“Dreams drawer”: Analysis of dreams during lockdown in the Italian population.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has indiscriminately involved the whole world, producing a collective trauma that may have activated socially shared mental processes. It was hypothesized that the content of dreams could reflect a change in the way people are conceptualizing relationships, their environment, and the world in general after the emergency and the lockdown. We used data from “Dream Drawer,” a free online forum where people could read about others’ dreams or write about their own. Our sample consisted of 68 participants and 90 dreams. Most of them were students, and 85% of the participants were facing lockdown at home with families. To identify how dream content could reflect the impact of lockdowns, dreams were analyzed with the emotional text mining methodology. The analysis created a factorial space of 2 factors: “Relationship With the Outside” (between the containing and the losing) and “Relationship With the Inside” (between the processing and losing yourself). Each factor presents a symbolic and reflective dimension. In this space, there are 3 clusters (“holding,” “refind the other,” and “anguish defense”). The findings demonstrate that home isolation, which is portrayed in dreams as an extraordinary and novel event, appears to be the aspect of the pandemic that the unconscious has most exploited, detecting the activation of collective mental processes in dreams. Dreamwork could be the first step in beginning to process this collective catastrophic experience. The results of this research may be useful in determining collective changes in anxiety and distress.

Pandemic dreams: A qualitative analysis of dream imagery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“…For example, dreams can depict a scenario opposite to a stressful situation experienced in real life, or scenarios in which a traumatic situation is resolved in an almost magical way (Freud, 1899/1992; Jung, 1928/1969; Renik, 1981). This is in agreement with the results of one of the two previous studies mentioned above, and run on Italian samples during the pandemic, in which the authors isolated a cluster of dreams showing characters solving problems in a fairy-tale dimension, such as a princess imprisoned in a tower and saved by mystical creatures (Monaco et al, 2022).…”

“…In a similar fashion, according to the authors, the absence of dream recall during the pandemic could be interpreted as a defensive mechanism aimed to protect the mind from a traumatic reality (Margherita et al, 2021). In another similar study by Monaco et al (2022), it was hypothesized that some dreams during the pandemic could have served as an anguish defense.…”

Pandemic dreams: A thematic analysis of university students’ dreams during the COVID-19 outbreak.

“…Although the effects of the pandemic on dream contents has not yet been fully elucidated, there are many studies analyzing dreams during the pandemic using qualitative methods (Borghi et al, 2021; Iorio et al, 2020; Margherita et al, 2021; Mariani et al, 2021; Monaco et al, 2022; Sommantico et al, 2021). These studies generally focus on whether the emotional and intellectual processes faced during pandemic processes are reflected in the dream contents.…”

The Relationship between Physiotherapist and Patient: A Qualitative Study on Physiotherapists’ Representations on This Theme

“…Such a methodology of natural language processing (NPL) is based on a socio-constructivist approach that, based on the association of words, allows to identify the general themes and symbolic-cultural categories of the construction of meaning. This methodology is composed of a structured and reproducible procedure and has already been used by several authors in the field of sociology [ 15 ], health [ 16 ], and psychology [ 17 , 18 ]. Moreover, it has already been applied to study patients’ experiences in a patient-centered view [ 19 ].…”