Photo: Anne Grange, used with permission of The National Covid Memorial Wall.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of dreaming. By the spring of 2020, when stay- at-home directives were in widespread effect, social media began to be filled with new hashtags: #lockdowndreams, #coviddreaming, #virusdreams. Even mainstream media outlets began reporting on the global increase in vivid dreams, which seemed to be prompted by anxiety about the pandemic.
There had been studies documenting the way extreme events can produce a widespread change in the patterns of dream life, but as Tore Nielsen noted at the time, a “dream surge” of such magnitude had never been seen before. For one of the first times in living memory, the whole world seemed to be dreaming about the same thing— albeit unevenly. The pandemic became a worldwide dreaming event.
In February 2021, the London Museum (UK) commissioned the Museum of Dreams to gather testimony from people living in the British capital about how the pandemic was affecting their dream life. A public call went out and people responded in overwhelming numbers.
We formed a small research team, which included members from Birkbeck University’s Department of Psychosocial Studies, as well as Canadian clinicians. After the first round of interviews, which took place by video call, we realized that dream life was serving as a crucial venue for helping people make sense of what was happening. Dreams were providing a kind of attentional prosthesis—a way to look at the strangeness of reality (rather than our usual mode of looking through it).
During the pandemic, dream life became one of our principal technologies for processing the meaning of this global event as it unfolded and one of our primary venues for managing the uncertainty of the time.
A handful of these testimonies were featured in the first season of the Museum of Dreams podcast series, Guardians of Sleep.
Audrey
“I've been an insomniac all my life. I've had nightmares all my life. It's always been a very difficult relationship with sleep and with my dreams. They were actually the main reason why I started therapy four years ago, because it was very difficult to continue living when all your nights are filled with weird monsters and disturbing images.”
Brett
“I've noticed that my dream life has become a lot more mundane and less surreal. It almost seems like an extension of the day. Maybe it's things that have been allowed to just drop away.”
Eve
“With the dates of some of the dreams that I've managed to remember or keep, they seem to be at the beginning of each lockdown announcement or around it. I think that's part of it – because you know that you're going to go back in. You're not going to have as much freedom, and you just have no idea when this is going to end.”
Hang
“I do feel like talking about a dream is kind of like opening yourself up to being vulnerable, especially if the dream was a nightmare.”
Ishani
“I’m a medical doctor. I’m training in London to become a GP with a special interest in emergency medicine. So, I've had quite an interesting year. I was pulled back to COVID wards from March which is when actually I started dreaming.”
Katie
“The dream was that there were people breaking in. Some sort of strangers and they broke into next door from the balcony and sort of smashed down the window and started having this huge party. That was a dream where COVID existed because we knew that it was wrong for them to be having this party with ten of them or whatever in the next door flat.”
Kavita
“I actually have had a lot of dreams about concentration camps and things like from the past. I dunno why those dreams have been coming up. A lot of dreams about survival. I had a dream once where I was really struggling to survive. And I had to really think on my feet. And it kind of linked in with the whole pandemic. We are trying to survive the pandemic. We're thinking about rationing. We haven't heard these terms in years and years. And now we're talking about rationing again, and we're talking about long queues.”
Lucy
“I have a lot of nightmares. I also have night terrors sometimes, which will be quite separate because I will have my eyes open and it will be as if I'm awake, but there's something laid over my surroundings. Those come with really extreme feelings of dread and terror.”
Ruby
“There's been a lot more dreams about death. I've dreamed about speaking to people that have died in the last year. I dreamed that I could contact them and speak to them. They were weird and quite disturbing those dreams because the conversations were so normal.”
Maggie
“No one talks about their dreams. Most people find it very boring to listen to other people's dreams. Of course I say, “oh, I had this dream last night” and then you can see whoever you're talking to is trying to be nice but they're really bored. This is actually very nice to talk about dreams. It would also be nice if I can rid of them this way. So maybe by just talking about them tonight I might have a happy dream.”
Maya
“One of my most recent dreams was visiting apartments in London. I was so stressed. I couldn't find anything. I went into a flat and Robbie Williams was the tenant/agent. And he obviously was very drunk, and the house was in a terrible state. And I thought, “Oh, not another one like that.””
Pinny & Iris
“One of my dreams was that, for some reason, me and mum, we had to have some surgery so I could go back in the womb for some reason. And I was back in the womb.”
Shelley
“It was so vivid. It took me back to a time I hadn't thought about—I mean, I'm nearly 60, so I hadn't thought about that for a very long time. Even now, I can see the images flashing past in a film. I've got very good memory, but I would never have remembered that. It did really hit me that somewhere in the depths of my memory are things that I don't even know that I know. If I was in a pram, I couldn't have been more than two.”
Henry
“I take my dream life quite seriously. I am interested in the link between madness and everyday life, and especially the ways dreams serve as a bridging experience, allowing madness to visit you in everyday clothing.”
Eva
“I started having these dreams where I realized I was with other people, in a public place or whatever, and they were not wearing masks, and I was not wearing a mask.”
Jane
“I've had dreams about, of birds being killed by a plague. Beautiful birds that are dying off because they're catching a virus. The birds were very large and very ornate with wonderful long feathers and very brightly colored. And they were in skies and along rivers, but they were all dying off very rapidly.”
Peter
“The most important aspect of my dreaming is that it's always frustrating. I'm in a frustrating position when I'm dreaming. I lose things, or I'm lost in a town. Sometimes I have really exhilarating dreams where I get a lot of inspiration, but it involves my past life.”
Janet
“Apart from the pandemic, general themes are often to do with control. I was a university lecturer for many years. I still dream that I'm invigilating exams.”
Kathrine
“I miss travel desperately. In the last year, the furthest I have traveled is 20 miles. If you compare that to 2019, I went abroad five times. This feeling of “I can't go anywhere.” I miss the technicolor of London. I miss the whole wide world outside. In my head, I'm going to these places.”
Sunil
“In the last week I've had strange dreams about having Japanese manga-style cartoon haircut. A normal person with kind of cartoon hair: really crazy spikes going on and stuff. My lockdown haircut is nice and trim.”
London research team: Foteini Aravani (Curator, London Museum), Sasha Bergstrom-Katz (Birkbeck), Katherine Fry (Birkbeck), Rebecca Greenslade (Birkbeck) Amber Jacobs (Birkbeck), Lara Joannou (SickKids Hospital, Toronto), Sharon Sliwinski (Western University), Sharon Tugwell (Birkbeck), Chris Vandervees (St. John the Compassionate Mission, Toronto)