Social media reveals population dynamics of dysphoric dreaming

Nightmares disrupt sleep health and predict future psychiatric diagnosis, yet reliable population estimates and their fluctuations over time are difficult to obtain. Here, we observe an increase in dysphoric dreaming shared on Reddit immediately following the World Health Organization's declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. This "digital dream surveillance" approach might offer the field of sleep medicine a low-cost and real-time system for monitoring population sleep health.