Jessica Hanff set up an interplanetary quarantine system and let new inhabitants onto her own personal planet. Robert Baum sometimes hears a knock at the door announcing the arrival of men in hazmats coming for his children, like something out of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Meanwhile, Erin Petrey, of Eckington, says she’s been trying to find a room in a giant hotel resort in Bethesda, but keeps getting rerouted through back stairwells, hitting dead ends, and failing to avoid giant crowds of people who appear to have just left some kind of conference.

These are just some of the dreams people in the D.C. area say they’ve had during the coronavirus pandemic—dreams they describe as the most vivid they’ve had in ages, some recurring night after night. Many involve dead relatives, famous people, or aggressive, scary, and obscure figures. A few say they are trying to escape crowds, stalkers, and the like. Others dream of out-of-state missions to retrieve toilet paper and attempting to bring it back to D.C.

Researchers across the globe are collecting evidence of bizarre dreams, believed to be caused by heightened stress, less time in the outside world, and more time with our imaginations, according to National Geographic. People are also reporting that they remember their dreams better, with spiked emotions and frequent disturbances in sleep (called parasomnias) resulting in better recollection of dreams.

The influx of terrible information during the pandemic—the fear of losing loved ones, losing our own lives, tragic news we’re witnessing hourly—is emotionally overwhelming and affecting our sleep patterns, researchers say.

Perhaps that explains why Marie Cohen, who lives near Eastern Market, recently had a dream that she and her husband went to see a new blockbuster musical because the tickets were so inexpensive due to the pandemic. The imaginary theater was packed, and they ended up so far from the stage, she and her husband decided to leave. “Unfortunately, we had to drag my mother—who has been dead 15 years—away from her perfect seat where she was happily enjoying the show,” Cohen says.

Maybe it can help make sense of things for journalist Sarah Brown, who dreamed of having a house party in Columbia Heights, only to be cyber-stalked by one of the attendees the next day. It was a friend of a friend in attendance at her dream-party, she thinks, who found her on social media and hacked her Slack channels at work. In real life, she turned her smartwatch on do-not-disturb because the buzz from notifications became so disturbing.

Or what about Eileen Murphy, who says every night is a different tableau of weird, starring a rotating cast of dead people. “My parents, a famous actor, last night—Jim Vance,” Murphy says, referring to the legendary D.C. broadcaster.

“I now hate sleep,” she adds.

That might actually be the wrong mindset, says Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He recommends leaning into the scary dreams, finding out what they represent, and seeing what meaning might be hidden there for us.

“That is such a Western attitude: ‘Let’s stamp out the unconscious mind because it’s illogical, it’s disturbing, it gets in the way of our neatly ordered, lovely, logical life.’ But, in fact, the opposite is true,” says Lieberman, who specializes in mood disorders and is co-author of The Molecule of More, about the neurotransmitter dopamine. “We should be embracing these dreams because they’re telling us something that’s absolutely essential for us to know.”

The first step is to metaphorically turn toward the fear and write down what you remember from the dream and your body’s reaction, Lieberman says. The meaning of the dream may reveal itself later, but the most important thing is to “collect data,” so to speak. A week into the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, Erin Gravley started a web service called “i dream of covid” where people can archive their dreams by category—and she illustrates them. This type of approach could be helpful for locals experiencing nightmares.

“This is a strategy that is used with patients who are not responding to treatment for pain,” Lieberman says. “By turning towards the pain and opening themselves towards it, they actually find out they tolerate it better than they thought they would.”

Dreams are largely misunderstood, Lieberman says, and have been disagreed upon by scientists for ages, but there are two main schools of thought: the neuroscientific approach, which argues that the purpose of dreams is to consolidate memories (to make us forget the things that are unimportant and lock in things that are important); and the psychoanalytic argument that dreams are communications from the unconscious mind, which present an alternative viewpoint on life.

Some survivors of COVID-19 describe—among the array of symptoms—having hallucinations caused by high fevers. That’s the case with Brad Weaber, a consultant in Upper Northwest D.C., who says the virus slammed into him “like a freight train” just over three weeks ago. With a fever of 104.1 degrees Fahrenheit, his hallucinations carried into ongoing nightmares. Symptom free for nine days, Weaber still has dreams of a furious man standing at the foot of his bed and pointing at him while an unrecognizable family in 1920s outfits stands a few feet away. Or that he’s drowning. Or that he has the virus again.

But instead of ignoring the dreams, Weaber took one step towards working through the anxiety—he sketched a picture of it. That’s a good thing, says Dr. Lieberman,

“We tend to really downplay the role the unconscious mind plays in our day-to-day life,” Lieberman says. “We are in a situation in which we’re out of our comfort zone. We’re scared, and our conscious minds don’t really have the tools to deal with this. So as a result, our unconscious minds, which are generating the dreams, are sort of kicking into high gear to help us out.”