I've been working at home for about ten years. Before that I was a translator, then a journalist, then a university lecturer, and now back to a translator. I've always had a very lucid dream life. I've been keeping a sort of a diary, I mean, not of everything, but of dreams that seem to me to be significant. I have lots of very busy, quite intense dreams. Most of them fade away within a minute or so of waking up. But I do have an extremely colorful dream life and often I can see things that have happened during the day. And there are also a few recurring themes.

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. And when I'm invigilating these exams, the students won't listen to me. They won't keep quiet once the exam is started. They will talk to each other. They'll walk around the hall. That's quite a regular one, even though I've been out of academic life for ten years.

I'm a lifelong non-smoker, I didn't even experiment [as a teenager]. And yet I do dream quite regularly that I'm smoking, and it's always a very pleasant sensation. And then there are dreams prompted by not crises, but things that call my attention in my life. Without going into a long spiel, I left academic life because I was bullied, and the bully appears occasionally, but that person is always quite nice to me in my dreams.

I always see it as a kind of housekeeping overnight. I've had a few dreams that seem to me [to be] very linked with the pandemic, and that's what I've been keeping a diary of them. The usual rubbish has gone on as well, but it seems to me that the dreams have had three main themes. And I see them as being interlinked.

One of them is travel: going on a journey, but a journey that's rather fraught or rather uncertain. The second one, which is linked with that is doing actions that are in some way irrevocable. I've interpreted that as putting yourself in a situation that might expose you to a risk of infection from COVID. And the third one—again, it's linked with the journeys—is unfamiliar territories and timetables. The intensity is not unfamiliar, but the content and the themes that I've picked out do seem to me to have changed. And they bear some relation to the, the trajectory of the crisis over the last, almost a year now.

I did my first degree in Edinburgh, in Scotland. In this dream I was going back as a student, but I was older. I don’t how old I was, but I wasn't an 18-year-old student. And I fetched up to the place where I was staying, which was where I lived in my very first year as a student. And I was shown to my room, and I was unpacking, and I realized that I had either lost or forgotten to bring the piece of paper that had my timetable on it. I could not find this timetable.

Then the dream switched to the next day. And I went off to walk to the university. Now, I know Edinburgh, so I knew roughly where I was going, except that the layout of Edinburgh didn't seem to be what I knew. But I thought, “Well, that's okay, I can orient myself by Edinburg castle.” I don’t know if

you've ever been to Edinburgh, but the castle is a massive building set on a huge rock that dominates the centre of the city. I thought, “Well, that's all right. I can just head towards the castle.” But the castle kept disappearing or I would have to go into a tunnel or an underpass where I couldn't see the castle anymore. And when I would emerge, it was further away than it should be. I was walking away from it instead of towards in. And the only way I can describe it is it was shimmering. It had turned into the kind of fairy castle that you see before Disney films. It had changed its location, and it had changed from being this massively solid structure to something much more ethereal. And that was where the dream ended.

We've had successive lockdowns in the UK, and at this point it looked as if we were going into yet another lockdown, which in fact we did. The vaccination program had started, but there was uncertainty about the timetable. People were supposed to be getting their two doses three weeks apart. And then the government said it doesn't matter if it's 12 weeks before the second one. So, the timetable component was there. And the end goal was looking further and further away. Would you ever get out of lockdown? That's how I interpreted [the dream]. Why it was in Edinburgh, I don't know, but it was a long dream. It seemed to go on and on, especially the bit where I was looking for the castle. It just seemed to be marking [the] complete uncertainty of where I was going.

Other dreams have involved transport trains. There was one early on, I fetched up at a railway terminus that was familiar to me. It was the Euro Star, the train that you go from London to either Paris or Brussels. I put my suitcase on the train, and then I stepped off the train, and the train went off with my bag on it. And a lot of this dream was: “How am I going to get it back? Who do I ask? Will it get destroyed at the other end? Can they get it back to me?”

That seemed to me to be a dream reflecting anxiety about whether you you've dropped your guard in terms of protecting yourself against the virus. I've been very, very cautious about not putting myself in the way of infection.

There were a couple of other dreams where I was coming under pressure from people to do things that I was reluctant to do.

I know that these are significant dreams because they stay with me. There's a lot of rubbish that I dream and that's gone within a minute or two of getting out of bed. But I flatter myself that I know when a dream is significant, and these are significant dreams. I'm able to think about them, remember them, write them down. And they have all been around times when the pandemic—in this country—has reached a particular point or something particular is happening. It's not just the grind of day to day. It's when there's a new government announcement or things are taking a turn for the worse, or when we have been locked down.

I've always been a news junkie, and it was really quite addictive, or compulsive to start following the news. I think a lot of people have that experience. I was hanging on the daily figures and listening to news bulletins several times a day. There's a news program on the radio between 10 and 11 at night. And I would quite often go to bed and I'd have the radio on and it would run for an hour and then switch off. So, I'd be going to sleep with all this stuff kind of coming into my ears. I do relate that to what was going on. And the uncharted territory has made me—and lots of other people, really—quite anxious. So, I do feel quite secure in saying they are connected. The word dialogue is a good way of putting it.