Pinny & Iris

Pinny: I live in Hackney, which is east London. I've pretty much lived here all my life. I'm married. I've got two children. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I've always wanted to be a filmmaker, ever since I was very young. My mom said to me, when I was very young, “You should be a filmmaker because you dream really lucidly.” I've been able to tell people the whole story, almost like it's a film, lots of different shots and things happening. My daughter's inherited this from me. She can recall everything she's dreamt about. She lucidly dreams, like me. She can tell people in her dream that she's dreaming, and sometimes change what happens, like, have some control over the narrative, which I think is quite rare.

She's always been like that ever since she was really young. It's funny because I feel what my mother felt—when she wakes up and tells me this incredibly complex rambling story, and I'm too exhausted. My husband, who's an actor and has a great imagination—he's fantastic, he is a great storyteller in his own profession—he doesn't remember any of his dreams. Neither does my son. We are just very different. I can't imagine not being able to remember that I dreamed.

It's quite nice in a way, because I know when I go to bed every night that I can escape from my life and be in a completely different place. It's like watching Netflix for the evening, but I have it all night. I had one of those watches that tells you about how well you slept, and apparently according to [the device], I sleep really badly. It's so strange because I feel fine. When I wake up, I feel very groggy, sort of angry and annoyed that I've been pulled out of this world. Irritated. My body's feeling groggy and not comfortable when before I was feeling great in my dream. This watch says [I] don't sleep deeply. And I was like, well, maybe I do sleep. I have more REM-like, dream sleep than most people. Maybe I don't sleep well because of the amount I move. I don’t know. [The watch] thinks that I have very little deep sleep. I don't understand the science of it, but, I was really annoyed by this watch. I stopped wearing it, because I thought that it was raining on my parade. Because I really, really, really like sleeping.

I've got children who are 12 and 9, and it took me ages to dream that I had children. In my dream world I was not a mum, for a very long time. And then they started to be in my dreams more. It was almost like the first 30 years of my life were more formative in terms of my dream space than the life that I’ve had since I had kids.

The same has happened with the COVID dreaming. It’s only now that I’ve starting to dream about lockdown. Sometimes I'm in my dream and somebody says something, “You can't do that because we're in lockdown,” or, “We shouldn't be here; there's too many people.” But it took a while for that to happen. My dream space was a lovely place because it was an escape from that reality. It's not always the case. The dreams come in every shape and form. But I have noticed that [the pandemic] has started to be—annoyingly—part of my dreams.

My whole work life has been disrupted, [and] my husband's work life. He's a theatre actor, so he can't be on the stage anymore. I can't go out and film people, or do workshops, or do anything that I normally would do. Everything's had to go online. I would say that it started to creep into my dreams since the recent lockdown.

My mom lives around the corner, and she lives on her own. She's 72, and we weren't allowed to see her, and she's been a big part of our lives—looking after the kids and stuff. So, that was quite traumatic for us. Then in the end of summer, she would come and sit out in the front garden. But the whole weirdness of not being able to be with your mother is quite wrong, isn't it? Not to be physically close to your mother? I started worrying about her loneliness and not being touched.

But I had quite a fun dream, and I told her about it. I said, “I dreamt that you had a massive party with all your neighbors, who are all quite old as well.” They're not the sort of people to have massive parties, but they all decided to have this enormous party. And mom was doing the Lindy Hop, and kind of going crazy, just making amazing cocktails. The whole of her garden was full of people of all different ages. It wasn't just her older friends. It was everybody, and everyone was having a lovely time. I guess that was wishful thinking, wasn't it?

I've dreamt a lot about touch—hugging and being with people, really close. I think my brain does make up for that lack of being with friends and being in contact. My dreams tend to be about touching. I know it sounds weird, but you know sexual dreams—you have dreams about an ex-boyfriend or someone that you shouldn't really be fraternizing with. But in your dream, of course you disappear into a cupboard with them or something ridiculous. You don't even fancy this person anymore, but the point is, it's something illegal. So, your dreams are things you're not allowed to do. My dreams tend to be in scenarios where we just go, “Okay, let's do it. Let's just cuddle or be together.” You wake up thinking, “Oh, I wish I could do that,” you know?

I had a dream in which we were in igloo. I was with my good girlfriends. There was a fire in the middle of the igloo, and a hole in the ceiling. It was really cold, and we were drinking cocktails. It was quite fun. It felt like a mini break. I remember the snow coming through the hole and coming onto the fire, and we kept on trying to keep the fire going. We were all in a circle around the fire, and we got closer and closer to the fire because we were just so cold, and started touching because we were so close to the fire. We were in this circle, and the fire was really hot, but my back was very cold. And it was like “I don't know how to get comfortable in this situation.” And I thought that was a really good [example] of what I feel generally, like, how do you make social situations comfortable now? It was distracting me from enjoying being with them. In order to get warm, we had to snuggle in close, which we weren't allowed to do. I had this mask and it kept me slipping off and I kept pushing it back on. It was quite a stressful dream, and it should have been fun.

I've had quite a lot of dreams about horrible nightmares about disease and things like that. I've had quite a lot of dreams about changing my life completely and [going to] study sciences. I dreamt that, that I decided I was going to retrain to be a doctor, which is the most absurd idea ever when you're 42, you've got no A levels or any exams in any sciences. My degree is in anthropology. I'm an arts person. [In the dream] I had like all these biology textbooks. And my children were a bit younger in my dream, and I was having to put them into after school clubs so that I could study. Of course, the exam-anxiety thing is common in dreams. But I woke up feeling quite disappointed in a way, because I was quite excited by the idea of doing something completely new. I just felt, like, my life is the same every day at the moment. And I was desperate to have an adventure and try a new thing. I woke up thinking, “42 isn't that old. You don't have to be a filmmaker for the rest of your life. You could just be something completely different. Why not? You know?” I sort of feel a bit annoyed that I've only got one life and that at the moment I'm being made to do the same thing every day, and I've got no choices. I actually love what I do, so I don't want a new career, but I think that was about me having an imaginary new beginning or an imaginary adventure. I think that is something that we were all missing.

I had a dream that I was pregnant. I quite often do. I've got two children and I'm aware that I'm the age now where it is the last chance if I was going to have another baby. 42 is probably like the last chance I could safely do that. At the moment, I have quite a lot of dreams about having another baby. In my waking life, I don't really want another baby. But again, it's that thing of having a new thing. I had a dream that I was pregnant and I gave birth, and it was a massive toddler. I said, “So what's your name? Because you can speak, you can make up your name. You can tell me what your name is.” And he said, “I don't want a silly name. I just want an ordinary name, like Thomas.” And I was like, “Well, then, your name is Thomas.” I don’t know what that means, but it’s this idea of kind of giving birth to a new thing and then it being fully grown. I don't know what that was about.

I think it is me trying to process the fact that the seeds I put in the earth are already quite big. Like I don't have to be anxious about trying to start something new. I think it connects to the dream about doing a medical degree. Like, “Your life is already in a good place. You don't have to start fresh.” Maybe that's what that's about. I do think that the whole COVID environment is making us feel like there's some kind of full stop and that we are going to start a new thing when it's over. There's a lot of talk about life can never be back to go back to the same. After it's over, there will be a new world or something. I think that's quite a common kind of human way processing disaster.

[Iris joins the conversation]

Iris: I dream really embarrassing things happen, and I lucid dream all the time. Every time I say, “Oh, I'm dreaming in this,” everything freezes, and I just fall out of the dream and wake up.

Pinny: But do you control it?

Iris: Most of the time I can control it, but like, sometimes I can’t control it. It's usually the same sort of thing, but with different stuff in it. A lot of the time it's about school, but school that’s mixed up with lots of other things that have happened in the day. I have a lot of dreams about my classmates. It's weird because we look younger than we actually are. I have a lot of those dreams about my classmates and I have a lot of dreams that I'm younger again. Or older. I don't have many dreams where I'm my age.

Pinny: Do you ever dream you're a boy?

Iris: I always dream that I'm a version of me. But I hardly ever am me. I'm always a version of me in my dreams. And it's usually in first person, but sometimes I do have dreams that are like movies. They're really fun. I love those dreams. Sometimes it's a scary movie. Sometimes it's a funny movie and you like, see yourself, and weird things are happening and stuff.

Pinny: But it's really good that you've got that thing now—you know, when you're scared, you just wake yourself up. I developed that as well. And that really helps you be less scared when you go to sleep. I used to get quite scared when I was a child, because I thought, I don't want to go to sleep because I'm going to go into a different world and I'm going to lose control. Because my dreams were so intense. You used to have that, and you’d get scared before you went to bed, and you’d say, “Oh, I don't want go to sleep. I don't want to go to sleep.” You’d resist it.

Iris: It's a form of not being in control, but being able to control your dreams and being able to know that they’re dreams—not being scared that they’re real life. It's just good to know that they’re dreams.

I've noticed that there's more dreams [since COVID began]. A lot of dreams where you're doing stuff with other people, but then you have this feeling that you're not doing something right, [because] you are doing stuff with other people. The night before last I had this dream, we were like, running around the streets with a bunch of other people. A bunch of relatives that I didn't even know. I didn't see their faces. A lot of the time, if I need to make up a new character in my dream, they don't have any eyes. Their eyes are just blurred out. Just not there. And you see the back of their head. There was people in boats on the road, and just weird stuff like that. But like you are subconsciously viewing that, like, oh, what you're doing isn't right. Because, you know, you're not allowed to be in groups. You don't know the word COVID in your dream. But it's just something that's there.

I usually do have [relatives in my dreams], but they’re different people. There's something really weird about them. You know they are relatives, they're familiar, but you don't know who they are. I've had a lot of them like for some reason, you know, because since COVID you don't see someone for a long time and you see them, it seems so weird because you really know them and it's good to see them, but they feel like a stranger again, you know?

I’ve had these two dreams where I'm in this virtual world, but I'm the actual human in the virtual world. I can feel myself taping the keyboard on the iPad but I can't take myself away from it. I can't look around to see what's behind me because there's nothing, there's just a screen. There's nothing around that. You can't move your head.

I always know their dreams. My entire school was in Minecraft, but we weren’t learning stuff. We were just like doing normal Minecraft stuff. And one had Minecraft skins. They were just there.

Pinny: The children are now on screens a lot more. It was really interesting to me that you dream inside a virtual world now. Because what was that one you dreamt about being a teardrop?

Iris: You know all the games where there's like a funny little character? It was like we were like a bunch of tear drops in a robot-y kind of style. But like the tear drop were not realistic, but very well cartoon designed. And they had, there was like a bunch of domes, like dark blue domes. The sky was white. It was bright, white. The floor was like a grayish blue. And then there was like these dark blue domes with little holes that you could walk through. I remember I was with one of my classmates, Bob, and we were like, using the same computer, but I could tell I was there, I was in the world. It was like a mix. It was less in the world than the last dream, the Minecraft dream. I could tell I was typing, but I couldn't look away from it. There wasn't even the edges of the screen, you couldn't see that it was a computer or an iPad or a laptop. But you could tell that you were in that dream

The tear drops might be something random, but because it did look quite lonely, and when you went up to someone in the dream, they were like, “Oh, I think that's you from real life.” But like, you don't call it real life. You don't see it as real life. You see it as something else, the dream world or something. I think it's because you see these other people, they have like their online stuff, online names and online characters. Like when you play Minecraft, they have a different name tag. And they look different to how they do in real life. And you're constantly competing, but you know who they are.

Pinny: It's trying to make sense of all those different identities that you are interacting with online. Because your whole social life and your whole learning environment is in those spaces, and your whole play environment. And it's really hard to shake that off when you dream, because that's been your whole day in some ways.

Iris: One of my dreams was that, for some reason, me and mum, we had to have some surgery so I could go back in the womb for some reason. And I was back in the womb.

Pinny: In my womb?

Iris: Yeah, in your womb. It was so weird. I was like a child, but I was tiny.

Pinny: But you had to go back inside mommy.

Iris: I had to go stuck inside you because it was really—

Pinny: Did you know it was about lockdown, though?

Iris: Yeah, it was about lockdown, because like, you have to go back into it. And for the second lockdown, you have to go back into it, you know? Or the third lockdown. And I remember it actually got repeated many times. Like I got put back in.

Pinny: How did you come out again?

Iris: They pulled my head.

Pinny: Oh, they pulled your head.

Iris: They pulled my head out and then I just like, whoop! Like that.

Pinny: And then what was it like when you came out?

Iris: When I came out, it was all suddenly really bright. Like everything was really bright around and nice. Pinny: Were you happy when you came out, or sad?

Iris: I couldn't tell. I feel like it was normal. Like, a lot of people had it, and it felt like it was my turn to have it. Like, it was a treatment that seemed like normal, like the flu vaccine. Like everyone had had to do it some at some point.

Pinny: [Laughs] But was it comfortable inside there?

Iris: Well, in the dream, the whole point was I had the same figure, but I was tiny. I was like that big [gestures]

Pinny: So, you weren't a baby?

Iris: I wasn't a baby. I was a child!

Pinny: You just got shrunk.

Iris: Yeah. I was the same proportions as a child. It was really weird. And I remember at the end of the dream, at one point, I just did a loop de loop for the final one. I was like, whoop! And then I saw the light, and then I woke up.

Pinny: Out of the vagina? [Laughs].

Iris: [They] put me in, and they just took me back out again. I'm not sure what that was about. I think the ones where I was inside was about lockdown though. But I just got pulled back in, and then pulled back out again.

Pinny: It is strange, because I think that in our home, under lockdown, we do feel completely safe. And you feel really safe here in this house with us. Of course, every now and then we go out.

Iris: It was just really weird. I could hear myself crying. I sounded like a baby again, like a baby cry.

Pinny: So, you couldn't speak or communicate?

Iris: I could communicate, but I had a baby's cry, you know? It was like, ah ah ah. Like that. I had that cry. It was so weird.

I'm pretty sure there was something before that, like we were camping in our garden or something, which I'm pretty sure is related to lockdown. We were camping in a garden before, but I can't quite remember. All I remember is being put in the womb again. That's all I remember.

I do remember my dream last night. I had a dream that I was grown up. Like, you know how I talk about the baby? But I was small. I was like that big [gestures] but I had the same proportion. I still looked the same. I hadn't changed my voice. Nothing changed. And then suddenly I was a completely different person. And then there was these houses, but inside the houses, there's a different—like, you know, in games where you go inside the house and there's different loading screen?

Pinny: It's interesting because Iris is 9. Nearly 10. I think you are going through growth spurt at the moment. You're eating lots of potatoes. Every day.

Iris: I love potatoes.

Pinny: And you love potatoes right now. I mean she's eating twice the amount everyone else is. And so obviously having a growth spurt. And I think you are probably just getting used to this idea of this body that's growing really big.

Iris: I don't know. That's maybe something to do with it.

Pinny: It's a strange thing, because children don't stop growing just because it's lockdown. They don't stop changing and learning.

Iris: Like you said, this lockdown doesn't stop spring coming.

Pinny: There's certain realities of your development and the world is changing. You can't stop those things, which is nice, in a way.