DAYS FORTY - FORTY-EIGHT 18/04/2020 - 26/04/2020
Hello, again!
I was humbled and surprised that so many of you sent messages of concern, following the last few days of radio silence. There is no cause for concern, I just felt that after forty days (and forty nights!), I needed a short break - particularly from the overwhelming daily consumption of news. So, for a week, I spent my mornings enjoying lengthy breakfasts, without scrolling through the headlines from around the world, exercising, reading and (of course) baking. Did it do me any good? Apart from breathing a little easier, I don’t know that it did: over the course of the week, quarantine continued to be mentally and physically frustrating, paid work continued to prove elusive, several hundreds of people still died every day and I still cried because I miss my friends sorely.
One significant difference this week, however, was that my dreams became much more vivid - and considerably more bizarre - than usual. Instead of pouring my thoughts onto a page and sending them out to you all each day, they simply rattled around the walls of my mind, like a pinball machine, manifesting in strange and macabre forms. I dreamt of violent deaths, police investigations, feeling threatened, trapped, suspicious and helpless in all of them. Friends became enemies, ex-partners appeared, and my beloved childhood dog featured in most of them as a central (talking) character. I was, understandably, alarmed to wake up from these dreams and nightmares, so decided to find out if anyone else has been experiencing the same, lately. They have.
The New York Times reported that this “perennially popular” question has been posed online “with increasing frequency” in recent weeks, quadrupling in America alone. They argue that this is due to the “surreal reality of American cities and towns” which mirror “the half-remembered approximations explored in sleep, by the same pliable, foggy logic”. They go on to say that Harvard Medical School psychologist Dr Diedre Barrett “has been in high demand lately” and that she confirms the recent rise in weird dreams; a survey she conducted on this topic concluded that people are having “ a ton of bug dreams”, and that “tidal waves are common, as are monsters.” While she discovered that healthcare workers and those suffering from Covid-19 were experiencing acute, vivid dreams related to their daily lives which meet “the usual criteria for what we call acute trauma”, the rest of us are more likely to dream up “less realistic” scenarios, she said.
The Guardian’s Poppy Noor also interviewed psychotherapist Philippa Perry for her recent article ‘So You’re Having Weird Dreams, Too?’, with the latter confirming that “we have so much more to process right now in terms of experience and feelings”. Perry encourages readers to analyse their dreams and be curious about them: “I tend to think all dreams are on our side, even the nightmares, because they are telling us something we can get done”, she says. Dr Nick Blackburn, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, agrees with Perry:
“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 I’d invite them to be curious about what it is that has disturbed them.”
Noor quotes readers who dreamed of water in various forms, while fellow journalist Donna Ferguson cites an online survey called ‘Lockdown Dreams’ which revealed that participants are frequently dreaming of escape. Spokesperson for the group, Jake Roberts, also noticed a “filmic” quality to respondents’ dreams, in which celebrities appear (another regular theme of mine, lately - no doubt a result of those Netflix binges), as well as things like spying and being pursued or running away from something.
One thing these dreams all seem to have in common is their vivid nature: they are “richer and more detailed” than usual. People also express surprise at being able to recall these dreams so well, which Roberts puts down to the contrast in our “dull...material waking lives” during lockdown: “our minds are obviously reaching out to try and make something from the little stimuli that we’re receiving being locked down”, he says. Ferguson writes that “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.””
So I’m not going loony yet, then. But just in case, from time to time, I’ll be voicing my thoughts and recording my daily experiences (and perhaps dreams?) with those of you who would like to read them. I’m very grateful to you for taking the time to read, share and comment on this diary: it has already been such a cathartic and eye-opening process, so thank you for encouraging me to keep it up.
I hope everyone is hanging in there - and having sweet dreams.