Narratives of Dreams and Waking Thoughts: Emotional Processing in Relation to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic posed a significant challenge to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of each individual. It also brought the importance of daily emotional management for survival to the forefront of every human being. Our study aims to explore whether emotional processes perform different functions during waking thoughts and night dreams during the first lockdown in Italy. Utilizing Multiple Code Theory (MCT), our goal is to verify whether waking thoughts facilitate a functional disconnection in order to manage the trauma caused by COVID-19. Two online forms were distributed to random participants in the general population, presenting a total of 49 reports of night dreams (23 males; mean age 33.45 ds. 10.12; word mean 238.54 ds. 146.8) and 48 reports of waking thoughts (25 males; mean age 34.54 ds. 12.8; word mean M. 91 words ds. 23). The Referential Process linguistic measures and Affect Salience Index were utilized. It was found that Affect Salience is present in both dreams and in waking thoughts; however, Referential Activity was higher in dreams and Reflection and Affect words were higher in waking thoughts. Two different processes of emotional elaboration emerged. The results highlight the use of greater symbolization processes during dreams and a higher emotional distance in waking thoughts. These results confirm that during the nocturnal processes, there is greater contact with the processing of trauma, while during the diurnal processes, defensive strategies were activated to cope with and manage life via a moment of the defensive disruption of daily activities.

Dreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic: A narrative review

“…The study sample size ranged from a minimum of 38 (two groups of 19 participants) to a maximum of 19355 participants. In all of the considered studies, females represented the larger part of the sample (males ranged from 16.13% to 44.57%), with the exception of a study that compared two groups with 46.94% and 52.08% of males, respectively ( Mariani et al, 2021b ). The widest age range considered is 10-99 y ( Pesonen et al, 2020 ), which also represents the minimum and maximum age reached in the present literature.…”

“…In the first study ( Mariani et al, 2021a ), the authors collected dreams from an online blog during the lockdown and analysed dream themes using different computerized referential processes linguistic measures, revealing three dream clusters: symbolizing process, arousal of emotional activation, reflection/reorganizing elaboration. In the second study ( Mariani et al, 2021b ), they applied computerized referential process linguistic measures and Affect Salience Index, a measure of arousal in written texts ( Fornari, 1976 , Salvatore and Freda, 2011 , Valsiner, 2021 ), on dreams and waking thoughts collected during the lockdown. The authors found that a) Affect Salience was present in dreams and waking thoughts, b) Referential Activity was higher in dreams, while Reflection and Affect words were higher in waking thoughts, and c) a greater symbolization process was observed during dreams and higher emotional distance in waking thoughts.…”

To Work or Not to Work, That Is the Question: The Psychological Impact of the First COVID-19 Lockdown on the Elderly, Healthcare Workers, and Virtual Workers

“…Recently, MCT was applied through linguistic measures to understand the impact of COVID-19 in the general population as well. RP linguistic measures highlighted that people used different functions in processing and integrating such a collective traumatic experience [ 30 ], where significant mechanisms of defense emerged [ 31 ], and were also connected to psychological symptoms [ 32 ], according to MCT’s disconnection suppositions.…”

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.…”