to quickly reveal everything he could create, reflected on the screen in his dreams.

To cope with the same threat at the same time as never before, humanity has to cope with the things that it knows, hopes, assumes, experiences, avoids or confronts, cleanses or smears in its dreams every night, to reduce its effect by simulating itself, and by changing direction. trying to relax.

Perhaps the biggest “common image” in the history of dreams is being built by the whole world every night. Today’s communication tools have huge possibilities in this construction.