Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to help analyse the dream content of close to 1,000 people and found that Covid-19 had infected more than half of the distressed dreams reported.
For the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the research team crowdsourced sleep and stress data from more than 4,000 people during the sixth week of the Covid-19 lockdown in Finland.
About 800 respondents also contributed information about their dreams during that time – many of which revealed shared anxiety about the pandemic.
“We were thrilled to observe repeating dream content associations across individuals that reflected the apocalyptic ambience of Covid-19 lockdown,” said study lead author Dr Anu-Katriina Pesonen from the University of Helsinki in Finland.