2022-53463-001.pdf

“Dreams Drawer”: Analysis of Dreams During Lockdown in the Italian Population

Silvia Monaco, Tiziana Citti, Benedetta Gaudio, Rachele Mariani, and Michela Di Trani Department of Dynamic, Clinical and Health Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome

The COVID-19 pandemic has indiscriminately involved the whole world, pro- ducing 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 peo- ple are conceptualizing relationships, their environment, and the world in general af- ter 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 demon- strate 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.

Keywords: text analysis, dreams, COVID-19, defense mechanisms, symbolizations

The COVID-19 is an acute respiratory syndrome that began to rapidly spread fromWuhan City of Hubei, in China, to the rest of the world in December 2019. As a result of the growing cases, the World Health Organization declared a state of

This article was published Online First April 14, 2022. Silvia Monaco https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6838-7537 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Silvia Monaco, Department of

Dynamic, Clinical and Health Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, via degli Apuli 1, 00185, Rome, Italy. Email: [email protected]

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Dreaming © 2022 American Psychological Association 2022, Vol. 32, No. 2, 111–123 ISSN: 1053-0797 https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000205

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emergency all over the world (WHO, 2020). In Italy, the government enforced a nationwide quarantine beginning March 10, 2020, during which people were only permitted to travel to work, and all retail businesses, with the exception of grocery stores and pharmacies, were closed (DPCM n. 62, March 9, 2020). Although some spent the quarantine period with their families, others were on their own and strug- gling with loneliness (Tagupa, 2020). This first lockdown lasted until May 18, 2020, for a total of 69 days. COVID-19 and the related containment measures tested the mental health of the entire population (Mazza, 2020), creating new research questions on the collective elaboration of this particular kind of collective traumatic experience.

From Individual to Collective Trauma

“A traumatic event is one in which a person experiences a genuine fear of death or injury for themselves or others” (Jetten, 2020). It is clear that a pandemic meets this criterion and can be safely classified as a traumatic event similar to natural disas- ters, terrorist attacks, and civil wars, situations that involve plurality of people. This being the case, we know that the COVID-19 pandemic has had the capacity to nega- tively impact both an individual’s psychological functioning and the communities’- collective well-being. The pandemic is a unique and unpredictable event that has indiscriminately involved the whole world; we have collectively considered the dam- age it has caused, its phenomenology, and its cure (Masiero et al., 2020). One impor- tant point is how people perceived social support: Mariani et al. (2020) explored these issues with the aims of creating psychological interventions for the general population during the postemergency period and directing health policies to con- sider the psychological health of citizens. It is possible that the trauma related to the COVID-19 pandemic may have activated collective mental processes that are observable in different dimensions of people’s lives, such as in dreams.

Dreams and Collective Trauma

The role of dreaming in individual trauma is well understood—repeated dreams portraying dangerous scenarios are a significant sign in the diagnosis of post- traumatic stress disorder (Miller et al., 2017)—but how do dreams work when the trauma is collective? In the literature, there are many references to collective trau- matic events that had similar effects on the dream contents of individuals who did not experience the trauma themselves. For example, during World War II, German civilians reported monotonous and boring dreams as a consequence of living in an environment so oppressive that it repressed the dreams themselves (Beradt, 1985). Valli et al. (2005) reported that children living in war zones mostly reported dreams depicting threatening events. A study conducted years after World War II found that a collective trauma such as war persists in the dream content, even in the gen- eral population who did not participate in the war themselves, for many years (Sandman et al., 2013). The peculiarity of dreams following collective traumatic events lies also in the fact that the many people in the affected population may have similar images in their dreams that are not directly related to the event itself. New Yorkers, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reported nightmares in

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which they were robbed and/or swept away by a tidal wave (Hartmann & Brezler, 2008).

Fitting the New Reality

The traumatic experience of COVID-19 resulted in different responses; how- ever, literature thus far has highlighted various social consequences that have been shared among different people. In fact, many studies have investigated the impact of COVID-19 on people’s habits. The Lancet Psychiatry (Pan et al., 2021) published an interesting study that examined the side effects of quarantine in a population of 60,000 people. Results suggested that one of the major impacts was on sleep quality, mostly related to insomnia. An Italian study (Marelli et al., 2021) demonstrated the significant alteration of sleep and psycho-emotional well-being of Italian students. In particular, the study shows low quality of sleep and poor sleep hygiene during lockdown and symptoms related to insomnia. Related to this, many people reported increasing frequency of strange dreams, connoted by worries, stress, and anxieties during the quarantine (Gorgoni et al., 2021). Freud (1900) wrote that the activities we perform during our time awake create a sort of “diurnal residue” that influences the content of dreams. A recent study (Š�cepanovi�c et al., 2022) demonstrated how the content of dreams, during the pandemic, was continuous with the dreamer’s waking experiences: The participants reported typical COVID-19 symptoms (e.g., cough and fever) in their dreams, suggesting that oneiric life reflected people’s real- world experiences. Similarly, dream’s research found that dreams during the pan- demic have in common the tendency to replace the fear of the virus with other meta- phorical elements, such as insects, zombies, natural disasters, monsters, and mass shootings (Barrett, 2020). An Italian study proves the negative impact of the restric- tion measures on oneiric life regardless the age, underlying that both adults and ado- lescents reported dreams related to the home confinement marked by negative emotions (Sommantico et al., 2021). The huge presence of COVID-19 elements inside dreams can be seen as the presence of unmetabolized daytime elements, showing a traumatic experience (Marogna et al., 2021). Finally, in the pandemic ex- perience, dreams content and specific traumatic pattern can be predictor of depres- sion and resilience, demonstrating how dreams can be a valid tool to understand the experience of the collectivity (Borghi et al., 2021).

In light of these insights, we can say that the quarantine and the virus have caused a collective trauma, due to the strong effects it inflicted on the collectivity. So it seems appropriate to research how threatening and traumatic collective events, such as a pandemic, might influence the content of dreams to capture the shared and unconscious processes, found in dreams, among the population during the lockdown period.

Aims

According to the literature, the elaborative processes to cope with a traumatic event are traceable in dreams, a phenomenon that would be seen in recurring themes and emotions (Caviglia, 2021). Assuming that texts can be analyzed to explain inner communicational processes (Greco & Polli, 2020) and considering

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that dream content can reflect a change in the way of imagining relationships, the environment, and the world in general (Mota et al., 2020), this study aims to under- stand which kind of symbolization had been activated in dreams during the lock- down experience in the Italian population. This study focuses on unconscious processes shared by the group of citizens, rather than having an individual point of view. The study also investigates the influences of sociopersonal factors (see the Measure section for the complete list) on the production of specific representations in response to the traumatic experience of lockdown.

Method

The “Dream Drawer” is a forum created and administrated by a group of stu- dents at La Sapienza Università di Roma. The forum was born as a free space in which people could share dreams by writing them or simply read about others’ dreams. Because COVID-19 trauma may have activated some collective mental processes, the group of students wondered if those processes could be traced in dreams.

Procedure

The “DreamDrawer” was launched on April 18, 2020, in the middle of the Ital- ian lockdown and was closed at the end of it in mid-May 2020. The forum was acces- sible to anyone via an Internet link that was disseminated by the administrators and by word of mouth. At the time of registration, participants had to fill out a question- naire with sociopersonal information and were asked to give consent to the treat- ment of the data and material reported for research purposes, respecting privacy regulations. In fact, the site’s Rules of Procedure allowed users to register with a nickname that would not be connected to their real name to protect their anonym- ity. To this end, it was also required that they not use their actual names in the description of dreams but rather initials or symbolic names (e.g., my cousin, the sis- ter of my best friend, etc.) and, ideally, remain ambiguous in the description of loca- tions. Each participant was able to read and write dreams throughout the whole period depending on their own desires and capacity to participate during such a complex and traumatic situation. A request that they participate within specific time constraints could have been unproductive and dangerous to participants. There were no limits in writing dreams, and participants could write how many dreams as they wanted.

The study was carried out in accordance with the code of ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans. Ethical approval was granted by the ethics committee of the department affiliate to Silvia Monaco (protocol number 0000323).

Participants

The sample consisted of 68 participants who filled out the sociopersonal ques- tionnaire, for a total of 90 dreams. The sex variance in the sample is skewed in favor of women (22 male [32%] and 46 female [68%]). Most participants (42 out of 68; 62%) were under the age of 26 and most were students (44 out of 68; 65%,),

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although three people did not respond to the question asking if they were students, workers, or other. Marital status is homogeneous: 34 people single (50%) and 34 people engaged (50%). Fifty-seven participants (85%) were facing lockdown at home with their families, 10 were not (15%), and one did not respond.

Measures

Each participant who shared a dream was asked to complete a sociodemo- graphic questionnaire, specifying their nickname, age, sex, education level, marital status, occupation, and if they were still working during the lockdown. If they responded in the affirmative to the last question, they were asked to specify if they were working at home or in an office. They were also asked to indicate their city of residence, if they were spending the lockdown alone or with family, or in company of roommates, and if they had any disability or pathology. They were asked if they were undergoing psychotherapy or if they had in the past. The survey included ques- tions about their experience with COVID-19 and the lockdown, specifying if they knew someone who contracted the virus, their average amount of sleep, average number of dreams per week, and if their dreams had changed during the lockdown. If so, they could indicate the nature of those changes. Finally, they were asked to indicate how stressed they felt personally in the context of the lockdown on a scale from 1 to 10.

Data Analysis

To identify how dreams could reflect the impact of the lockdown in this global state of emergency, we used the emotional text mining (Greco, 2016) methodology through the software T-Lab (Lancia, 2017). Emotional text mining is a textual anal- ysis technique that includes statistical competences, adopting a psychodynamic and symbolic-cultural model to understand human behavior and, in particular, the anal- ysis of language. In a communication, we can find two processes (Matte Blanco, 1981): the conscious one, explicating the manifest content, and the unconscious one, which can be inferred through how it is communicated, (i.e., the words chosen and their association within the text).

The 90 dreams were inserted individually on T-Lab as separate files through the corpus builder’s option, then the sociopersonal information was added. At this stage, dreams were collected in a unique corpus composed of 20,852 tokens (the amount of all the words contained in the text) and 4,298 types (the different words used). To determine the lexical richness of the corpus, we calculated the type–token ratio, a lexical index that indicates the average number of times in which a word appears in a text, which in this case was 0.2. The Hapax percentage—obtained by dividing the type–token ratio by the number of types—was 60%. Usually, the per- centage should be around 50%, but given the small dimensions of the corpus, litera- ture accepts higher values (Cordella et al., 2014).

T-Lab performs a normalization of the text to process data; the software seg- ments the corpus following the statistical criteria. Then, a lemmatization is carried out, during which words with the same root are gathered in a unique word. Then, the keywords are selected: The adverbs were excluded as were all the words that

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appeared fewer than three times, and the remaining words were gathered in several lexemes (Cordella et al., 2014).

To point out the links that connect the words and to deduce the symbolic ma- trix that determines their coexistence in the text, we used correspondences analy- sis and analysis of the clusters through the bisecting K-means algorithm (Savaresi & Boley, 2004), which is designed to highlight the similarities and differences between the context units and to verify how words of the corpus are organized, regrouping them in function of a statistical link (Carli et al., 2007). Clustering val- idation measures were taken into account to identify the optimal solution: the Calinski–Harabasz, the Davies–Bouldin, and the intraclass correlation coefficient indices.

In this way, a map of corpus content was constructed according to the keywords that share the same elementary context units. The bisecting K-means clustering technique uses a computational procedure based on the results of previous corre- spondence analyses, based on the coordinates of the lexical units of the factorial axes (Lancia, 2017).

The analysis creates a factorial space, which is a space in which the corpus moves, based on the occurrence and proximity of words in the corpus. The words are arranged in factors, which have two polarities: one positive and one negative. It is necessary to point out that positivity and negativity are only indices that indicate that the factor is a single dimension characterized by these two polarities, one going toward one direction and one toward another, the opposite; they do not present, therefore, a qualitative meaning. The clusters, which are cores of representation, are positioned inside the factorial space with real coordinates.

The interpretation takes place by reading the individual words of each polarity, of all factors, and for each cluster, and going through free associations, keeping in mind the reference context. The words are arranged in order of percentage of abso- lute contribution for factors and context unit’s percentage for clusters: Some words are more representative than others and therefore have a greater weight than others.

First, the various factors and their two poles, positive and negative, are inter- preted to identify the symbolic matrix that communicates the corpus. Once this step has been completed, the clusters are interpreted on the basis of their positions in the factorial space and based on the words that characterize them. The interpretation is carried out by at least four judges, and it is necessary to evaluate the agreement among them. It is therefore associated with a dimension, a general representation that can collect the meaning that those words are transmitting. Using the interview’s fragments, parts of elementary context were sorted by weight. This function is referred to an analysis made by T-Lab, in which a score is applied for relevance to each word present in the cluster. The final score is calculated by the term frequency- –inverse document frequency of Salton (1989), crucial to estimate the importance of lexical units in a text. Following the interpretation, the judges assign labels to each cluster and factors, polarization included.

For the analysis of the variables, we performed a x2 test on the contingence table cluster for variable, and we calculated the standardized residuals to under- stand if the clusters showed differences considering these dimensions. Five main variables emerged through the review: changes in dreams, the knowledge of a

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person who contracted COVID-19, occupation, marital status, and the level of perceived stress.

Results

Through the interpretation and the data analysis, two factors and three clusters were identified. Each factor represents a general dimension of meaning according to unconscious logic, elicited by the latent connection of each word collected inside the factor. Each factor is characterized by a positive and negative pole.

The first factor (Table 1) has been labeled as “Relationship With the Outside.” At its positive pole, we find the function of containing and at the negative pole the function of losing. The two poles are considered as two different experiences along a continuum. The function of the “Dreams Drawer” was to create a space in which it was possible to narrate one’s fears at the moment of waking up and thus contain the dimension of anguish linked to losing. This factor relates to the function of the forum itself because the forum became a “drawer” in which contain the anguish of losing the relationship with the outside.

The negative pole “losing” refers to a sense of anguish over not finding what has been left behind. For example, several dreams describe scenes in which the dreamer could not find their car or in which they cannot help or see their grandfa- ther. It can also be extended to the loss of a larger concept, namely, the “normal” life that is out of reach during the quarantine.

The positive pole—“contain”—expresses the function of the “DreamDrawer,” which is holding: the possibility of using a space that can contain the anxieties related to the situation of the lockdown. The factor highlights the anguished rela- tionship with what happens outside.

The second factor, “Relationship With the Inside” (Table 2), is divided into lose yourself (negative pole) and process (positive pole), and it describes two modal- ities through which individuals came into contact with the lockdown experience.

The negative pole, lose yourself, calls to mind a house’s structure, represent- ing the inside dimension of the lockdown. Associated with that pole, we find words such as “room,” “corridor,” “balcony,” “building,” and so forth The struc- ture of the house seems to represent the same foundations that constitute the state of mind of the individual, according to Freud’s (1900) conceptualization.

Table 1 Factor 1 “Relationship With the Outside” and Its Polarities

Factor 1

Negative pole: Lose Positive pole: Contain

Keyword Absolute

contribution (%) Keyword Absolute

contribution (%)

Take: “Prendere” 2.34 Dreams:“Sogni” 12.72 Bring: “Portare” 1.50 Wake up: “Svegliare” 6.61 Find: “Trovare 1.27 Listen: “Sentire” 1.64 Grandfather: “Nonno” 1.22 Scare: “Impaurire” 1.19 Leave: “Lasciare” 1.20 Tell: “Raccontare” 1.12 Row: “Fila” 1.14 Man: “Uomo” 1.11 Car: “Auto” 1.13 Reality: “Realtà” 1.02

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The theme of the house expresses an emotional dimension during the lockdown, which many experienced as a situation without comparison. Although a house is usually a safe place, in the context of the lockdown, it turns to a “new” and “strange” location where, even if you know the structure, you can “lose yourself.” In addition, we can observe a phobic dimension to this pole, suggested by the words “spider” and “to hide.”

On the positive pole “process,” there is a dimension of hope and memories. It seems to be the pole that mostly reflects the request made to the forum participants, that is, to share their dreams (bring, memory, dreams, know, collect, and wake up). In addition to the dreams collections, the “Dreams Drawer” gathers the pandemic experience, that from the waking up, it allows to process the inner world and brought it to the consciousness through the insight, suggested by the word “sud- denly.” In this factor, the relationship with the outside is lost; the relationship with themselves, fears, distress, and hopes prevails.

The analysis produced three clusters positioned inside the factorial space as shown in Table 3.

The first cluster (Table 4), named “holding,” is placed on the pole of contain in the Relationship With the Outside and on the pole of process in the Relationship With the Inside.

This cluster is evocative, and it recalls the image of a worried infant that wakes up from a nightmare and runs to hismother to tell her the dream. The mother has the function of holding (Winnicott, 1965) as does the “Dream Drawer” in this case. The forum was established, in fact, as a place where, once awake, everyone could share

Table 2 Factor 2 “Relationship With the Inside” and Its Polarities

Factor 2

Negative pole: Lose yourself Positive pole: Process

Keyword Absolute

contribution (%) Keyword Absolute

contribution (%)

Room: “Stanza” 4.07 Bring: “Portare” 1.77 Big: “Grande” 3.26 Memory: “Ricordo” 1.49 New: “Nuovo” 2.37 Dreams: “Sogni” 1.44 Corridor: “Corridoio” 2.23 Suddenly: “Improvviso” 1.43 Centre: “Centro” 2.10 To know: “Conoscere” 1.15 Building: “Palazzo” 2.00 Car: “Auto” 1.10 Garden: “Giardino” 1.71 Head: “Testa” 1.10

Table 3 Cluster Placed in Factors and Percentage of Related Context Unit

Cluster CU (%)* Label

Factor 1: Relationship With

the Outside

Factor 2: Relationship With

the Inside

1 37.73 Holding Contain Process 2 30.09 Refind the other Lose Lose yourself 3 32.18 Anguish defense Lose Process

* CU = context units.

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their dreams and “blow off some steam,” releasing the anguish they might experi- ence from the dream.

The alleged teacher in my dream was my friend’s mother, and I was worried about her judg- ment and behaviour, because when I was younger, I used to make fun of my friend. In the same dream, I dreamed that I woke up and told myself: this is not possible because my friend’s mother isn’t a teacher, and I don’t go to school anymore, and I don’t even have lessons at the university. Now I callmy friend and I tell her. [SCORE: 65,942]

La presunta prof.ssa del sogno era la mamma di una mia amica, della quale temevo il suo giudizio e il suo comportamento, perché da piccolo ero solito prendere in giro la mia amica. Sempre nello stesso sogno, sognai che mi svegliai e dicevo tra me e me: non è possi- bile tutto questo perché la mamma della mia amica non è una prof.ssa, io non sono più a scuola e nemmeno seguo più lezioni all’università. Ora chiamo la mia amica e glielo racconto.

The second cluster, “find the other” (Table 4), moves between lose and lose yourself. The special feature of this cluster is a fairy-tale dimension that calls to mind the princess who needs to be saved, imprisoned in the tower, waiting for some- thing almost religious or mystical.

Getting out, I find out that this place isn’t a small clothes shop as it used to seem before, but it’s a kind of a huge shopping center even if, due to how the big corridors were (by the lighting and the feeling they aroused), I would have considered it more like a museum. These big corridors are empty, quiet, and there aren’t many people around. [SCORE: 22,663]

Uscendo, scopro che questo posto non era un piccolo negozietto di vestiti come sembrava prima, ma una specie di enorme centro commerciale anche se, da come erano fatti i grandi corridoi (dall’illuminazione e dal feeling che davano), lo accosterei più ad un museo. Questi grandi corridoi sono abbastanza vuoti, silenziosi e non ci sono molte persone in giro.

The third cluster, “anguish defense” (Table 4), corresponds to the pole lose of Factor 1 that represents the Relationship With the Outside and the pole elaborate of Factor 2, the Relationship With the Inside. This cluster is almost exclusively charac- terized by words that refer to action. The continuous sense of movement (“find,” “take,” “return,” “bring,” “leave,” “start”) gives a sense of frenzy, a reference to a manic defense (Klein, 1940), which focuses the anxiety on the action, with the aim of defending the person from emotionality and fears.

Sto cercando di prenderli dal mio portafoglio ma gli altri mi mettono fretta e alla fine riesco a prendere un pezzo da 10, due monete da 2 euro e vedo che me ne casca una a terra da 5cent che avrei voluto raccogliere ma che alla fine lascio lì. Poi siamo per strada e decidiamo di

Table 4 The Three Clusters

Cluster 1: Holding Cluster 2: Find the other Cluster 3: Anguish defense

Keywords CU* Keywords CU Keywords CU

Dreams: “Sogni” 75 See: “Vedere” 48 Find: “Trovare” 38 To feel: “Sentire” 50 House: “Casa” 40 Take: “Prendere” 30 Wake up: “Svegliare” 39 Room: “Stanza” 26 Arrive: “Arrivo” 28 Memory: “Ricordo” 32 People: “Persone” 22 Car: “Macchina” 24 Reality: “Realtà” 28 Big: “Grande” 18 Return: “Tornare” 16 Mother: “Mamma” 23 Little: “Piccolo” 18 Bring: “Portare” 15 Finish: “Finire” 16 New: “Nuovo” 17 Sudden: “Improvviso” 15

* CU = context units.

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andare almare, andiamo a farci il bagno, ma la corrente è forte e ci spinge lontano su un’altra spiaggia. [SCORE: 12,773]

I'm trying to take them from my wallet but the others are rushing me, and eventually, I man- age to take a 10 piece, two 2 Euro coins, and I see that I drop one 5 cent coin on the ground that I wanted to pick up, but in the end, I leave it there. Then we are on the street, and we decide to go to the beach, we go for a swim, but the current is strong and pushes us far away on another beach.

One of the variables investigated concerns the person’s dream themes or ability to remember them once awake changed compared with before the lockdown. Par- ticipants who observed a change in their dream themes presented in the dreams themselves a predominance of Cluster 2 “refind the other” [x2 Cluster 2 = 11.45; p , .01]. Because this latter is the cluster that most closely resembles the feeling of loneliness caused by the lockdown, it is likely that the dreams have changed con- tents as a result of the new experience.

Those who reported an increase in the extent to which they could recall their dreams, on the other hand, have a strong presence of Cluster 3 [x2 Cluster 3 = 3.73; p , .05], “anguish defense,” in their dreams. In fact, the ability to recall dreams is supported by a defense mechanism that allows a sequence of contents to be brought to consciousness.

The disparity that is found instead in people who reported meeting at least one person in their waking lives who tested positive for COVID-19 is also interesting [ x2 Cluster 1 = 4.4; p , .05]. Their dream narratives contained a large amount of Cluster 1 [ x2 Cluster 1 = 4.4; p, .05], “holding,” and a significant lack of Cluster 3, “anguish defense.” The fact that they experienced the state of emergency directly, rather than passively, could have increased the need for reassurance through con- tainment such as in a relationship while simultaneously decreasing the need to use an “anguish defense.”

Workers’ dream narratives contained a high presence of Cluster 1 [x2 Cluster 1 = 10.06; p , .01], “holding,” and a low presence of Cluster 3, “anguish defense.” Workers, unlike students, continued to leave home for work-related purposes, rais- ing the risk of infection and hence the need to be reassured, perhaps finding that se- curity in the house to which they returned. It is hypothesized that the low level of “anguish defense” content is due to the lack of the need to implement manic defen- ces, constant acts that shift the anguish on the acted.

Single participants’ dream narratives were extremely high in Cluster 3 [x2 Clus- ter 3 = 7.64; p , .01], “anguish defense.” Given that this cluster was much lower in people in relationships, this could be a consequence of a deeper anguish in single people. In addition to the general fear linked to the moment, there was also the fear of meeting new people because doing so could increase the risk of contracting the vi- rus. For some, this was a reason to give up looking for a partner. People in relation- ships had dream narratives that were significantly high in Cluster 1, “holding” content, probably because they were able to find “holding”with their partners.

Conclusion

The world changed in December 2019 when nations everywhere were hit with an acute respiratory syndrome, SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, resulting in the World Health Organization declaring state of emergency. Most of the world enforced

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restriction strategies and lockdowns. The pandemic has been a unique and unpre- dictable event that has indiscriminately involved the whole world, making it a collec- tive trauma. This may have activated collective mental processes that could be measurable through various dimensions of human experience and communication. Increasing interest in the possible consequences of this unique moment has been the driving factor in the development and execution of this study. The “DreamDrawer” was launched to investigate the creation of mental representations in dreams during the lockdowns. The purpose of this study was to capture unconscious processes, assuming that dream content could demonstrate people’s images and understanding of the emergency and the lockdowns.

Because dreams are an expression of the unconscious, they should have a wide range of themes. The fact that a thematic dichotomy emerged from the dreams, we gathered indicates that it may be a direct consequence of the quarantine. It should be kept in mind that the dreams were not made of a group of people living their lives normally, and the “Dreams Drawer” was not only a drawer/container for dreams, but it was also an expression of the pandemic itself. Because of the unprecedented historical period in which the dreams were written, the lack of variability and imagi- nation should not be interpreted negatively but rather as a sign that we were all experiencing the same dimension of anguish.

The factors uncovered present both symbolic and reflective dimensions but their substantial difference lies in their focus. The event itself is the subject in Factor 1 “Relationship With the Outside,” almost in collective terms, whereas the subjec- tive dimension of the event, how it has affected the participant, is the subject in Fac- tor 2 “Relationship With the Inside.” The dichotomy is particularly strong in the positive poles, which have been dubbed “lose” and “lose yourself,” respectively. Factor 1 describes the anguish of missing and not finding the other, the reality left “outside,” whereas Factor 2 describes the fear of losing yourself inside a new and strange home, which is a representation of the psychic interior relationship. The “home theme” seems to remember the house’s function posited by Freud (1900). For Freud, the house had the task of providing security and shelter, functions that are also carried out by the mother. This is the same mother who has the function of “holding,” the one you can run to when you have a nightmare and the same one who can “contain” the anguish to return it in more sustainable terms (Bion, 1967).

In both factors, therefore, the same anguish of losing is present but in two dif- ferent ways. In “Relationship With the Outside,” there is the anguish and the effort to contain it in the other; in “Relationship With the Inside,” there are both the an- guish itself and the attempt to rationalize it. The findings outlined here demonstrate how catastrophic events can be expressed in dream life, in line with dream continu- ity theory and psychoanalytic thought. 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.

These findings may be useful in exploring collective changes during stressful sit- uations. It may be fruitful to compare these results with future studies in the post- pandemic period to describe how emotional and representational processes related to the COVID-19 pandemic develop. Dreamwork could be the first step in begin- ning to process this collective catastrophic experience.

It is possible that dream content continues to change as the state of emergency progresses and based in part on each country’s response to it. Future studies should

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examine this progression to track changes in dream content compared with the images that were associated with the lockdown and the virus at the beginning of the pandemic. It is important to carry out an intensive awareness campaign on the part of health authorities and to make psychological assistance services available by pub- licizing access to these services as much as possible.

There are some limitations in our research. One limitation is the small number of participants, which consequently produced few dreams—90—thus creating a small corpus to be interpreted. Moreover, most of the participants were students, which is probably due to the fact that the forum was made known by the students themselves, hence reaching mostly peers and colleagues from the university. In addition, most of the participants lived in central Italy; a wider sample of people from all over Italy would have been more representative of the overall emotional dimension.

Another limit is that some participants have reported more than one dream in the forum. Even if the dreams carry different representations, it would have been more appropriate to avoid including more than one dream of the same person. Nevertheless, this does not affect the result of our work, being ours an explorative qualitative study.

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  • “Dreams Drawer”: Analysis of Dreams During Lockdown in the Italian Population
    • From Individual to Collective Trauma
    • Dreams and Collective Trauma
    • Fitting the New Reality
    • Aims
    • Method
      • Procedure
      • Participants
      • Measures
      • Data Analysis
    • Results
    • Conclusion
    • References