Dreaming in quarantine: emotional elaboration of the traumatic experience COVID-19 pandemic

AIM The spread of COronaVIrus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) brought significant changes in different spheres of society, represents a collective traumatic experience, affecting physical and psychological health. Lockdown rules imposed to counteract the rapid growth of COVID-19 for almost two months, bringing a total disruption of the daily routine, with a castration of individual freedom, becoming a real threat to the integrity of self developing post-traumatic distress, feelings of loneliness and perception of low social support. The research aims are to explore the emotional process of quarantine dreams, through linguistic measures of referential process (Bucci, 2021; Bucci, Maskit, & Murphy, 2016), to explore a collective elaboration of unexpected experience. A group of students self-organized a public blog collecting ninety-one dreams. We assume the group worked a common emotional process of emotional schema activated by COVID-19 traumatic experience, a computerized linguistic analysis and clinical evaluation has been applied to writing dreams. METHOD A group of people 68 (22 males) joint the social blog mean age 26,16 ds. 7,68. collecting 91 dreams. They could write their dreams in an open blog, filling before an on-line platform: a socio-anamnestic questionnaire. The dreams were analyzed by the software Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (DAAP; Maskit, 2014) applying linguistic measures of referential process and statistical cluster analysis has been conducted. Parallel each dream was evaluated by judges on three specific quality of Referential Process (Kingsley, 2009: Arousal, Symbolizing and Reflection/Reorganig). Clinical judges in a double blinded method reached reliable scoring (Arousal cronbach α.874 icc .701; Symbolizing cronbach α..783 icc .671; Reflection/reorganization cronbach α..884 icc .758). RESULTS Both linguistic analyzes and the judges' clinical evaluation of dreams have shown that three specific clusters are recognizable. The first dreams group is characterized by emotional activation, where senso-somatic and affects dictionaries were predominant, the second show a symbolizing process were reflection activity is higher and third group is characterized by higher reflection and reorganizing measures to manage emotional reaction. DISCUSSION That results represent that the blog “dreams container” showed a three kind of emotional elaboration of referential process. Computerized linguistic analysis and clinical evaluation reach an interesting integration of dreams qualities, showing three type of emotional processes. Based on these results dreams, core of non-verbal system, can have different function in connecting sub-symbolic and symbolic systems. This could indicate a collective and social elaboration of traumatic experience. According to this approach, the dreams of a community can represent a key of access to the unconscious of a society.