Sleep is a process that helps the brain rest and carries out active life processes. While sleeping, a person can dream, which helps process the information received during the day. Dreams themselves are necessary for ordering thoughts and rebooting the brain, especially the nerve centers responsible for transforming signals from the external environment: hearing, sight, and smell. It means that while dreaming, a person can smell, hear sounds, or observe quite clear and connected pictures. Dreams teach us to cope with stress and dangerous situations: for example, the “hit or run” mechanism works best in sleep. Dreams are essential for the cycle of life and death because they reflect psychological states and often physiological ones. 

The experience of dreams has been studied from various perspectives in science through the reconstruction of the mental processing of sleep (Mariani et al.). It has several phases, and while attention was first paid to the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase, scientists are now interested in the dreaming experience (DE) phase. DE is now thought to play an essential role in emotional coding and regulation, although the neural basis of the REM-DE relationship is discussed as much. data suggest that people dream because there is an alternating muscular activity of different brain areas, leading to specific images. It is worth noting that this also accounts for the influence of healthy sleep on the construction of emotional response: during DE, emotional experiences are processed, and at the onset of the waking phase, the nerve centers are again ready for new environmental signals.  These results indicate that people dream due to external factors related to isolation and social interaction; in the limitation of communication, dreams are no longer conscious. 

Dreams and dreaming are closely related to the processing of experienced emotional responses. The scientific world adheres to the dreaming continuity hypothesis, which states that dreams are a natural continuation of the sleeper’s thoughts and experiences. The emotional tone of dreams, in this case, depends on the emotional experience of the person and the degree of influence of external factors on it. Scarpelli et al.’ study focus on the impact of the external environment on the formation of dreams and the identification of affecters that are more tied to the stages of the referential process. The paper is based on emotional trauma received during the COVID-19 pandemic, making it relevant and valuable for understanding the influence of society on the themes and images of dreams.