Why Is Everyone Having Vivid Dreams Right Now? 

I am actually really surprised that this appears to be a general problem. I was having a lot of weird nightmares lately.

A couple of days ago I had a dream where Bruce Lee was given a star of fame on the floor of the frozen food section of an old Fred Meyer that closed 20 years ago, and he was standing on it as part of the ceremony. He was very friendly, but then it turned out he was actually Michael Jackson, who was actually a velociraptor skeleton disguised as Michael Jackson, except he was actually a cardboard model of a velociraptor skeleton. The velociraptor slipped and fell and broke into pieces because he had waxed the floor around his square, in case someone challenged his Bruce Lee disguise to a fight. I have no idea what that says about the stress of the day.

Honestly I'm kinda living for these weird dreams because last night I had a completely normal dream where I was just grocery shopping and everything was fine except this one display of cereal boxes that just showed Scooby Doo on a blue background and the name of the cereal was "DUMBASS" in big yellow block letters

Fun fact: that REM rebound he described is also why a lot of people experience more intense dreams after getting drunk. Alcohol supresses REM sleep, so you get very little REM at the start of the night. After a few hours, your liver has removed enough alcohol from the blood for REM sleep to be possible, so your brain tries to make up for lost time with very intense REM sleep. Therefore very intense dreams. Plus, because this occurs in the later stages of your night's sleep, it's likely that you'll wake up soon after (or during) the intense dreams. This means you're much more likely to remember them, due to the surge of noradrenaline mentioned in the video.

I wasn't aware something like this was happening, but this is actually really interesting.

Yes if I'm not having insomnia I'm having very vivid dreams as of late.

I was struggling with math and science classes a year or so ago, and the things I was struggling with presented themselves in one dream. I solved the problem in the dream easily, and then I knew the way to go about it when I woke up. It's so weird what your sub conscience hides from you.

When I was young, to help me fall asleep I made up stories in my imagination and it still helps me. It sometimes influences my dreams. For me, I've always remembered my dreams pretty vividly. I've gotten into dream journaling too.

Is there like... a 'norepinephrine' pill I can take just before sleep? I'm a writer, and my dreams are often more interesting, complex and creative than I am, so... if I could tap into that... I'd like to try. I've had dreams where I feel like I am gone for weeks at a time, or more; nor am I aware of the waking world anymore - or even that I was ever awake in the first place. The dream effectively 'becomes' my reality until I awake again... I literally become someone else, and seem to live through a piece of their lives in whatever fantastical setting they're from. They're always especially intricate and believable compared to dreams I hear others talk about. They always feature things and people and places and ideas I've never seen or ever even thought of before. It's all extremely fascinating and my only regret is I can't always write everything down before I forget. :(

"Replay the dream in your head" *Cries in aphantasia*

"Intense sleep" sounds like an oxymoron.

Wait - that wasn't just me? Wow.

Yes....it’s called me drinking too much and too often. Also sleep apnea. My nightmare begins when I wake up.

I started a dream journal when we started staying at home, and immediately started having really weird dreams...

i’ve been dreaming about people i knew a long time ago and i wake up heartbroken :( that’s a cute mouse by the way

This was one of best videos yet. This applies to me so much. I want to try the changing the ending thing.

2:49 Newton’s Pendulum doesn’t look right on the table or in the dream. That is the stuff of nightmares

I'm definitely having more vivid dreams, and more dreams in general.

I have narcolepsy and cataplexy, literally since the age of 14 every dream of mine has been vivid and (at times) nightmarish. Little did I know my body must have been preparing me for 2020! Arise my sleepy brethren! It falls upon us to teach the rest of society how to cope with abnormal sleeping patterns!

I can't be the only person who enjoys having nightmares. It's like living a movie.

Man you read my mind, I had a dream where I went on a trip inside a three wheeled car made by some really old company, there was something about a pet turtle in a small cage, so I brought a fish tank with me. I was wearing a white long sleeved shirt, and my friend put oil in a sprinkler and got it all over me, I got mad and fought him. Later I found oil stains all over my shirt. Probably the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.

That one-sided newton's cradle is gonna give me nightmares more than anything

I get sleep paralysis more often during this stretch of time. About twice a month. Used to be a lot more rare. 😞

Been dreaming of people I havent seen since high school. Even those I know have passed. Actually feels hollow waking up knowing they’re not here anymore.

I had a dream where I walked out onto my porch and saw 2 mushroom clouds in the distance one farther away from the other

I haven't had a vivid dream in years. I was in some sort of prison, had two friends, somehow learned how to fly and taught it to my companions. We attempted to escape but I lost my ability to fly and had to stay behind. Woke up right as I was recaptured with the memory of my friends calling for me. I have never met them in real life, but I still remember them a decade later.

Semi Lucid dreaming for the win. As a child I developed this thing. I have a chalk board in my dreams. And if I don't like the way a dream is going I can erase the part I don't like on the chalkboard and have it start again where it left off. I have a lot of really strange and pretty dreams though!

I can relate to almost all of these points made, especially the part about having anxiety and being worried about a specific situation or thing and then having a dream relating to it.

Nope. None at all. Sleeping like a rock. World is on fire. My brain: cant do anything about it. Lets go to sleep.

Anyone ever have a reacquiring dream scape? Like I’ll have a different dream in the same place every few nights

Jokes on you, I've been social distancing most of my life. EZ sleep.

Anthony!!!! I love you lots and lots! Obviously I miss you but I’m so glad you’re making helpful videos like this. (I’ve sent this to so many people during quarantine...)

I didn’t know everyone else was also dreaming more often

This is the first of the SciShow's where I have seen Anthony. Nice presentation. I hope to see you more! :)

Does anyone else have moments in their dreams and imagination when you just can't do something, like some force pulled you and your line of sight away from whatever it is, like some sort of mind barrier? Just remembering that feeling and trying to explain that makes me annoyed, frustrated and just utterly demotivated

After my mom, who is an essential employee, found out she transported a train crew who all tested positive for COVID-19, I started having dreams where I would find her passed away at home. I can remember every one of them. She had to have two tests done 2 weeks apart and when the second one came back negative, the dreams finally stopped. The same thing happened to me in 2010 when 4 EF4 tornadoes destroyed the township I live in. I was having long bouts of insomnia, and then I'd crash, and each time I got sleep I relived that night all over in my dreams. After a couple of months of this, my husband dragged me to the doctor and she wasn't too happy with me because I didn't make an appointment right away after that event. I still have nightmares about it every summer.

I’ve always had really horrible nightmares for as long as I can remember (family members and friends dying and coming back from the dead to blame me for their death, my cat showing up dead and covered in blood in random places, me being eaten alive by spiders, ventriloquist dummies stabbing me repeatedly, etc.). Right now, I’ve mostly been having dreams about bugs crawling inside me, which, believe me, is better than usual. So, I’m doing alright. I also had the first good dream in I don’t even know how long last night (I ate like fifty donuts).

What started to do is if I wake from a very vivid, and interesting dream, I will write it down when I wake up. Some dreams I have are so detailed while others aren’t as much. But I can go back and read from a dream I had a year ago and still picture it exactly.

Oh I thought it was the LSD, thanks

The thing is... I don't get to have nightmares, but there are dreams that are like connected everytime I sleep

I dreamt of my university burning and last night about the whole neighborhood burning ... I wonder what my subconscious is saying

I haven't seen Anthony before; I love him and his narration was really great! Thanks SciShow AND Anthony for this enlightening episode!! 💕

Last night I had a dream that siren head was chasing me because he wanted to take my rock candy. That’s the most tame dream I’ve had this month

As a person with severe anxiety among other conditions this explains the disruptive sleep I have over the past several years. My dreams usually are a mixture of events from throughout my life (mostly unrelated traumas) it has been a wild set of dreams. I wish I had started a dream journal years ago.

Eh... I've always had pretty wild and memorable dreams alongside a life of anxiety and stress. So I'm not remotely surprised.

I just wanna thank you for putting everything so clearly in this video and the effort you put in making the video. I was so tensed thinking about what's happening to me. Thanks for explaining as to why this is happening. I am experiencing a great deal of stress and anxiety.

I’m having more dreams because I generally wake up at a reasonable time but more often now I can just go back to sleep for a short time

ive been having these vivid dreams lately and always wake up feeling very exhausted than ever in the morning till noon, but now ive got my answer- its due to stress and unfulfilled worries in life. thanks for explaining so clearly. its definitely interesting to know im not the only one having this problem.

I dream of dabbing up the Bois

I'm loving these nightmares I'm having, because I'm writing them down and expanding them into actual stories. Thanks brain!

I JUST HAD A WILD ASS DREAM TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW DONT DO THIS TO ME

I’ve had vivid dreams for as long as I can remember, even back when I was a kid. I’m a creative person, so that’s common for me, but I can attest to sleeping less comfortably during the past few weeks for both reasons with the world right now and because I hear almost everything during the night, such as my roommate getting up early for work, the dog licking himself, someone driving a stupid race car down the street, etc.

Didn't know this was a thing right now and thought it was just me lol. I'm someone who never remembers their dreams, but lately I've been having some really weird dreams. Wish I could remember them for longer than a couple hours though. 😂😂

I lived without work through my 20's. It's upsetting to see the world finally experiencing the benefits of being free. The most upsetting is how so many of these changes are making people more intelligent and emotionally stable. For the first and only time in their lives, they have time to think and reflect. The more months and the more years they have the better they will be as people and the more "themselves" they will be.. as long as they don't lose themselves again when the world opens back up and enslaves them again. You're getting something called enough sleep. Something called enough time. You're getting enough energy to think. Solitude and isolation work wonders on the human animal. As some form of divine justice, I've been working more than ever through the pandemic. I get to experience the work everyone was doing when I was in my 20's while everyone else gets to experience the solitude I had. I miss my 20's every day. No work is all I ever wanted in life. I'm a slave essential to the economic system of the modern world. The world needs slaves and if you give them some distance and the bare minimum money to make choices then they won't even notice that they're slaves. How far we've come from the forest. So intelligent that we put ourselves in beautifully expensive chains.

I just have dreams about going to crowded grocery stores and realizing i forgot my mask...

Sometimes I feel like my dreams are videogames I take place in personally. Literally today I woke up in the morning from my phone ringing and inside the dream I was like "Alright I'll just pause", literally pressed the pause button within the dream as I woke up, got up to answer the phone and resumed the dream right at that moment when I went back to bed. Also I rarely ever have bad dreams or nightmares. Sometimes I do have stressful dreams but they don't bother me. To me dreams are manifestations of what's going through my head when I'm having them and that understanding helps me cope even with the scariest ones. Most of the time I have supernatural powers in my dreams. Though sometimes I have full control of them and sometimes not at all.

SciShow: _"Anyone else been having vivid dreams lately?_ Meanwhile, I'm here not remembering having any dreams since April...

I want that "I am Here" hoodie!

Since corona i have been having such weird dreams.I had dreams about having kids and giving birth, death and much more

I wouldn't say my dreams are any more vivid than usual, but I seem to be remembering them less well than usual. I think it's because I've been getting partially woke near the end of my sleep period, or wake up and be expected to carry out a conversation or answer questions immediately. My sleep schedule's weird, so my parents keep waking me up... That said, my dreams tend to be unusually vivid to begin with, and I normally remember them more often than not (though I don't bother trying to commit uninteresting dreams to long term memory.) Normally I wake up and either sit quietly trying to memorize the dream, or if I'm pressed for time, go through my morning routine while trying to memorize the dream. Most of my writing is based on my dreams, so I try very hard to remember the interesting ones. Since quarantine started, I've only had two dreams that seemed to have potential, which is pretty normal for the amount of time elapsed. I found the link between stress and nightmares interesting though, because two of the worst nightmares I've ever had did actual take place when I was under a lot of stress (one occurred when I went to sleep while having a really bad migraine; the other occurred when my dad prevented me from doing one of the things my OCD makes me do before going to sleep, so I was feeling really anxious because of that.) I never get reoccurring nightmares, the closest I've gotten to those has been nightmares in which I failed to feed or look after a tank of fish. In these dreams, the fish are either somehow still alive, despite their environment being filthy and not having food; there's a few fish left that had to kill and eat the others to survive; all the fish are dead; or, something's in the tank that shouldn't be there such as a frog, a turtle, a snake, a really big fish, a small shark, a crab, or on one occasion a small sea serpent/dragon thing, and the thing has been eating the fish, usually with a few still alive. Sometimes the fish are totally random fish, other times it's the fish I had that were all wiped out by a severe outbreak of cotton disease that wiped the entire tank out within a month; occasionally pet fish I had that weren't involved in that incident appear as well. In all the variants, the focus is on me feeling immense guilt for forgetting to take care of the fish, or for not being able to stop the situation from happening, with the fish or ghosts of the fish blaming me for their deaths/suffering or asking why I didn't save them in some versions. I only started having these about two or two and a half years ago, and they aren't very frequent, but I don't think I've had any of them since quarantine started.

I've heard this from multiple people lately

My dreams have always been extremely weird and vivid. So much to the point where sometimes I'll wake up disturbed by some of my creepy or emotionally draining dreams 😐

Bro nowadays I am having dreams like they've actually happened to me! And now I'm being confused in reality and dreams!😅Funny right?? But it's reality!

This there are two dreams I had twice growing up so far: 1) Me driving a car and it's moving hella slow but I have to save my parents. 2) Me riding a steg-ah-saw-russ (forgot how to spell) but the reason why was different each time even though the scenery was the same

Frequency of alien abductions are up, thats why. I’m not even kidding

The imagery rehearsal that you mentioned really helped me. After I awoke from a nightmare, I would immediately reimagine it going my way. It calmed me quickly to help me get back to sleep quickly and lowered the intensity and frequency of future nightmares.

I'm not. I smoke **ahem** "herbal cigarettes", it suppresses dreams. ; D

I have a whole post apocalyptic world in my dreams and it keeps going on like a Netflix show or a series I can usually pick what happens in my community to survive which is pretty fun as hell

Last dream I had that I remembered had guns in it. I've been watching a lot of news about police brutality. Hmmmm 🤔

Dreams are a tool for intuition and awareness in my religion, Eckankar. I and many ECKists record our dreams because, as you say, they often mirror what goes on during the day. Sometimes when I forget most of a dream, I'll write short phrases of what I do remember: putting on a shoe, taking out garbage, attending a class, navigating bureaucracy, etc. Or even "I dreamed. I don't remember." The very act of writing even small details can bring out all of a dream so you can write it down. It can seem a Jumble to begin with. But with practice, symbols emerge, associations are made, and simple but powerful concepts come through and guide me into a better way of doing things.

I've been having these weird thoughts lately. Like is any of this real or not? Like if you get the reference

My dreams have been especially vivid and complex lately, but I had no idea it has become more common for other people as well! Great video! I have been doing the imagery rehearsal, but not before going to bed, but right as I wake up. One issue I've been having are dreams where I'm trying to go somewhere, or do something, but I can never get the task completed. I feel like the dream goes on for hours, with me TRYING to finish a test, or find a bathroom, or get to an appointment. I wake up grumpy and frustrated. If I wake up slowly, with a few minutes of half sleep, I try to "fix" the dream. This doesn't always work, but it helps sometimes.

That hoodie is AMAZING! I need that design in my life.

I wasn't thinking about whether or not I've been having weird dreams. But now I will. Thanks, Scishow.

Anyone else notice his hoodie has the Pioneer 10 diagram for the location of our sun and the Google Maps pin symbol? Super clever and nerdy, I just love it.

I was just wondering this, I have been having really surreal dreams

Vivid dreams are terrifyng and exhausting. But it felt nice after you wake up, the relief and serenity feeling

Anyone else notice how whenever you fly in dreams, it's always feet first? Or is that just me?

Thanks! For the last 5 nights I’ve been having dreams about marching and dying. The pro tip at the end of the video will definitely help. Welp, back to marching.

During fasting last month I wasn't getting any decent amount of sleep but my dreams were so much more interesting then anything I have experienced in my life these last 5 years

I wish I could dream more. I rarely dream and haven't noticed an increase in them.

I chalked it up to getting more sleep bc I have a pretty open schedule now. Allowing me to stay up until 3am and wake up anywhere from 10-noon. I'm about as stressed as usual, and didn't normally "remember" my dreams before COVID.

Vivid dreams, but not many nightmares, I’ve had such a beautiful dream of the ocean, and when I looked down, it was deep and colorful under the ocean, it was amazing.

ive been having soooo vivid dreams in the past last 4-5 months I felt like ive done so much a sleep i'm not sure i feel like i even slept - no idea why and then your awesome channel just post this video and i just had to write this down before watching

Not a good time to have BPD and chronic anxiety... I keep having dreams of someone shadowy figure following me. Freaks me out every night, I feel like I haven't had a good night's sleep in months.

Thanks Anthony! I really enjoyed this explanation, your pacing, and your voice :)

As a person who loves and admires stories and writers, and as a person who also loves to write and wants to be a professional creative writer/author/novelist someday, I wish I could control to remember every detail of my best vivid and or lucid dream adventures, 'cause they are more interesting and fun than the stories I could think and create when I am awake. Sometimes it is even harder to show through writing all of the complex emotions, moods, awe, sense of adventure, discovery, and fantasy I have in my best vivid and or lucid dreams if I could remember some for a longer time, and that's just how fun, emotionally complex, visually pleasing and vivid, colorful, and detailed a part of my best vivid and lucid dreams I had.

Night after night I keep dreaming that I'm about to head home from a vacation place, but I have tons of stuff that needs packed like I'm moving an entire house and no matter how much I pack there are still rooms and rooms full of my clutter. It's getting dark, people are getting angry, and I still have days of work left. Ugh.

Why do they always say it's stress? I am not stressed and have vivid dreams that I can recount. Not always stress people...

I had a dream where instead of lighting poles were replaced by giant beating hearts pumping this gold liquid everywhere through fleshy blood vessels

The Newton’s cradle that only bounces on one side will haunt my dreams now, THX. (Also I’ve been remembering my dreams for the first time in like a year)

I feel the real reason is because us empaths are connecting and everyone else is getting caught up in our gravitation. Listen to your dreams, it's energy trying to talk to you, listen.

Tbh. I'm enjoying these vivid dreams. I usually draw what I see in my dreams. Usually, I'm at my workplace but it doesn't look like my workplace but it feels like it. Or my home town but everything looks different, my town is still a developing community but in my dreams it looks industrialized.

I really want more vivid dreams. They make no sense but I’m living for them.

I've always remembered my dreams and now I learn that it's because I get bad sleep. I thought all my dreams were a sign of good sleep cycles. This makes more sense though since I'm always tired. Yay.

if i could just stay asleep all night. instead of waking from another vivid falling dream, full of adrenalin, that would be great.

i dont remember the good ones but then i remember the one where i get bit by a lizard, turn into one, and get stomped on by my brother and then wake up

My dreams are becoming more interesting these days. I guess going back to my programming hobby (BASH, nothing fancy) really gets me into good mood and into good night sleep.

3:15 Duh. The last 6 months has been pure Inception for me, this video explains everything. Thank you for making this video 👍🏽✨

Thank you. I really needed this.