Ruby

I've always dreamed, but I'm not one of those people that dreams every night. I'm a little bit jealous of those people. But I have always enjoyed dreams, and I never understand when people are like, “Oh, there's nothing as boring as listening to other people's dreams,” because that is literally the most interesting thing to me. I love listening to other people's dreams. I love talking about my own dreams. Maybe that makes me boring! [Laughs].

[My dream life] is quite surreal a lot of the time. It depends on what's happening in my life at the time, I suppose. But my dream life is kind of like the real world, but then strange themes will come through, and things that aren't quite real, which I guess is kind of just dream logic in general. But I find that when I wake up, I can't always explain why things were like that in the dream. And it seems to be this dream logic that exists in your subconscious. I often wake up and I go, “I don't understand how the geography of that worked.” But that's just what it was like in the dream. You can explain a lot away by being like, “...dream logic.”

They got a bit more intense in lockdown. I used to have anxiety dreams, but they were like, I couldn't push the buttons on a phone. That used to be my typical anxiety dream: I couldn't dial 999 to call for help, or I couldn't dial my mum's number in order to call for backup. Or your hand moves in slow motion.

I stopped having those dreams in COVID, and started having these quite intense dreams that had these themes of anxiety running through them. But weren't my typical anxiety dream. I didn't normally dream about things like aliens, but I would start having these alien invasion dreams, which is quite out of character for me. Aliens had had invaded the world, and the only people that were safe were archeologists. Everybody had to become an archeologist. I don’t know why: dream logic. You were only safe if you're an archeologist. But the archeology schools had cottoned onto this. And they were trying to weed out people that didn't really want to be archeologists and only allow the true archeologists to study archeology. Somehow, I had managed to trick them. There was a sense of me having pulled one over on the authorities, getting them to think that I really genuinely did want to be an archeologist. And all these hoops that you had to jump through in order to be safe from these aliens, which I suppose when you think about it, is probably quite a straightforward metaphor for feeling unsafe from COVID.

Before COVID, there was an answer, and I couldn't get to the answer. I needed to call somebody, and I knew that if I could do that, and it would solve the problem. Whereas in the new dreams, the threats are a lot more amorphous and unclear. It will be the threat of something coming to get you, or the way that they appear in the dream is different. An ongoing striving to make yourself safe from things. And there isn't an answer anymore. Before whilst I did still have some surreal dreams, a lot more of them were based in the real world. I would dream that I was having a fight with my friend, or I would dream that I was trying to escape from a crime. Things like that. They were more known. The threats feel quite different [now].

I started keeping a dream journal before lockdown. I was doing a project with my friend, Laura. We were doing a podcast about creativity, and we would get challenges from people. And one of the creative challenges was to keep a dream journal. We had two separate people who suggested that. Harry Pierce from Pentagram Design suggested it, because he keeps a dream journal. And Gary Lockman, who is an author and a musician. He suggested that we keep a dream journal, too. So, I'd started to keep this dream journal before we went into lockdown. Most of those dreams seemed to be about things like going to meet this girl. This girl started appearing just before lockdown in my dreams. She's turned up in several dreams, and it was just as COVID was starting to be in the news. She's not a person that I know in real life, but she has come up in several of the dreams. She's this character who is quite similar to my best friend from childhood. She is this companion figure who appears in the dreams. She's not a pleasant character, but she's not horrible. She's not a villain in the dreams, but she is this companion who will take me on journeys.

There was one dream I had where we were walking through a village. I was with this girl. In my dream, it seemed perfectly natural that I was with this girl. We hung out all the time. She's a kind of best friend figure, I suppose, but she only appears when we're going on these strange adventures. We were invited into somebody's house, and they had a tunnel in the cellar. We were like, “Oooohhh, tunnel. That sounds kind of exciting.” And the man said, “You can explore if you want to. But nobody knows how deep the tunnel goes. It might go on forever. And if you do go in, beware of the bones, beware of the long bones.” There's a sense of dread. For some reason, we were going to go into a tunnel, which in waking life, I would definitely not do.

If a person was like, “Come into my house, strange women, come into my house. Come into my cellar. There's a tunnel that goes on forever. Why don't you go down it?” No, that would be a silly thing to do. But in my dream, I was totally fine with that. That wasn't the problematic thing. The problematic thing was that there were bones and the tunnel, and there was this girl with me, and every time we go on these adventures, she sort of plays this strange companion who is there but not helping me.

There are bones everywhere [in the tunnel]. It's implied that they are animal bones, but there are definitely human bones [too]. The explanation on the surface is, “Oh, they’re just animal bones, probably left over from ages ago.” But the long bones are human leg bones. They started appearing further down the tunnel. You become aware that there are human bones in this tunnel. I wake up before I find the end of the tunnel.

It was an uneasy feeling. I know before I go into the tunnel that the man saying “Beware of the long bones” probably means that there are human bones in there. And I am partly interested because I'm like, “Why are there human bones in there?” And I’m partly frightened. And partly, I know why there are human bones, and there are human bones in there because it's an endless tunnel and people have starved. There's a point beyond which you can't come back because you've traveled so far into the tunnel, and you'll die before you get out.

I wanted to be an archeologist when I was a little kid. That was what I thought I would grow up to be. So maybe it's to do with this kind of like, dreams from youth and things that, that you wanted to do before. Maybe it's connected to that rosy idealistic view of the past. I dreamt this just before pandemic, but we were just starting to hear about it. In a way, we were about to go into a tunnel that we don't know where the end of is.

The other thing that I keep dreaming is kissing people. It's not romantic kissing. It's like kissing my friends. There've been a couple of dreams where I've kissed somebody and then they're really shocked that I've kissed them. And I'm like, “Why are you being so weird about this? It's just a friend thing,” which in my dream makes total sense. It's not a sexual thing. It's not even a romantic, emotional thing. It's just something that I've started dreaming about. And maybe that's because we're all locked away and human contact is quite taboo at the moment. And the idea of going around and kissing your friends is just a million miles away from what you should or could be doing right now. And maybe there's an element of like my brain just being like, “We don't have that anymore. Let's put that human contact, let's put that into your dreams.”

There's been a lot more dreams about death. I've dreamed about speaking to people that have died in the last year. I dreamed that I could contact them and speak to them. They were weird and quite disturbing those dreams because the conversations were so normal. All the normal things are strange and all the strange things are normal.

I had this boring conversation with this person that had passed away and I'm sure it was just my brain trying to kind of like process. You would think if you were having a dream about a grandiose subject, like being able to contact the dead—and there's so much ritual in dream before we get to that stage; my friends have magical powers and we can only do it if we work in a three and all of us have to put in our element and then I will be able to speak to the dead—but then when I get through, they don't say any of the things that I was expecting them to say. They don't say anything reassuring. They're just confused as to what has happened.

That was such a disturbing dream. Partly because my friend had passed away. And then having that conversation where I wanted a reassuring message. When people pass away way, a lot of people talk about these dreams where they visit them, and they say reassuring things. You know, “I'm, I'm safe and I'm fine.” And I was sort of expecting that. So, to wake up and have this conversation that wasn't terrible, but it wasn't satisfying... It was worse than if it had been dramatic in any kind of way. If it had been dramatic in a positive way, where it's like, “I'm totally fine. And everything's great.” Or if it had been like, “Everything's terrible,” then I think I would've been able to kind of assign it as “Nah, dream.” But because it had this element of reality—it felt like a real boring conversation—it was ultimately more disturbing.

I couldn't tell my friends who also experienced this loss. I wanted to be able to tell them, “Oh, I had this dream, and everything was fine. They told me that they were okay.” And I couldn't. And that was horrible. That was very isolating.

I quite enjoy talking about my dreams in general. I mean, obviously the one I just spoke about that was connected to my friend's death was distressing, because it was a very affecting and because I haven't talked about it that much. I felt like I had to not talk about it to save the feelings of other people. So, that's the first time that I've really talked about it in any depth. I sort of mentioned it to one of my friends and they were like, “Oh, of course you were dreaming about that because you are feeling helpless in this situation, and you haven't been able to help. And so of course you're creating this dream where you can do something.” I was not sure that's what the dream was about, but other than that, I haven't really spoken about it.

The dream itself is sad because it's connected to this real-life event, which is the death of a friend, which is obviously upsetting, but talking about my other dreams, isn't upsetting. I find them interesting. It's funny talking to somebody else about it because they see themes in your dreams. It's funny when you start to see patterns and things.

I started collecting dreams in the pandemic for an art project. It’s called The Fever Dream Journal and we take the themes out of the dreams. Anybody can send a dream into the website. And then my friend is writing this piece of sci-fi based on the themes that come out of everyone's dreams. He’s the last human on earth, and all the other characters are robots. And because of that project, I've been looking at the themes of the dreams of friends.

I think there certainly is something about pattern and connection, and trying to make sense of things that don't make sense. It does feel like it's something that connects us. Those themes that are coming out of dreams make me feel close to you. When you're far away, when I'm not seeing you, and we've dreamed about the same—that feels like a connection. It feels like more than the kind of connection that I can get through Zoom, or on a telephone call. It feels like there's something that is really connecting us if we dream about the same thing. Or if we're feeling the same, or we have the same themes in our dreams.

Maybe it's just more socially acceptable to talk about your dreams now. It used to be considered a bit off to talk about your dreams. I always love hearing about people's dreams. But maybe it's just more socially acceptable now, because it's something outside the same existence that we're all living. We're all living these lockdown lives. And maybe it's okay to talk about your dreams because of the pandemic.