Pandemic Dreams

“COVID-19 has altered our dream worlds, too: how much we dream, how many of our dreams we remember and the nature of our dreams themselves. Early this year, when stay-at-home directives were put in place widely, society quite unexpectedly experienced what I am calling a dream surge: a global increase in the reporting of vivid, bizarre dreams, many of which are concerned with coronavirus and social distancing.”

— Tore Nielsen

I have been struggling with sleep paralysis and somnambulism since I was a child. I also come from a culture where the interpretation of dreams is taken very seriously. It’s very likely that the vividness of my dreams and my sleep disruptions are heightened by my cultural and spiritual conditioning. I often dream about various animals and objects that have a symbolic importance in Turkish culture, especially when they appear in dreams and coffee cups.

Like many people, I like googling and reading about my various ailments, both real and imagined. On one of these digital journeys, I found out that following the pandemic, many people started experiencing extraordinarily vivid and confusing dreams. This, to me, does not seem surprising, people often have intense dreams and changes in their sleeping behaviour and patterns after experiencing big changes in their lives. For example, my sleep walking started at 6 after my family and I moved to Macedonia from Turkey.

The pandemic and its surrounding materiality (masks, queues, social distancing, hatches) have only once made an appearance in my dreams. Aside from that, my dreams have been consistently bizarre throughout my life, and haven’t become more so during the pandemic. I think this is probably because not much has changed in my life during this time. I write and work from home, and do not have to face illness, death and the realities of COVID-19 in my daily life, unlike health care workers. Deirdre Barrett, who is an assistant professor in psychology at Harvard, has written a book about this subject called Pandemic Dreams. The book builds on Barrett’s survey of 9000 dreams from 3700 dreamers and identifies common symbols and phenomenons that show up in people’s pando-dreams. She found that health care workers’ dreams were more “slippery” when it came to the representations of the virus: the illness would take invisible forms but with a palpable and ominous presence.

While health care workers’ have had to face this virus on a daily basis, I have been at home, writing a dissertation. I am as far away from the reality of the pandemic as I can be. This means I have had the privilege of endless navel gazing. Trying to “make” my way out of my dissertation, I have created a few images of some of the dreams I remember having during this time:

Making doodles and tracing pictures