I’m not from London. My parents are from Vietnam, and I was born in Birmingham. I'm a terrible sleeper with crazy vivid dreams.

My dream life has always been varied. I have a history of sleeping quite terribly—I have trouble going to sleep and then also staying asleep,so when I do have a dream it's quite strange. But I really enjoy writing them down. I carry a dream journal to make note of them if I do remember them. Sometimes I have lucid dreams. Sometimes I sleepwalk. Sometimes I sleeptalk. So, it's a bit all over the place.

If I'm having a nightmare or something, I try to force myself awake. That's part of lucid dreaming. Sometimes I might be asleep for four hours and then just be up all night. Or [I’ll] be up all night and then sleep for a couple of hours and then have to wake up. Then sometimes my dream feels like they've happened for a very long time. But I've only been asleep for a couple of hours.

If it's a good dream that I can be lucid throughout, it just feels like part of my day already. And then I get to explore weird and wonderful things, like going to work on a skateboard as my mode of transport. I had a really funny lucid dream where I had moved into my place and I dreamt that one of my friends was cleaning my living room, but completely naked. And I'd had this conversation with them, just kind of jokey. My lucid dreams take place in quite real settings, or they have real people in them.

I did have a lucid dream once where I ate ice cream and it was just really like a normal day with a few friends. And then my mom came into it and then everybody started talking Vietnamese in my dream. That was fun. But then some of the really terrible dreams that I might have, I try to force myself awake. Like, “I know this is a terrible dream. I want to wake up.”

I feel like my dreams are becoming more surreal in a way, but I think maybe that's because I'm so contained in my very familiar spaces, whether that's my flat or whether there's I have a very specific route where out (like out for a walk). Because my life is punctuated a lot by movies that I watch or things that I'm reading—I have very vivid imagination as well—that kind of escapism is like feeding into my dreams as well and making them really surreal. I've dreamt a lot about things that happened when I was really young. A house that I was living at when I was growing up in Birmingham [that was] completely distorted, or work life and personal life being all intertwined together.

I had a dream I was experiencing something really hard at work. I’m also very aware that my internal life has an effect on my dreams and my sleep. I had a work issue going on. And then that night, I dreamt that everyone I worked with was living in my house that I grew up in, in Birmingham. And then I had, like this fight with one of my teammates, and I was really upset. I was going downstairs in the middle of the night to get food or something. And in the kitchen there were massive, cheerleader-like dancing rats. They were dancing cheerleader-like. They had like, an orchestra. It was so crazy. All these pots and pans were everywhere. It was just a circus. And I was just watching them eating ice cream and applauding.

My real life and work life are all melting in together because I don't think that I'm being stimulated apart from my immediate thing. I'm not going on travels or things like that to expand the visual vocabulary inside my mind. Then the people that I see really feature a lot into my dreams. So, like my friend who I dreamt was naked in my dream, just cleaning. But then I also will end up dreaming about people I've seen on TV, too, like, celebrities. Gweneth Paltrow was one after I'd watched a lot of Marvel series. She definitely came up twice.

Those dreams that I remember are always the ones that I tell my friends, and that helps me remember. I keep a dream journal. Sometimes it's just a sentence or it might just be a feeling. I have also noticed that I've been sleepwalking a little bit more. I didn't really know that I was a sleepwalker until quite recently. I've sleepwalked a handful of times in my life, but I feel like it's starting to become more of a thing. I sleep with a Fitbit. If I do a weird amount of steps, I'll know.

There was this one time last year when we had gone into lockdown, probably around November, I had this night where I was sleepwalking and I was getting ready for work, but I obviously didn't leave my flat. I just stayed within the confines of my flat. And I could tell when I woke up that I was trying to get ready because I'd moved my bag and I'd got out clothes. Nothing really untoward. I have woken up once when I'd slipped on a pillow. I've woken up because I needed to protect myself. In that one, I was chasing these babies. I was getting out of bed to find all these babies and pick them up and stop them from running away.

I one dream where my friend came over to my flat with a huge salmon and was like, “Well, let's have sushi.” They had really cool sushi knife and sushi chef skills. And we just had sushi in my flat.

Because we haven't been able to go outside because of the snow, I think the dream me, the sleep me is like, “I still want to go outside.” So, it's trying to walk out. Which is scary in a way because I would hate to wake up outside my door and not have keys and it be snowing. I do think it is probably internalizing a lot of stress, any anxiety about work or personal life.

I was over stimulated by everything that I was watching, everything I was reading. I couldn't shut off. And when I did shut off, when I did manage to sleep, I wasn't actually shut off. I wasn't able to go into that deep or REM sleep, that kind that relaxes you. I think that might be a reason why I started sleepwalking a lot more.

If I remembered something very vividly, then I’d write it down. Or I’d tell my friends and then my friends were like, “You should definitely keep a dream journal.” I know I should probably look back and think about them or notice patterns and stuff, but I feel like that's very much suited to how I am as a person. I like planning. But to improve my sleep and get out of some of these bad sleeping habits that I have, it's the kind of embracing that uncertainty. I'll probably get there when I'm in a better place with my sleeping to kind of look back and be like, “Well, that was really messed up.” But for now I'm just going with it every day as it comes and see how it goes every night.

I've always been really interested in dreams through psychoanalysis, Freud. I have an art history background. I've been always really interested in the surrealists as well; René Magritte is one of my favorite artists. They were so interested in automatic thinking, and they created such amazing art using dream like scenarios that were quite lucid, but also had so much meaning. So, I kind of come from this academic side, but also this personal side where I have such crazy dreams.

I am very aware that they are part of some kind of computing inside of my brain trying to piece together things. But I know it's much more of a restorative aspect. I feel like it should be quite restorative in your sleep. A dream should be helpful in helping you analyze those abstract feelings that you wouldn't be able to like [understand] in real time scenarios. That's where my interests lie. Sometimes I do imagine if I was sat down in Freud's chair, he would probably have such a field day. I'm so repressed. Obviously, like, the dream self and the real self are so different. Your real self is your learned, socially acceptable self. And then your dream self is all this chaos trying to be trying to be heard and felt. I think capturing dreams is also about capturing feelings.

If I dream of my friends, I like to tell my friends that I’ve had a dream about them. And it sparks often really funny conversations, but it's also that kind of spark for conversation, right? Like, “What did you dream about?”

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. So many other people are going to interpret it in their own personal ways. It starts to feel like a fable or like a fairy tale. I feel like your dream landscape can be so wild. It doesn't necessarily stick to the rules of life.

I have a very familiar anxiety dream. When I’m feeling really anxious it usually crops up as a recurring [dream]. It's me in a body of really dark water. It's like those images of oil spills, like oil on water. And then I start drowning in the dream, but obviously I can breathe still and I'm being pulled in and I wake up. Sometimes my ex-boyfriend appears next to me trying to reach out. Very familiar tropes. It took me a while to figure out; why am I still having this bloody dream? And then I was like, “Wait, it's because I'm really anxious about something.”

Then I also realize it's a very familiar scene: Titanic, Harry Potter [and the] Goblet of Fire. It's a very familiar scene in movies. So that must be why it's stuck inside of my brain. It is all very interesting to piece together how I’ve managed to put myself in it. When you do talk about it out loud, it’s a case of being vulnerable, but also seeing where these different aspects have played into your mind or fed into your dream landscape.

They're definitely telling me something about myself. It's a very personal fairy tale. I don’t know what Freud would say about me. Or Carl Jung. I think they’d have a field day with me.