I live in East London, but I'm from Birmingham, originally. So migrated, I guess, to live in London. I'm married, 39, lucky enough to have our own home. So, don't share it with anyone else or anything like that. I'm employed full time. I've been really lucky throughout the whole pandemic that my work hasn't been affected. I've had to switch it pretty much all to virtual.

I've noticed that my dream life has become a lot more mundane and less surreal [during the COVID-19 pandemic]. It almost seems like an extension of the day. A lot of people [are] appearing in the dreams that I haven't spoken to for years and years. People I went to school with. It feels quite surreal and very measured. Nothing particularly exciting. [But it’s] quite strange in terms of revisiting things from the past. Maybe it's things that have been allowed to just drop away. There's not been any conflict or anything like that. I guess that’s what's interesting: it's things that have just drifted away through time, but then resurfacing and becoming very realized now, and present.

I’ve started [to be] much more aware of my dreams now and there's not a lot going on in them. I wonder why I dreamed about just having an everyday experience with that person that I went to school with and haven't spoken to in 15 years. I feel like there's something about the environment we're in now that's being reflected in the dreams.

I think there's something about a lack of stimulation at the moment. It is really interesting, ‘cause I'm finding that certain things that I'd really enjoy previously, I don't make as much time for, now that the days seem like they're all merging into one and quite repetitive. I think there's probably something about the space. You've got to let your mind kind of wander a little bit. But it doesn't feel like it's trying to be creative or explore things. It just feels like it reflects the environment that you're in.

I used to travel quite a lot. I'd be up quite early in the morning in the car traveling. So now I'm getting a lot more time to sleep consistently and the same hours.

The other strange thing I've noticed as the pandemic has gone on is that lockdown has become almost normalized in the dream. I think initially it was kinda like, “What is this thing? How long is it gonna last for?” I think people thought it was gonna be over pretty quickly. And now it actually seems to be like, almost like a theme within [dream life], or it seems to be like the normal setting within the dream.

Recently, I've had a couple [of dreams] where I was trying to do something, and it became really, really laborious and difficult, but what I'd call very real. I was trying to book some time off work, and I was having to go through the computer system, and it felt really, really detailed, and there [were] all these reasons why it wasn't happening.

Another one that kind of stands out quite recently was just a dream that it was a normal day. But we were in September 2021 already. It was dark nights. There's nothing really exciting going on. Very kind of realistic and very mundane. The dream had been so real that I woke up and I was like, “Ah, better start thinking about Christmas now,” and started planning. It kind of took me a little bit of time to be like, yeah, it's February.

I got married in September, 2019, and we joke that we should be having a five-year anniversary ‘cause the amount of time we spent together, both working from home and stuff like that.