Coronavirus: Chinese dreamers saw Covid-19 as a threat, not an illness, study says
- Researchers analysed the dream content of 100 people – mostly students – during the height of the outbreak in China
- ‘The more people encounter threatening experiences in waking life, the more likely they are to report dreams about threatening events,’ paper says
Covid-19 has killed more than 1.3 million people around the world but the amount of disease-related content in the dreams of 100 Chinese people studied in February was no more than usual, while the number of threatening events they dreamt about increased, the researchers said.
“The more people encounter threatening experiences in waking life, the more likely they are to report dreams about threatening events,” said the team led by professor Shen Heyong from South China Normal University.
The peer-reviewed study was published on Saturday in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.
“The idea here is that the situations encountered in dreams help us learn how to recognise and respond to threatening circumstances, and the better we get at applying this knowledge to real threats in our waking life, the more likely we are to survive and reproduce,” Shen said.