  The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams is
continuous with the dreamer's waking experiences. Given the unprecedented
nature of the experiences during COVID-19, we studied the continuity hypothesis
in the context of the pandemic. We implemented a deep-learning algorithm that
can extract mentions of medical conditions from text and applied it to two
datasets collected during the pandemic: 2,888 dream reports (dreaming life
experiences), and 57M tweets mentioning the pandemic (waking life experiences).
The health expressions common to both sets were typical COVID-19 symptoms
(e.g., cough, fever, and anxiety), suggesting that dreams reflected people's
real-world experiences. The health expressions that distinguished the two sets
reflected differences in thought processes: expressions in waking life
reflected a linear and logical thought process and, as such, described
realistic symptoms or related disorders (e.g., nasal pain, SARS, H1N1); those
in dreaming life reflected a thought process closer to the visual and emotional
spheres and, as such, described either conditions unrelated to the virus (e.g.,
maggots, deformities, snakebites), or conditions of surreal nature (e.g., teeth
falling out, body crumbling into sand). Our results confirm that dream reports
represent an understudied yet valuable source of people's health experiences in
the real world.
