Faced with the Covid-19 threat, our brains were overwhelmed and they transferred the stress to our sleeping state.
Now, more than a year on, as many people have become used to pandemic life, we set out to find from you if your dreams had also adapted to the "new normal".
Are masks, empty streets and social distancing now simply a backdrop to our everyday dreams? What do you see when you nod off?
"I will be walking along a beach with water filled to the brim with sharks, and wonder why people aren't social distancing," says Fiona Ramage in Dundee, Scotland. She says the pandemic is now the backdrop of most of her dreams and they sometimes include a "casual, matter-of-fact" fear of coughing.
Sayaka, who moved to the UK from Japan with her family, says her seven-year-old daughter tells her about her Covid dreams. "She mainly 'stays at home'. Only her parents wear masks, and all members of the family wash hands in the dream."
While Mariela Cortés, in Santiago, Chile, says her dreams have taken a more surreal turn. "I even want the animals - cats and dogs - to wear masks, but they don't."
We received just a sample of dreams from our readers, but scientists have been researching the issue for months now. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School in the US, has collected some 15,000 dreams in an online survey of the public.
So far, around two-thirds of the respondents are women and one-third men.
Her resulting book, Pandemic Dreams, focuses on the pandemic's first wave. She says that when it initially hit, many people dreamed about threats like insect attacks or being unable to breathe. Then during lockdowns and home-schooling, a common theme was being trapped in prison or being forced to take a surprise maths test.
However, after about six months, Dr Barrett told us she noticed a significant uptick in people describing dreams about forgetting to wear a mask or being out in public and seeing others not wearing a mask.
Dr Barrett suggests that initial dreams, which tended to express fear of catching the virus, decreased as dreams about social anxiety rose.
"Many dreams became 'I forgot my mask' and a social shame came over the dreamer. They were more concerned about getting out of there before anyone noticed that they had made a mistake," she says.
A number of readers told us they dreamt of scenarios involving social shaming or anxiety.
"I'm in a crowded space, like a shopping centre, and all of a sudden I realise I have no mask. Nobody around me is wearing masks either. I feel in danger and become suddenly extremely aware of people's proximity to me," says Diletta de Cristofarro in Nottingham, UK.
Naomi Harvey in Cambridgeshire says she dreamed about hugging her nephew, before the rules relaxed, and as she hugged him, her family approached and she suddenly remembered the pandemic. "I woke with a feeling of panic at having broken the rules and risked exposing each other to the virus."
And Diana Valk from London says in one dream she mistakenly hugged a stranger thinking it was someone she knew. The person was "horrified... because she was scared of getting Covid and neither of us were wearing masks," she recalls. "My main emotion was embarrassment because I hugged the woman in front of others and she looked so shocked."
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Panthapath, Dhaka.
Survey Lancer is a survey and data science company that helps marketers to connect with their customers by letting them know about their customer's needs, wants and demands.
