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. It started off with me taking a gap year. The first gap year that I've ever taken, where I planned to go and work in the jungle in Mexico as part of a conservation team. I was supposed to be looking after the conservation scientist in a medical clinic. That didn't happen. I ended up going back to do emergency medicine training, but I did have a bit of time before that to do an alternative medicine course in India. I went scuba diving in Borno for a bit. So, I had a bit of fun in my year off. And then I was pulled back to COVID wards from March, which is when actually I started dreaming [laughs].

I've had dreams in the past, but this year has just been crazy in terms of real life but also dreaming life. It's been intense. It's been eye-opening. It's been rewarding at times, and I'm quite happy now in my general practice job, which is taking a little bit of a step back and dealing with the repercussions in the community, because there are so many at the moment in terms of loneliness, anxiety—insomnia is a big one. All of these things which are coming back now and affecting patients in the long term are coming back to general practice. So that's been very eye-opening for me, in terms of what we've been missing out on this year.

I've been thinking about why I've been—people in general are—having such vivid, memorable, intense, sometimes stressful dreams. Initially I just thought it was because everybody's a bit anxious. Obviously, there's a bit of uncertainty about what's going to happen in the future. Nobody knows when they're going to see their family again, or if they're going to go back into the office or to work. So first of all, I thought it was just an element of stress that was causing more vivid dreams for me and for other people.

And then I thought, actually, I have been sleeping a lot more. Not to say that I'm sleeping a lot, but I'm probably getting a normal amount of sleep—maybe, you know, seven hours a night. Whereas before I'd probably get about six hours a night. And now I'm getting seven or eight hours. And I feel well-rested, whereas before I was trying to cram everything in—trying to cram my work in, trying to cram seeing my friends in, my social life. I was drinking in the evening, sometimes having a couple of glasses of wine. And I was thinking maybe that was why—because I was more tired—maybe that was why I was not remembering my dreams so much. Whereas for the last year I've been looking after myself, I've had the time to sleep well, eat well, have a bath in the evening, relax, wind down. And maybe that's why I'm more in tune with my dreams.

I have dreams, which I remember going years back, but very sporadically. Whereas now I'm finding that I will have dreams two or three times a week where I wake up and I remember them, and I try and jot them down. Or, if I don't, I try and at least run through them again in my head, so I don't forget them. Or I go through them with my flatmate. I communicate to him in the morning and say, “Oh, you’ll never guess what I dreamed about last night,” which I think helps you consolidate them as well.

For whatever reason, my dreams have just been a lot more vivid. Not necessarily more stressful—no more nightmares than unusual. Just a lot more vivid.

I have dreams about COVID on the wards now. And I have dreams about being in lockdown. I'm much more by myself in my dreams, whereas before I would be with a lot of other people. I remember being part of the crowd, whereas now I feel very individual in my dreams. I feel like I can't really see other people as often walking around me, and I don't have that many interactions with people. Now I'm more in tune with what I'm thinking in my dreams. Even in my dreams, I'm a bit more isolated.

I compiled a book during the pandemic. It's called National Health Stories, and it is a compilation of stories, poems, diary entries from frontline workers, which is mainly my colleagues. It's all anonymized. Is it okay if I read from the book? It’s short:

[reads]

“Last night I had a dream that I was on the wards, and I had to look into a patient's ear drum using an otoscope (which is the device that you use to look into people's ears if they have an infection or if you want to see the eardrum). I looked down the ear canal and I saw a healthy cervix as if I was doing a smear test, but in the patient's ear. And then in my dream, I woke myself up laughing because I said, “A smear test,” and the ear kind of stood out. In my dream, I told them that the exam was normal, and I woke myself up laughing.”

I will never forget that. And whether I've recreated the memory, I don't know, but I remember laughing so much at it in the morning thinking I've just woke myself up with a quarantine related pun. I just will never forget it. So that was one of the first ones where I thought, my dream life is getting really strange.

I really thought that was real life. When I was walking down the corridor, when I was checking my bag to make sure that I had all of the equipment that I needed, when I was putting on the personal protective equipment. It just seemed I was working on the medical COVID boards at the time. It just seemed so real, that dream.

I don't often lucid dream anymore. I used to be able to here and there, but I haven't in a long time. But sometimes you have a perception that something's not right here, “this isn't real life, this isn't what I do on an everyday basis.” For that one, I just remember everything being so real, as if it was something that I'd just done a few hours before—walking to check on a patient. I think that was the most striking thing to me that I really couldn't distinguish in my dream that it was a dream until the moment I saw the cervix in the ear. I just said, “Wait a second. Something's not real here...” [laughs].

At least it was healthy. At least it was a healthy cervix! And I just got on with it. I said, “Okay, it was normal,” I told my patient. I didn't even feel relieved in my dream that it was normal. I just thought, okay, I've done my job now. I'll just go on to the next.

Speaking to a lot of my friends, it's been difficult to gauge what's normal and what's not. What's a healthy level of anxiety to have. What is a normal level of nightmares or dreams to have. It's really difficult to tell what's normal in such a new situation. So, I think to have dreams which are relatively nice and normal and healthy, that makes me really happy when I wake up. But then again, there's also the other side, where I wake up and I feel very anxious and stressed. [The nightmares] have become a lot more regular since COVID started.

I had a difficult situation at work... I say difficult—I had a horrible situation at work a few weeks ago where a patient died who shouldn't have died. He was 59 and he came in with a heart attack, and I managed him immaculately, but I felt like, had I known he was going to die I would I have put a bit more of a human spin on it? That is what I think. I think in terms of my management. This has been escalated and it's not the fault of mine—he died in the next hospital, which I transferred him to. I think, had I known that this man was going to die, would I have leave said to him, “How's your year been?” You know? “Do you want a cup of tea?” Just something more human.

I've spoken to all my colleagues, and I've run it by everybody. And they've said, “No, you don't have the time to do that. In this situation, you managed his heart attack, you did everything, right. You've transferred him to the next hospital. And then you move on to the next patient. You're not there to say, do you want a cup of tea?” But anyway, that's been playing on my mind for the last couple of weeks. And I've been having dreams that I think are related to that, but not necessarily just about not, not just about work, it's not in a work environment. [But] I can tell that the feelings are related to that. I think it's my body trying to tell me, “You need to let it go. You've tried to do what was best for that patient. You can't always do everything right.” And some of my dreams have just made me feel a lot better about the situation in a really crazy way. I've been quite relieved [by] some of them [when] I wake up. I think that's my body trying to tell me you did what you could. You can't hold onto that forever. You tried, basically.

I'll tell you one [dream], [where] I woke up and I just thought, I don't understand what that was about. It was, again, very real. And I think the more I try and reflect on it, the more I associate it with that experience [of the patient who died].

This is one of the few dreams where I've been in a crowd of people. I love being around people. I used to love going to theatres and being in bustling streets. I miss that about London. And so, I was in a huge hall, like a gym hall. And it was packed in to the point where you kind of can't move, and everybody's in each other's space.

We were all facing different ways. It felt like hundreds or thousands of people. I couldn't see an end to all of the people around me. There was a stage at the front, and somebody was shouting numbers. I couldn't see who was shouting the numbers, but it was somebody up shouting. Kind of like bingo. They were shouting “Eight!” and we would all have to make a big figure eight. As if it was a bird's eye view. We didn't know how it looked from the bird's-eye view, but I could feel like we had to try and make that figure eight. So, everybody started running in one direction. People on the outside were staying still, and people on the inside were trying to figure out how to make the best figure eight.

Then all of a sudden, the number would switch. So, they'd shout, “Eleven!” and everybody was running and then you'd have to stop and think, “Okay, where am I now? How do I best join onto people to make the best figure 11?” I remember my dream thinking, “Okay, when you get to the end of a point where you think you should be changing, do you continue with that crowd of people that's already started the momentum or do stop, and you try and make a change in that direction?” And I remember in my dream thinking, “Okay, well, if I can continue with the momentum, it's not going to go anywhere. The figure's going to be really, really deformed. If I try and change direction, then who knows what's going to happen, but it's worth a try.” And in my dream, I remember thinking, “Right, I'm gonna try. I know that it's coming to the end of the point where you need to change. I'm gonna try it.” And I just remember it was chaos. It was absolute chaos, and nobody was following me in my dream, and I woke up, and I just thought, “Okay, well at least I tried.”

And I just thought, that's such a strange dream, but I wake up thinking, “Okay, it didn't go the way I wanted it to go—that strange pattern—but at least I tried to do it. At least I did what I thought was right.” I felt that immediately. And then I thought, surely that can't be the gist of the dream. But, actually, I think that it was my subconscious trying to tell me that “Actually, you tried, you tried and it doesn't matter that didn't go the way that you wanted it to go, but you tried your best, even if it was chaos.”

It's about teamwork, but then also standing up and saying when you think something's not going the right way and making a change and being kind of being brave enough to do that. You even, if you think, “Oh my God, I have no idea how this is going to go.”

Eight is my favorite number. I'm not surprised that that was the first one that I heard. I know that there were a few more numbers. So maybe if I'd written them down in the morning, maybe I'd win the lottery [laughs].

My patients have been coming to me with dreams. But you know, if a patient comes to you, then it's not because they're having a good day. It's because they've got a problem. A lot of them are coming to me with recurrent nightmares, but mostly just sleep troubles and insomnia, which means that a lot of people aren't dreaming at all.

I feel like I'm blessed to be able to get into that stage of sleep where I not only have [dreams], but also, they're long enough that I remember them. Given the levels of sleep disorders that I've seen, I don't think a lot of people are even capable of dreaming. I'd be really interested to hear what people are dreaming about, but my time hasn't permitted me to go into that with my patients yet. Maybe in the next few months when I get on top of everybody's sleep and everything starts to settle down

I know that sleep medicine is up and coming now. I had to refer my first patient to sleep medicine a couple of days ago. Before it was something that just didn't even exist.

One night I had a nightmare about my cat because [that day] we'd taken my cat on a walk on the lead because it's not used to the area. It was quite new at the time that we put on a lead, and it tried to escape. It just tried to run away. It's a 17-year-old rescue cat. Mr. Pink. But we caught the lead, and it was fine, but it was really stressful for me. And I thought, “What if the cat runs into the road?” You know? So that day I was quite anxious, and I thought I've got to take better care of the cat.

So that night I had a dream, which is the only dream I've ever remembered about the cat. And in my dream, my cat was a stroke patient that I'd been looking after on the ward. It looked like a cat, but in my dream, I knew that it was this patient who I had been caring for who stuck on the ward as a stroke patient. I woke up and I was in tears. I was really, really upset. And I wrote it down in my diary and I thought, I'm not going to tell anybody about this because they're going to think I'm crazy.

And literally that morning I went into the kitchen and said to my family, “Oh, hi, how are you? How did you sleep?” And [my flatmate] turned around and said, “I had the first dream that I've ever had about the cat last night. And we took it for a walk.” And I thought, no way. And then I told him, and he just thought, “Oh my God, we need to spend less time together!” [laughs].

It was so strange. I didn't know you could synchronize dreams. That's not something that I've ever heard about it. It wasn't exactly the same dream, but we were both trying to take the cat walking in the dream. And we both dreamt about the cat that night. It was really odd.

The cat ended up just coming into my life just by chance. And I've been really lucky. I never saw myself getting a pet here because I love to travel. I see myself moving around a bit after my general practice and emergency training. So, it's not something that I ever thought that I'd get, but they were really struggling to find a home for him, and I thought I'm going to be here for at least another few years. I'm not going anywhere this year. And then I've got my training. And I've always got friends around that have fallen in love with him so much that they've said, “If you do you want to go and travel anywhere, we'll always look after him.” So, yeah, I've been really lucky. Maybe that's the reason that I have good sleep – because I've got something purring next to me.

This is my house now, and I've been able to design it, and I've just been having so much fun decorating it. I've just got the kitchen and bathroom done. And I've been watching interior design shows with my flatmate. So, in my dream last night, I dreamt that it was the house of my dreams. And it had been designed in the way that it was huge. It was a mansion, and it was in the middle of nowhere. I remember somebody showing us around, and I was with my parents, and it was the house of my dreams.

I remember my mom saying, “Oh, no, I don't like it.” We were going from room to room, and I was like, “Oh mom. But look at that.” It was all very dark. It was all a bit morbid. I wouldn't have a house like that. It was all very dark and, and sinister. A bit Gothic. I like bright decorations. It's not my dream house now that I look back at it. But in my dream, I remember thinking “This is my dream house. This is amazing.” And my mom there going, “I don't know. I don't know. I'm not too keen on it. I don't like it much.” And then we got to the garden—and I'm digging a pond outside at the moment—and we got to the garden, and there was a huge pond there and it had loads of goldfish and it was just lovely.

There was this creature pinging around the pond with the goldfish. And it looked like a cross between a frog and an axolotl. It was a bit squished in the face. It was definitely an amphibian, but not an amphibian that exists. I've never seen anything like that. But it was pinging around the pond. And I thought, “Oh, what's that? That's interesting. I've never seen anything like that.” The guy who was showing us around said, in a really patronizing tone, “Don't, you know? That's a sprat.” And then it jumped at me, and I woke up.

And I just thought, I wonder if it's because I've been thinking about this interview today. I just thought, I’d like to know a bit more about that creature.