One person tried to stock up on broken biscuits at the supermarket with a couple of children’s TV presenters, only to be pursued by an angry mob. Another accidentally tore up all of the artist Jasper Johns’s work, before being chased out of the exhibition by an enraged 80s dance troupe. A third climbed into a plane to escape a collapsing building, realised there was no pilot – and decided he could just hide in the toilet.

These are just a few of the vivid dreams people have been having during lockdown, according to a research project by an independent group of postgraduate psychoanalysis students in London. The group, Lockdown Dreams, is asking people to fill in an online survey about the dreams they are having at the moment as part of a project to “collect” dreams and analyse how the Covid-19 crisis is being experienced “unconsciously”.

So far, the most common trend people are reporting is richer and more detailed dreams than usual – a sharp contrast to the monotony of daytime lockdown. “Everyone’s quite shocked by the fact that they’re having incredibly vivid dreams. That’s so interesting because our material waking lives have become, in a way, more dull,” said Jake Roberts, a spokesperson for the group.

“But this is being reflected in a more vivid dreaming life. Our minds are obviously reaching out to try and make something from the little stimuli we’re receiving being locked down, and bringing up things we’ve completely forgotten about.”

Respondents are also recalling their dreams more often, he said: “It seems to be a universal thing, that people are remembering their dreams more than they normally would.” This may be a consequence of changes to routines and sleep patterns – and with no commute or school run to do, there are fewer reasons to spend the mornings rushing about. “We generally don’t think about how we’re thinking and feeling, but perhaps, at the moment, we’re being more reflective,” said Roberts.

With that extra reflection has come a greater-than-usual ability to recall the detail of dreams, he added. “People are remembering very specific aspects of the dreams, like smells, emotions or places. And they are able to describe buildings and scenery, which is something we are not usually able to do.”

In other words, he added, people are “living” in their dreams. “They’re experiencing their dreaming world as they would their waking world.”

Dr Nick Blackburn, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, says his patients are also reporting more vivid dreams since the lockdown began and remembering them more often. Breaking the rules and being punished by others is a recurrent theme. “One patient said, ‘I dreamt I was caught having sex in a cubicle at my favourite restaurant. They gave me a lifetime ban and I was so distraught I wouldn’t get to eat there again.’”

These people may be suppressing irrational thoughts that the lockdown is a punishment for a mistake they made or something bad they did. “We all think the world revolves around us. It’s like when a child sees something traumatic – there’s a tendency to think: it’s my fault in some way,” said Blackburn.

Several of his patients have dreamed about empty shelves in supermarkets and being unable to get their bodies or their houses clean. Others have had anxiety dreams about blocked toilets and drains. “I think we’re all feeling a bit overwhelmed,” Blackburn said.

At night, he thinks, the unconscious mind is having to do more work under lockdown: “A dream can offer a possibility of putting into words something that the dreamer might want to put into words. Either they’ll wake up, and the dream will have done its work... or they will wake feeling disturbed. And then I’d invite them to be curious about what it is that has disturbed them.”

Natasha Crowe, a psychotherapist, recently set up connected-together.com, a free telephone and online support service to help people who need someone to talk to during the pandemic. She says that dreams have come up a lot in discussions with clients. “They’ve had really vivid, weird dreams about trying to run away and trying to escape. Which makes perfect sense during the lockdown,” she said.

Crowe thinks people are feeling a lot of fear at the moment – and that can manifest itself in many different ways. For example, she says, people are experiencing dreams that are similar to thrilling TV shows. “It’s like the dream is Killing Eve, and you’re in it,” she said.

Roberts’s group has also noticed that a lot of the dreams being reported have a “filmic” quality. “I feel like people are watching a lot of Netflix. The characters that appear are often actors or celebrities and there’s a sense in the dream of being the protagonist in their own film,” he said.

Narratives that involve secret missions and spying are popular. “There have been quite a few that have been just like a James Bond film. They get the girl and they defeat the bad guy – except the bad guy is someone strange like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Surprisingly few nightmares have been reported, but more than 90% of people who have taken part in the survey so far have reported waking up feeling anxious. Roberts says dreams are often taking place in or near supermarkets, or involve shopping. Many also involve being pursued in the dream or running away from something, or the dreamer suddenly discovering they have done something wrong or unacceptable. “These are typical anxiety dreams. It’s very pedestrian stuff in that sense, but it’s acted out with such vivid imagination, it becomes very strange.”

The good news for anyone who is already tired of having such vivid dreams is that the phenomenon may not last. “In general, humans have an amazing capacity to become accustomed to any situation,” Roberts says. “So at least tentatively, we could say that this incredibly vivid dreaming might start to wane after a while as we get used to this situation.”

The group hopes that if people share their experiences, they will feel less alone with their anxieties. “I have submitted a few dreams of my own to the survey,” says Roberts. “And I know it has helped me, being able to write my dream down and say how I felt about it. The act of remembering a dream is itself a way of cognising something. It’s a way of processing what’s going on that many people wouldn’t usually have.”