In normal times, I'd say my dream life is generally… I have quite an active dream life, but nothing of any particular significance, nothing that would make me think the next day. Just normal dreams, in a normal time.

When the pandemic first started—so, going back to March, 2020—it became extremely vivid, and I was having very unusual dreams. And then I contracted COVID fairly early into the epidemic. I started getting symptoms on the 26 of March, and I was really ill for about three weeks. Not in hospital, I was at home, because it was right at the beginning. Nobody really knew what was going on and I wasn't even tested at the beginning, so I didn't even know if I definitely had it or not.

And then as I started to recover, after maybe a week or so when I started to get better—so, middle of April—I started having really, really bizarre dreams. I said to people it was like I was on an acid trip at night. I had one dream in particular that stood out to me, which even now is really, really clear.

Very clear, and I can remember it.

And then as the pandemic went on, particularly in the UK, we un-locked, and things started getting back more to normal from June. And my dreams tailed off. I'd had really vivid dreams during the lockdown, but since that, nothing much was happening. And then we locked down again here at the end of December. And since then, my dreams have just gone mad again, and I'm having two or three dreams a night where I'm waking up and writing them down because they're so bizarre that it's very unusual. I dunno what's going on.

I had a dream that I was observing my mother. She was in what looked like a supermarket. And at the front of the supermarket was a coffee bar, which is quite unusual. I think. We don't really have many of those here. My mom looked young, and she was with my aunt. And my aunt also looked young, and my mom and my aunt are both still alive. My mom is 80, my aunt's 90. But they looked young. I was sitting up high. My image is of looking over something. It was like a silver metal bar going across in front of me. So, that was my dream, and it was extremely vivid.

The next morning when I woke up, it struck me. As soon as I woke up, I was thinking about this dream and I had to tell my mom about the dream. I needed to tell someone about it. And then I remembered that the supermarket was a supermarket that we used to go to when I was a little girl. That would be in the 1960s. It was a long time ago. And I thought, I dunno where this has come from. So, I got in touch with my mom, and I told her about the dream. And she told me that it was true. There was a supermarket where we lived in Finchley, which is North London. It did have a coffee bar in the front. She did use to go with my aunt—the aunt in my dream—to the coffee bar. And they would leave me outside in my pram, because I was a baby, and in those days, you could leave babies in prams outside the supermarket. In 1962, I think it would've been. And my pram had silver handlebars.

I haven't thought about that place in my life. I can't even remember the last time I thought about it. It doesn't exist anymore. I never even knew that my pram had silver handlebars, but it must've been a dream that jogged something in the depths of my memory, and I can still remember it. My aunt and my mom were so delighted that I remembered them. That I also remembered them young. It was really incredible.

It was so vivid. And it was so unusual. And in a way, it took me back to a time I hadn't thought about. I mean, I'm nearly 60, so I hadn't thought about that for a very long time. And it just stood out so much in my mind. And I still, even now, I can see the images flashing past in a film. I've got very good memory, and I would say I've got almost a photographic memory, but I would never have remembered that. It did really hit me that somewhere in the depths of my memory are things that I don't even know that I know. If I was in a pram, I couldn't have been more than two.

The only reflections that I have, and I thought about it: why did I dream like that? Why did I dream like that now? And I think I actually wrote to a friend who I also told about this dream at the time—we're all communicating like lunatics on WhatsApp and Zoom because we can't see people—and I said to her, it's like this pandemic has stripped us away of everything that we know and everything that's normal. And it's almost taken us back to the beginning.

Particularly during the time I was ill and I was getting better—I was in bed for nearly six weeks in total—that dream made me think a lot about when I was a child, when I was a teenager, when I was growing up. Things, again, I hadn't really thought about for years. Because the normal things that we do in our life that are so normal and so busy, they're gone. It's very quiet.

[I’m] normally a very active person. I live in a very busy city. But back in April, March, the city was silent. The traffic, everything stopped. The planes stopped flying. Everything that we are used to—I've lived in London my whole life, and I'm used to being in a fairly frantic atmosphere—just stopped. So, I think it did give us time to reflect and take away all the distractions that we normally have every day.

Had a very weird dream last night. Well, another recurrent theme of my dreams since January. And I think, again, literally going back to stripping everything back, [that’s] a lot of it. I'm running around naked and waking up thinking, “Oh no, where are my clothes?” But last night, that wasn't that dream. I dreamt that I met—he died a few weeks ago, and I dunno if you know who he is—a footballer called Maradona. In the UK, football was very big. He played football here. And we had the big incident with the English football team. It was very controversial moment in the World Cup with him. And I did meet him a couple of years ago, by pure coincidence, in a hotel in Abu Dhabi.

But anyway, last night I dreamt that I married [Maradona]. And I am married [in real life]—I have my husband here—[but] we got married, and we needed to go out and buy new china. And so, we went to a jumble sale, which I don't think he would've gone to. And we bought some cups and some plates, and I was arranging them all, and I broke them. And I woke up and I was absolutely thinking, “Oh no, that was another just completely mad dream.”

I think, again, my imagination—because we are back to almost square one where we are not going out, we're not seeing anyone. It's also snowing. So, we are also stuck in our houses because it's hard to get outside as well, which is unusual here for us to have snow. So, I think it's just all of the things that I've been thinking about. I would've heard that Maradona has died recently. Maybe I saw something on TV about him that I didn't even register. And I've been sorting out my china cupboard. Doing all this clearing out stuff. So maybe it just all got confused in my mind.