Claridream: Taking Back Control with Lucid Dreaming
It has now been a year since COVID-19 changed the lives of people across the globe. This unprecedented phenomenon has affected every aspect of our society, with serious social and economic repercussions that have led to higher amounts of stress, anxiety, and depression amongst all age groups and genders.
According to a report done at the height of the pandemic by the Bureau of Economic Research, over 16.5 million people in the U.S alone filed for unemployment on April 4th, 2020, and it was estimated that a total of 20 million jobs were lost by April 6th, 2020.1 As the unemployment rates increased, as did the number of individuals experiencing declining mental health.In a survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), adults experiencing job loss during the pandemic were much more likely to develop difficulties with their mental health in comparison to those who did not experience the loss of a job, whether it was their own or someone in their immediate family (53% vs. 32%, as seen in the figure below created by the KFF).
Not only has the recent economic crisis caused by COVID-19 created a negative impact on people’s mental and physical health, but also the staggering loss of life on a global scale, which occured in the short span of only a year, has only added to the already universal feelings of dread and despair. The overwhelming number of deaths, which currently has reached almost 600K in the U.S alone, has only contributed to the nightmare-like experience that has been living a full year with COVID-19. In the graph below, we see just how the numbers of those struggling with their mental health has increased by a drastic 30% since the first half of 2019.
While the research done thus far regarding the emotional effects of COVID has focused mainly on the increase in mental-illnesses such anxiety and depression specifically, there is still another common trend (amongst all adult age groups) that has been addressed in these studies by professionals: the drastic deterioration of people’s sleep.
In this same report done by the KFF, difficulty sleeping (or in some cases a complete lack of sleep) is one of top side-effects of this COVID-19 experience amongst adults. A KFF Health Tracking Poll was done in July of 2020 where 36% of adults reported a negative impact on their overall quality of sleep.2 This was closely followed by 32% of adults reporting a decline in their eating habits, and 12% saying they’ve seen an increase in their alcohol and substance consumption.3
In a study done at the beginning of the pandemic by Deirdre Barrett, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School, the correlation between dreams and the current state of the world was made. In her research, Dr. Barrett discovered that her subjects were experiencing more dreaming in general during the pandemic than pre-pandemic.4 There was also a separate online survey (not a part of Dr. Barrett’s study) of 3,000 Americans was completed where 29% of the subjects reported that they were recalling more dreams than before the pandemic started.5 There is even research from other countries such as Finland that once again show the trend of deteriorating sleep and increased dreaming. In this case, 4,000 Finnish dreamers were surveyed regarding their dreams, and the results of the survey showed that 55% of the bad dreams were directly related to COVID-19.6 In the graph below, we see a more detailed visual of the different sleep inhibitors people have had throughout the pandemic, and how the presence of these inhibitors, whether it be because of nightmares or because of a simple inability to stay asleep, has created an overall increase in sleep deterioration.
What makes Claridream separate from other supplements of its kind is its ability to keep one in a state of REM sleep for a longer period of time, subsequently allowing for a larger dreaming window (as shown in the graph created by Claridream shown below). Furthermore, unlike other popular dream inducing supplements on the market such as dreamleaf, you only have to wake up once during the night to take two pills instead of having to wake up twice to take two different colored pills (as in the case with dreamleaf).9 Who wants to have to wake up twice when Claridream only requires you wake up once? The less interrupted your sleep is, the better.
