Whenever I wake up from a good dream these days, there is that moment of lag. The birds will be singing, there will be sunlight in the window, or else rain whispering against the glass. I will stretch and smile, remembering the night’s wonderful, wonderful visitations, whether angelic or otherwise — and then goddamn reality will assert itself.
We’re in a pandemic. My city is under lockdown. People are dying. My son and I are cut off from our loved ones. The economy is collapsing. Just a few miles from where we live, in Washington D.C., a malignant narcissist of a president searching for scapegoats as the proverbial Rome burns. It’s almost tempting to be mad at my dreams — so colorful and vivid these days, so frequently full of love. How dare they?
The quarantine has made dreams stranger. And why shouldn’t it have? Living through history is bad enough as it is — but when you’re forced to practice social distancing, and let us recall that we are fundamentally social creatures, anxiety percolates through our dream lives. The brain deals with it as best as it can. And by “best” I pretty much mean “weirdly.”
Considering how things are going, those of us who can sleep at all are the lucky ones. Anxiety exhausts you and then it pulls another trick out of its bag — your exhausted self can’t seem to get enough sleep. People are dealing with it in all sorts of ways in the various corners of the world. Journalists are figuring out some ways to help each other out, for example — and as this article notes, Bellingcat, the online investigative collective where I am editor, is providing people with some tools to feel less helpless right now. For example, did you know that you can monitor the global slowdown as you socially distance at home? Doing something, anything, that makes you feel like you’re taking some control of the situation, even if it’s by researching it, can help you breathe a little.
I realized recently that what I’m going through every morning is a process linked to grief. My dreams — full of adventures, amazing people from the not-so-distant past, shimmering fairy tale domes, kisses that flood my head with light — allow me to rest in a small pocket of normalcy. Then morning comes. Reality feels like a smack to the face in these circumstances.
Yet at the same time, having something positive to hold on to means that the smacks sting less. We are going through something momentous and dangerous, as a species. There are cowards among us, and the craven, and the brave. The plot of the story keeps speeding up and twisting itself up. There is a great recalibration going on in the world today, and the past seems more innocent all of a sudden, and it is so hard to let it go, like saying goodbye forever to a friend. In this time, everybody needs something good, a piece of the broken world that feels precious in your hands.
What also helps right now is to discuss random dreams with friends. Well, assuming they have an interesting plot. Telling your dreams is a particular kind of art, and few of us are actually any good at it. But as I have discovered, the pandemic has created some interesting plot lines and subtexts. Dreams are just another narrative, disjointed as though it may be, and it turns out that when you are living through history, that narrative can really come together. Probably because we are constantly thinking, “What next?” in our waking hours.
A dream journal is a cool idea right now too. I haven’t bothered to take up one, seeing as I rarely follow my own advice, but you can do better than I, surely? At the very least, you may have some bizarre and cool writing to look back on.
If we survive this.
And we ought to.
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