Individual and situational factors predicting threatening events and pandemic-related threatening events in dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic

Previous studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic affected dream recall, dream content, and nightmares. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the individual and situational factors associated with pandemic-induced changes in dreams. The threat simulation theory of dreaming predicts that threatening situations in our waking life (situational factors) influence threatening dream content. At the same time, individual differences predispose some people to be more prone to experience threatening dreams more frequently than others. Using a large Finnish sample of prospective dream diaries, we analyzed the relative importance of individual (e.g., belonging to COVID-19 risk group, life satisfaction, depression symptoms) and situational factors (e.g., daily COVID-19 worry, COVID-19 media consumption, negative and positive emotions) to determine the best predictors for threatening events and COVID-19 related threatening events in dreams. Random forest analyses revealed that individual factors were consistently better predictors than situational factors for both threatening events and pandemic-related threatening events in dreams. Lower life satisfaction was the only statistically significant predictor for threatening events, and fewer positive emotions in the past two weeks the only statistically significant predictor for pandemic-related threatening events, in dreams. These findings suggest that the propensity to experience threatening dream content, including pandemic-related threatening events, is more of a stable trait rather than a daily fluctuating feature of dreams. In the light of the threat simulation theory, it could be argued that individual variation in the proneness to simulate threatening events adaptively interacts with daily experiences to modulate threatening dream content.