HAVE YOU HAD WEIRD LOCKDOWN DREAMS, TOO?
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
I did a recent Instagram poll and 86 percent of people who responded said that they have had some weird dream lately too. I knew I couldn’t be the only one! I looked into it a litte and it turns out quarantine dreams are quite the phenomenon.
Here’s an article from The Guardian talking about it:
So You’ve been having weird dreams during lockdown, too? By Poppy Noor
Since the worldwide coronavirus lockdown started, many of us have been having vivid dreams. Google searches for “weird dreams” have doubled since this time last year, and there is a spate of articles on the topic, that seem to be asking: “You too, huh?”
I asked the psychotherapist Philippa Perry to explain this phenomenon. “Normally our dreams are processing ancient memories, or things that have just happened,” she says. “We have so much more to process right now in terms of experience and feelings.” Most people who claim they usually don’t dream do – they just can’t remember them. So pandemic dreaming could be as simple as people remembering dreams more often, due to being in a new situation.
Is there any point in analysing your pandemic dreams? Perry says it is useful to be curious, particularly if they are bothering you. “The Gestalt method [suggests] every aspect in your dream represents a part of you because you dreamt them,” says Perry. So you could analyse your pandemic dreams from the perspective of the other objects and characters in your dream: the person chasing you perhaps, or from the perspective of your tooth that keeps falling out.
Perry adds that in sleep, we often dwell on unfinished business: “I tend to think all dreams are on our side, even the nightmares, because they are trying to tell us something we can get done.”
So what do these weird dreams of yours look like?...
I’ve had some pretty strange dreams for sure.
Off the top of my head, I woke up extremely mad at my boyfriend about a week ago because, in my dream, he had a party at his house during the pandemic with exactly 27 people. Another time I was attending an intergalactic art/engineering/magic school where we were suddenly under attack and I was the only one who could defeat whoever was attacking us (?). Finally, I had a dream where I was living the same day over and over but we were in hiding in China and I was the only one that remembered every day, meaning my boyfriend would not remember the day-- sad-- and I was also the one who had to figure out how to fix it all. Again (?).
Some of you all reported weird dreams including: Characters from a current Netflix show shouting exam answers at you, and being trapped in an empty grocery store and all the shelves were empty
One particularly amusing dream I read about in the Boston Globe included Bob Dylan wearing a Celtics uniform coming up with the cure for COVID-19 while Abraham Lincoln sews face masks. Because of course.
I like to think it’s all just our imaginations working in overdrive because our physical realities are so limited right now, but who knows if that’s a real thing.
Stay safe my friends! And start writing down your dreams! Maybe you’ll get some inspiration for the next great action movie franchise, or just learn something new about yourself.
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