Wednesday, December 30
On Twitter, I found out that a group of British psychoanalysis researchers have been attempting to track and analyze humans’ apparently rising number of dreams during the lockdown. You can discover some of their activity at @LockdownDreams or at their website.
The researchers solicit play-by-play accounts of dreams, and lots of people from across the globe have apparently responded. But the shrinks don’t give the rest of us much access to these accounts. On a recent Zoom chat, they kept remarking how interesting the whole phenomenon is, and they read a bit from Sigmund Freud’s speculations about dreams. Hey, I don’t want the contributors’ names and addresses, just a little bit of what they are dreaming. (There’s more to be found on Twitter at the hashtag #LockdownDreams but it’s hard to know how seriously to take the comments there.)
Picking up on this theme, The Guardian says all this dreaming may relate to our experience of “financial hardship, social isolation, loss of our normal roles, and, for some, loss of loved ones. These stresses are real and present, others are feared or existential. Uncertainty and unpredictability dominate our experience.”
I gather that people dream a lot about airports or other forms of travel. Maybe they are seeking some means of escape—or maybe, as I suspect, they simply experience some form of motion while sleeping and that, in turn, prompts a memory of travel.
I have been having an increased number of dreams for several years, possibly as a result of a prescription drug. What I am noticing now, though, is a greater level of dread that seems present irrespective of the content of a dream. I think it is tied to the pandemic, fear of death, and the very dark winter nights—darker by far than winter nights in the street-lit city.
There’s a very amusing rumination on dreaming available on the BBC. Essayist Ian Sansom describes his own frequent-dreaming experience and that of author Graham Greene, who published a dream diary, which he’d kept for decades, called A World of My Own.
Sansom admits to keeping some notes about his dreams but not a formal dream diary: He says it’s the creepy types—Kafka, William Burroughs, and Emanuel Swedenborg—who have kept dream diaries. Then Sansom describes how he has been dreaming a lot lately—prompting his mother to ask “are you secretly eating a lot of cheese?” She’s always been suspicious of cheese, he admits. He describes a backyard barbecue dream, with a horse present, and a vivid supermarket dream, in which he makes love to a beautiful sometimes-French, sometimes-Italian woman in the bread aisle.
In contrast to such quotidian stuff, Graham Greene’s dreams are like “little movie pitches,” featuring the likes of Nikita Khrushchev, Francois Mitterrand, authors Robert Graves and T.S. Eliot, and several popes.
Sansom concludes that perhaps the reason we’re dreaming so much is that with the state and lockdown authorities being so intrusive, dreams are the only place left for us to hide—”unexplored territories of the self.”
Dinner: Tonight we’ll again have the Middle Eastern egg dish shakshuka with feta cheese and a salad. On New Year’s, we’ll have pork chops sautéed with apples and the Southern must-haves hoppin’ john (black-eyed peas and rice) plus garlicky Swiss chard as a stand-in for collard greens.
Entertainment: Episodes of the 1982 BBC adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.
