I don’t know if you’ve been having more intense dreams during this pandemic, but I know I have. Every night is an adventure. I may be trying to stay home during my waking life, but in my dreams I’m all over the place.

We were lucky enough to have time to include some stories about pandemic dreams in our new collection, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Listen to Your Dreams. And you know how we always say that your dreams can reveal your truths to you? Those truths you are too busy to pay attention to during the day when you’re distracted and you can’t listen to your subconscious? Well, take that situation and compound it by the intensity of pandemic dreams and you get some pretty powerful dream guidance.

Here are previews of two of my favorite pandemic dream stories about how you can use your dreams for personal transformation:

Dreams can reunite you with your past.
During the COVID-19 lockdown in Germany, Sergio del Bianco found that he was dreaming of people he hadn’t seen in years. In his story "Just in Time" Sergio had repeated dreams about a woman named Gwen who had been kind to him at a part-time job he held in college many decades ago. He became fixated on finding her, figuring she must be in her nineties by now.

After a prolonged Google and Facebook search, he found Gwen’s daughter, who arranged a phone call for him. Sergio found himself crying tears of joy as he talked to Gwen and told her how much she had meant to him. A few days after that phone call, Gwen’s daughter called to say that her mother had quietly passed away in her sleep, and that it seemed like she had hung on just long enough to hear from Sergio.

Dreams can change your behavior.
In the story "What They'll Remember" Holly Rutchik found herself dreaming a lot during the COVID-19 lockdown. In fact, her stress dreams about the coronavirus came so early that she and her husband voluntarily self-quarantined with their five children days before their schools shut down. Holly kept dreaming that she was looking in the bathroom mirror, but the woman looking back at her was an “other me,” a slightly different version of Holly. This mirror person kept telling Holly one word: “Remember.” Holly kept noting the dreams in her journal, writing, “Remember WHAT?” She was frustrated by the dream, and by the new reality in her household as well, one in which she was trying to manage her five children’s education and her full-time job, all remotely. Her husband was frustrated, too, and they were both snapping at the children.

That’s when her husband, who didn’t know about her recurrent dream, said, “In these moments, I need to remember how trivial the things that upset me really are.” And with that, Holly knew what to do. She was making memories for her children, and she would remember that every day going forward, and also try to make this unusual time in their childhoods a good memory, with dessert every night and parents who were open to having a little fun along the way.