[My dream life is] really vivid. It's always been pretty vivid and often quite extreme. The content of the dream doesn't always have any relation to how I feel about the dream. Like the emotion doesn't always match up.

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.

A few years ago, I started recording the dreams when I woke up in the middle of the night before I would lose them. I sleep in quite a fragmented way, so I will often wake up. I don't always switch the light on when I do this because I feel like it's better just to kind of catch it. It's not necessarily about writing it down really neatly. It's just about trying to catch it in that moment. But I definitely noticed from the pandemic that things kind of escalated, so I brought the first six months of dreams. [Holds up stack of sticky notes] Yeah. [It’s] quite a stack. A lot of anxiety is being played out there, I think.

It seems to be common—a lot of people have been experiencing quite vivid dreams. That was common for me anyway. That didn't feel like a shift, but definitely the volume—and also, some of the content—has changed. Normally I wouldn't remember this many dreams in such a short period. And I also wouldn’t normally have them all noted down.

I also found that there are some common themes. I often won't experience my dream in a pandemic form, like, I won't be surrounded by people wearing masks or something, but midway through the dream, I will realize that I'm in an environment that would be unsafe for COVID purposes and so I'll have a big panic. I'll suddenly realize that I'm in a room with some of my close friends or I'm on a train and nobody's wearing masks. And then [it] will have like an extra layer of anxiety on top of whatever's already happening in the dream.

Dreams about trying to escape something. Dreams about doing things wrong. Dreams about poison. Dreams about people close to me dying. And a lot of dreams of guilt over some of these things. A lot of intense emotions come out in my dreams, but I feel like that's definitely escalated. Just to pull out some random…this is from quite early on:

[reading]

“A man who asked us to kill him. So we did, flushed the body away. Now the prince has asked questions. He comes into my locked room at night, finds a screwdriver in my luggage. The fear that I will be imprisoned here forever.”

The next one just says, “Allergic to dinosaurs, petrol station.”

Sometimes when I reread them, I can also remember the feelings or remember more details. I remember being, like, “Oh, no wonder you didn't know before that you were allergic to dinosaurs, because it almost never comes up.” It felt like a revelation. It kind of goes back and forth between like more extreme and, yeah, there's a lot of like death: [reads]

“A church, but it's also a hospital. There must have been a terrorist attack. Children lying covered in blood. Their classmates lying with them, saying it will be okay. The church is so large that elsewhere teenagers are graduating. The Dark Ones go down a spiral staircase to the basement. I am dressed like one of the others, but still feel eyes on me.”

Sometimes I can't read what I've written very well [laughs].

Sometimes I am aware that I want to write a dream down, but I'm not able to wake myself up enough to do it. Normally if I try and do it in the morning, it will be gone. So, I try and just retain as many of the elements. Sometimes it's the story of the dream, but sometimes it's just a feeling of the dream. I usually try and make it brief enough to fit on one [note]. Sometimes it's on two, if there's a lot. It's quite important to me that it be something that I can do in the normal rhythm of my sleep – that I'm not causing myself more stress in terms of going back to sleep afterwards. So that's also kind of why I don't switch the light on.

I think I've been probably doing it in this way for about four years, although it started with just the odd one, when I would wake in the middle of the night and be so struck by an image or by something that had happened in the dream. I would think, I don't want to forget this. And I would keep paper by the bed anyway, for the kinds of thoughts you have when you're falling asleep. But in more systematic way—I think that that probably started about two years ago.

But as far back as I can remember, I've dreamed in a vivid way. I guess you never know exactly what other people's experiences are. I remember being struck when I would tell people these elaborate and surreal and violent dreams and they would say that they didn't experience it in the same way. I think it's quite often to do with what you remember rather than what you're dreaming.

I read a book about sleep a couple of years ago, that mentioned that one of the theories about dreaming that’s it’s a way of processing strong emotions. I've really tried to use that to reconceptualize my own feelings towards my dream life. Because it can sometimes be quite distressing to have a lot of nightmares. Even before the pandemic to have nightmares quite frequently and alongside the night terrors. So, I find that if I can think about that in terms of like, “this is my body trying to do this work to protect me.” However true or not that is, I find it's quite a helpful way to be like, okay, I've just had a really distressing dream about someone I love being murdered, and lots of dramatic things happening. But instead of keeping all this inside me, I'm kind of moving through some of these feelings. And especially in the past year, which has involved like a lot of kind of shifts, big events, big emotions—for me, the changes that [have been] made in terms of kind of isolation: being able to see people, a precarious work situation, and the uncertainty of the future...

One thing I have noticed in terms of how things have changed is that as things have gone on in the past six months, I've had fewer night terrors than I would normally expect. That's been quite surprising. Still loads of vivid and violent dreams. I wondered if that is partly because my environment is very predictable at the moment. The night terrors will quite often happen when I'm in a strange place or unfamiliar environment. So that's something that has massively reduced, I think.

Something that's been quite nice over the past month or so is that I haven't been waking up as frequently. I've maybe been sleeping more deeply, and so I have written down fewer dreams and remembered fewer dreams. Even though I'm a bit sad that, comparatively speaking, I don't have as much of a dream journal. But on the flip side, it just feels like perhaps things in my brain or to do with dreaming are finally calming down a little bit.