Yikes. I was going to post this in the Anyone having COVID-19 dreams? thread I started, but currently I’m getting a message saying “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.” Hopefully a temporary glitch. 
So anyway, here is an interesting NYT article: Why Am I Having Weird Dreams Lately?: Because we all are. But know this: You can program your dreams.
Excerpt:
As the new coronavirus’s grip strengthens to a chokehold, waking life itself for many has taken on an odd, dreamlike air. For populations unexpectedly and indefinitely confined to their homes, timekeeping no longer seems staked to the orderly movements of the sun, but tied to a cloud selected at random.
The surreal reality of American cities and towns also mirrors the half-remembered, half-empty approximations explored in sleep, ordered by the same pliable, foggy logic: Masks are pilloried until they are mandatory; liquor stores open early for sexagenarians only; an invisible plague makes people fall gravely ill seemingly at random; touching anything — everything — is banned.
Metaphors and Nightmares
Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who has spent the past four decades studying dreams, has been in high demand lately. In April alone, she has spoken about dreams to a handful of outlets including The Los Angeles Times, The Cut, Vice and Yahoo! Sports.
In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Barrett confirmed that many people are having weird dreams. “A ton of bug dreams,” she said.
A few weeks ago, she created a public survey to gather dream data from the pandemic. In it, she asks respondents to describe any dreams they have had that they feel are “related to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.” (Participants should also relay whether they have had specific experiences with the virus, in terms of being a health care provider, or having been diagnosed, symptomatic or tested for the disease.)
Dangers and threats that are difficult to visualize — such as abstract fears, or real invisible hazards like a poison gas attack — often cause similar metaphors to appear across the sleeps of concerned dreamers, she said. Tidal waves are common, as are monsters.
Nightmares are widely known to follow in the wake of trauma, and for survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder, the effect is even more pronounced; frequent disturbing dreams are described as a “hallmark” of PTSD.
But Dr. Barrett was quick to emphasize that while many Americans are experiencing the effects of the pandemic as “somewhat as a significant life change” — and might be having unsettling dreams — the circumstances do not, at present, meet the threshold for trauma in most people.
“It’s a stretch to say we’re all being traumatized in the sense that psychology means,” she said.
Experiences of short, intense trauma, said Dr. Barrett — like battle warfare, or working 12-hour shifts at a hospital overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients — “have such inherently vivid specific imagery that goes with the trauma that they are likelier to be dreamed about in a more realistic way.”
The virus-related dreams of, for instance, nurses managing the chaos of the outbreak firsthand might be differentiated from those of the general public by their stark realism — dreams consisting of, in essence, variations of real life scenes from their days, played out in sleep.
“The people that are deciding whether to give a ventilator to one patient or not, who have bodies lined up in their hallways — those people are certainly meeting the usual criteria for what we call acute trauma, and we’d expect to see post traumatic reactions from them,” Dr. Barrett said.
(Those subject to severe trauma dreams may already be experiencing them, if they’re getting adequate sleep. If they’re currently sleep-deprived, the disturbing dreams are more likely to occur down the line, after their schedules have calmed.)
While people whose coronavirus experience consists chiefly of working from home may notice some literal dreams, theirs are, overall, more likely to be less realistic, she said. That doesn’t mean they aren’t related to the topic on everyone’s minds.