Dream activity significantly shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a sample of 108 participants revealing reduced dream frequency from 43% during total lockdown to 22% post-lockdown. Emotional intensity and vividness also declined, with fear remaining the dominant emotion in dreams (26.9% at lockdown, 22.2% post-lockdown). Despite improved sleep latency and fewer PTSD-related disruptions post-lockdown, poor sleep quality and high anxiety persisted. These findings suggest that the pandemic's emotional toll continues to shape our dreams, supporting the continuity hypothesis.
Primary visual consciousness—whether a person reports seeing a stimulus—is associated with enhanced cortical neural synchronization, but the timing and brain regions involved depend on the type of visual feature. In three experiments using event-related potentials, seen and unseen trials showed no difference in the timing of neural responses, but the sources of brain activity differed. For visuospatial stimuli, consciousness involved higher activity in dorsal occipital and parietal areas around 400 milliseconds. For emotional face expressions, greater activity appeared in parietal and frontal areas at about 180 milliseconds. For written words, higher activity occurred in occipital, parietal, and temporal areas at about 230 milliseconds. These results suggest that primary visual consciousness arises from synchronizing different cortical networks depending on the visual feature, possibly forming a multidimensional palette of qualia.