There wasn’t anyone else around, and he had an unsettling awareness he shouldn’t be there—“that other people had more sense than me by not going to school, and the structure itself was crumbling.”

Gus Jacobson, an 8th grade English teacher in Queens, found his school had changed in a subtle and sinister way: all the walls and desks were a little bit rotten. “Like, when you’re in the woods, and you see a rotten tree stump where the wood is so soft you can break it apart with little effort,” he said.

That's when Jacobson woke up; this is a recurring dream he's been having since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first night he had it, he had been anxious and nauseated before going to sleep. The dream evoked the same queasy feeling.

Jacobson isn't the only one having unusual COVID-19-tinged dreams. Online, people have been sharing how the pandemic that takes up nearly every minute of their attention in their waking lives has started to trickle into their sleeping life too.

Sometimes the dreams are very realistic. A 60-year-old retired nurse in San Jose had a dream where she returned to work in the ER. “Patients being intubated in the hall beds,” she said. “Utter chaos. Waiting room full. Everyone coughing. Manager sitting in office wearing N95 mask, yet we had none. I woke up sweating.”

Other dreams are more symbolic. Danielle, 27, who lives in New York, said that in a recent dream, she was wearing a choker that was too tight. “I couldn’t breathe and was gasping for air. I couldn’t loosen the choker no matter how much I tried and no one was able to help me,” she said. “I think this came after reading in articles how people sick with covid are gasping for air [and there are] not enough ventilators.”

Then there are the nonsensical dreams: Klára Ottisová, who lives in Prague, said that she dreamt that the Czech Republic’s prime minister replaced the current leader of the central crisis committee with a yellow rubber duck that normally resides in her bathroom. Tim, a 23-year-old in Sacramento dreamt he found a book that Tina Fey had written five years ago titled “Covid-19.” “She called out everything several years in advance, said it would be the collapse of civilization,” Tim said. “Later in the dream she got in trouble for it and so did I for some reason.”

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Dreaming has long been a fascination for scientists, psychologists, and regular people alike. While some consider dreams a benign byproduct of the sleeping brain, there's also accumulating evidence that dreams help with memory formation, processing complicated emotions, or as a way to practice facing threats or dangers. Dreams might help lead us to new insights and problem-solving; other research has supported that dreaming could be therapeutic.