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April 20, 2020 8:59 AM   Subscribe

Why Life During a Pandemic Feels So Surreal (Wired): The study of the surreal has mostly concerned Dali's paintings and Kafka’s writings. But there are psychological reasons why every day seems so otherworldly. Related: Time Is Meaningless Now (Vice) and The pandemic is giving people vivid, unusual dreams. Here’s why. (National Geographic)
posted by not_the_water (30 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've been experiencing an odd time sensation these last couple weeks. My wife and I wake up at a "normal time" around 7:30am, sometimes a bit later. Her business is staying very busy, so she works here at home most of the day, and sometimes into the night. I help out with various projects of hers where I can, but mostly I'm a house-husband and internet addict.

My days have been feeling very, very long from the morning up until about 4pm. Then time feels very speeded up, and I look at the clock and suddenly it's 10:30 at night and time to watch Colbert then time to sleep around midnight.

I don't have an explanation. But my wife (who's been "busier" than me in a regular work-way) is experiencing the same slow first-half of the day, then a bizarrely fast second-half of the days. Neither of us is having unusual sleep or dreams, though.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:48 AM on April 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


SH: I've been getting that time effect, the day drags even with a later wake up.
posted by biffa at 9:57 AM on April 20, 2020


They didn't even mention half-empty grocery stores, kids aren't going to school, there are no distractions - no sports, no theme parks, no gyms, no eating or meeting communally. Our normal normal response to tragedy is to get come together. In this your neighbors are potential enemies.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:58 AM on April 20, 2020 [8 favorites]


I've been home for almost six weeks, and it feels like the three weeks in March took three months and now the three weeks in April have taken about a week.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:59 AM on April 20, 2020 [25 favorites]


Over the last seven years, I've bounced back and forth between companies that were either partially remote, fully in office, and fully remote. My most recent job started in July and was full remote -- no physical commute, all Zoom calls and Slack, no in-person social interaction beyond seeing my wife and what we chose to do outside the home. My wife, herself a university professor, worked partially at home, grading papers and prepping class materials, and partially in the classroom. We bought our condo four years ago with the explicit goal of both being able to work from home easily -- each having an office with a door that closed. Good sound isolation between our workspaces etc. We both still have our jobs.

I put in all of this preamble to say that we're lucky in that we haven't needed to make a huge shift to a quarantined lifestyle. We were 75% of the way there. All my wife needed to adapt to was figure out how to do her classes via Zoom. With that said, we're still feeling discombobulated on our weekends when some of our usual outdoor activities (go for a long walk, visit a museum, visit a friend out in the suburbs, etc.) are just now on hold. We used to be able to mark time by talking about something we did near a weekend with going out for a movie or having some friends over for dinner, but now all of that feels so long ago, on the other end of a monotonous series of weekends spent at home.

One thing I have found helpful during the weekday is to stick to a regular exercise regimen with regular variation. M W F are jogging days with their own goal. Tu is strength day. Th is rest. Our old routines are gone, but we can have new routines to keep ourselves sane. But it's still a struggle, and my wife and I recognize that we're on easy mode in this pandemic, so have also been trying to do more to reach out to friends and family who are more isolated, just to give them some form of social comfort and material support. Our neighbors in our apartment have also taken to dropping off baked goods and homemade food projects in front of each other's doorsteps.

In some ways, it's using our privilege to make life better for others, in other ways, it's just what we need to stay sane, to feel like we're doing something while waiting out the pandemic.
posted by bl1nk at 10:19 AM on April 20, 2020


What day is it today? (Emily Todd VanDerWerff, Vox) • originally published March 27, 2020; updated daily, last updated April 20, 2020.
"The sun coming up in the east and setting in the west is real. Thursday is not."

I will update this article daily until we don’t need it anymore. I hope there is a time when we know it is Thursday or Tuesday or June 17 without having to look at a calendar or ask each other or Google. I hope there is a time when going outside to see the sun doesn’t feel like exposing yourself to toxic levels of radiation. (I know I should be taking walks; every time, I feel like I’m risking everything.) I hope there is a time in which all this “free” time no longer feels like a period we must exploit for maximum value. I hope there is a time when I remember what it’s like to grab lunch with a friend, to watch dogs play in the surf, to breathe in the air and just be.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:11 AM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


My bf and I are admittedly very fortunate in both still being employed on perma work from home. It is a tremendous blessing we are not currently having to stress about income.

That said, I don't know wtf happened to linear time but somehow every eight hour workday lasts infinity years and the evenings are a planck time long.
posted by PMdixon at 11:29 AM on April 20, 2020 [7 favorites]


I can't report anything consistent about my sense of time while working from home. Sometimes it flies by and I was super-productive the whole time. Sometimes it takes about 87% of an eternity.

I do know the weekends still feel like they're one day too short.

I've also been having the most vivid dreams, many of which combine "you're not social distancing!" panic with people from my past who suddenly want me to do something or just want to hang out.

Little things that feel really odd to me:

- No restaurants, when we used to dine out most nights a week and I usually ate lunch in one. The weirdest part about this is, in most cases I don't even miss the food. I don't hate what we're eating at home, nor doing more dishes. I don't mind having extra time not spent driving and waiting somewhere else. But the whole ritual of it is a big hole.

- Not taking walking breaks during my workday. My neighborhood is inconveniently hilly and I don't much like being out in bright sun for long, especially when the weather is warmer -- my workplace has an indoor atrium I can walk laps around.

- Mostly not drinking soda except what I make in the SodaStream, which is totally not the same. But I've been unable to justify putting it on the grocery list when we're trying to minimize our store trips and there's already enough stuff to carry back upstairs.
posted by Foosnark at 12:05 PM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm a pretty vivid dreamer but even for me some of my dreams have been pretty intense. I posted about it on Facebook and discovered I'm not alone.
posted by tommasz at 12:26 PM on April 20, 2020


I know that my wife and I are lucky in that we're both essential workers. Moreover, 95% of what she does can be done at home, and 99%+ of what I do can be done from home (I've been working from home since Mar 13th, things that would require me to leave home would be pretty dire emergencies. I anticipate not needing to go anywhere to work until "this" is over).

Somehow, despite no longer needing to do a 20 minute commute 2x daily I've been feeling like my days are short on time. I'm guessing it's a bit of a stress thing that I get distracted and I lose 5-10 minutes repeatedly. Even on the weekends, I'll have a list of a bunch of small things I should be able to get done, and I'm lucky to scratch 1-2 things off. I'm going to leave at 2 pm for a run, but I'm getting out the door at 3:40.

Additionally, our dog, who I usually run with, is limping. So my morning run now needs to be a morning run + 20 minute slow walk with lots of sniffing (to lower his herding instinct), leaching more time. And starting today, I've got a 10 day course of antibiotics to give to a sick cat. So extra time to get her stinky food, coax her to eat some, then pill her, then beg for forgiveness. So 5-10 minutes more gone.

Which is to say that I've been feeling very short on time. Again, I'm fortunate to be fully employed by an employer who isn't making me come into the office just for appearances. CERB benefits might be more generous than EI, but not enough for our household. Despite the fact that I know I'm in the "lucky" category, it's really started to irk me anytime I see the "what day is it" or "things to do with all of that free time" articles.

My dreams have always tended to be a bit surreal, so it's hard to judge if they're getting more so. But I'm definitely remembering them more now. 4 dreams over 3 nights in the last ~2 weeks, as opposed to once every month or two. I like remembering my dreams though, so I'll happily take this as a win.
posted by nobeagle at 12:29 PM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


I had a dream this weekend where I found myself in open plan cubical farm where the office was reorganizing on a new management fad called "Motivational Block Tracking". Vivid, yet dull!
posted by bendybendy at 12:48 PM on April 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


That said, I don't know wtf happened to linear time but somehow every eight hour workday lasts infinity years and the evenings are a planck time long.

I do know the weekends still feel like they're one day too short.


I've always felt like that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:55 PM on April 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


Every day is Blursday now.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:15 PM on April 20, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'm glad to know I'm not the only one having vivid dreams. I usually have them pop up under periods of stress (along with sleep-walking), but this has been something else lately.
posted by Mouse Army at 1:16 PM on April 20, 2020


I am lucky in that I still have my job through telework. And I'm also lucky that, because I telework, I'm not so worn out by two hours of commuting every day. So I'm sleeping a LOT better these days. Trapped in my tiny apartment with two young boys is a challenge, though...
posted by zardoz at 1:24 PM on April 20, 2020


Septober twenteenth
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 2:04 PM on April 20, 2020 [4 favorites]


My boss keeps asking how our weekends were and.....um I spend all day in my apartment. All night. All weekend. How do you think it was?
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 2:27 PM on April 20, 2020 [10 favorites]


perfect? wait. you didn't get out of bed, did you?
posted by 20 year lurk at 2:35 PM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Yesterday felt like it went on forever, and then, after dinner, I thought I’d do some food related projects (cold smoking some stuff to then vacuum pack for sous vide, put some beef into cure for pastrami), and was shocked to realize it was already 9pm, somehow.

My dreams have been intense, and unpleasantly real. Like, odd situations that don’t seem right, but with people I know in mundane situations with unreal twists. And, for the most part, bad. None of them are dreams I enjoy, and some of them have been bad enough to wake me up, while others are so real that when I wake up, I wonder how I’ll be able to move forward after the events in my dream, how they’ll have changed everything. It takes a good couple minutes to get my mind to the point that I understand it was just a dream.

(Sorry, I know no one wants to hear about other people’s dreams, but this one woke me at 4 am) Last nights dream was some sort of bachelor party with friends and the room we rented, we trashed thoroughly. Just unrelenting destruction. Looting of anything worth taking (strangely, a whole cooler full of craft beer was part of that), and then when we left, the very angry owner was totaling the damages with glee, all of us paying separately, and I was at the end, and got stuck with a bill for over $3000. The rest of the dream was trying to contact the friends I was with trying to see if they’d stiffed me and left me to pay the lions share.

I woke up trying to figure out how I was going to come up with the money to pay for the room we destroyed, more with a sense of doom rather than panic because I know there’s no way I could cover that. I spent about three minutes trying to think what to do, and was about to text one of the friends who was there in the dream before it finally clicked.

I do not enjoy these dreams, but I’m waking up like this two or three times a week.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:35 PM on April 20, 2020 [8 favorites]


The NatGeo explanation of vivid dreams makes sense, but I wonder if there might also be another simple explanation for a portion of the increased numbers. I almost never remember my dreams, but if I sleep in for an extra hour or more I'll remember my dreams more often than not. Some people reporting vivid dreams may just simply be recalling their dreams for the first time in a long time while they're getting to sleep in for a change.?.
posted by p3t3 at 7:11 PM on April 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


I just looked at the clock to see if it was time for my 3pm meeting yet. I had a feeling I had probably lost track of time enough that I had missed it, and totally expected to see the clock showing 3:15 or even 3:30.

It was 1:12.
posted by lollusc at 8:15 PM on April 20, 2020


As for the dreams, I always remember a few dreams per night. The number of dreams I recall has not changed. The nature of them has, though. The past few weeks, all my dreams are about having missed a flight, or being late to the airport, or travelling between cities by bus or train but the network breaking down and missing connections. Or about being meant to be somewhere else but having forgotten to travel. It's the sort of travel stress dreams I usually only get the night before an international trip. I don't really understand why my brain is deciding to do these all the time now instead.
posted by lollusc at 8:17 PM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


I worked from home 1993 to 2016. This feels like back to my normal. I'm my own boss again but unfortunately I'm very much a "boss" in the video game sense.

Yesterday I noticed that my bed had moved about 7” during the night, knocking my wall charger out of the outlet.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:25 PM on April 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


In my head it’s like this: reality changed too fast and now the Humanity Superorganism is trying to catch up, and it’s creating a lot of...unexpected behaviors, not to mention the unexpected feelings.

For example, I am an agnostic/atheist* who mostly attends weekly worship services because I like spending time with my wife and kids and it is important for them. So you might think that I wouldn’t be too bothered about Sunday services being cancelled due to the pandemic. But you know what?

I miss church.

I miss going to this place that I stopped believing in long ago, because when I strip it down to the essentials there’s this primal “spirit” that actually matters to me. It defies all my rational thoughts, and I feel the traces of it in the collection of weekly rituals we call “church”. The details of what we pray/chant/sing each week hardly matter, but the fact that we can gather and point our collective wills to a simple ideal (like being kind to others) is really wonderful to me. I miss that more than I care to admit.

*my transition from belief to agnosticism is fairly well documented in my MeFi comment history, incidentally

**LDS/Mormonism for the curious
posted by Doleful Creature at 8:42 PM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


There are a few of us for whom life has not dramatically changed, introverts who live on a modest pension. We have boundless reservoirs of empathy for houses full of children not yet grown and gone, abusive partners, restaurant workers, healthcare workers, and on and on.

Not that there are not things I miss now and then.
posted by kozad at 9:28 PM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Even on the weekends, I'll have a list of a bunch of small things I should be able to get done, and I'm lucky to scratch 1-2 things off. I'm going to leave at 2 pm for a run, but I'm getting out the door at 3:40.

I’ve had similar experiences and I’ve taken to calling it MTFOMO (“empty” FOMO) which means Missing the Fear of Missing Out. FOMO can be quite motivating. If you know you have a narrow window to do something, you’ll prioritize it so that you won’t FOMO yourself. “This is my only chance to run.” is now “I can run at any time today, any activity could be moved or dropped. I can do it later.” And there’s FOMO motivation to not just sitting at home. You may want to engage with the world to enrich your life or just your weekend. That’s all gone. It’s very disorienting and unbalanced.

I blame my vivid dreams on a change in sleep patterns + anxiety.
posted by amanda at 10:50 PM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


All my dreams are about travel now. Travel and misfortune.
posted by rodlymight at 5:50 AM on April 21, 2020


Three nights ago my subconscious wrote, directed, and performed a full-length Broadway musical in which the audience finds itself in a Kafka-esque nightmare of not knowing whether they were actually part of the production, or if their sanity was slipping away with the rest of the onstage cast. Plot points revolved around revealing dark secrets of individual audience members, revealing them as previously-unknown antaqonists. At one point a dog sang a very Gilbert-and-Sullivan ditty accusing someone sitting in the front row of murder.

My takeaways from this:
1. I wish I had more than a hazy recollection of the plot, because I could totally pitch this in the time of Corona
2. I don't know what I did to you, subconscious, but it's gonna be OK, buddy--we'll get through this
3. May is going to be a really long month
posted by Mayor West at 6:15 AM on April 21, 2020 [4 favorites]


Both of us in my house have been idled, and we never know what day it is.. We don't have day-specific activities like church or a weekly tv show, so we're running blind. I feel like Violet Crawley: "What is a week-end?"

I've been sleeping at night like I'm taking a nap. Usually when I'm sleeping for the night = I easily fall asleep, deep sleep where I rarely remember dreams, I stay in one place, I wake up refreshed. Usually when I take a mid-day nap = I drift in and out, vivid dreams, I move around a lot, I wake up in a fog. I've been having nap-type sleep at night and it's weird.
posted by Gray Duck at 6:33 AM on April 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


I've been listening to a lot of music that I loved in high school. I don't know if that's me embracing surreality or me embracing depression.
posted by grandiloquiet at 10:46 AM on April 21, 2020 [2 favorites]


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