Candy-Colored Clown Engages in Pandemic Hijinx

November 10, 2021 1:57 PM

Did Covid Change How We Dream? "As the novel coronavirus spread and much of the world moved toward isolation, dream researchers began rushing to design studies and set up surveys that might allow them to access some of the most isolated places of all, the dreamscapes unfolding inside individual brains. The first thing almost everyone noticed was that for many people, their dream worlds seemed suddenly larger and more intense." (Archive.is link)
posted by Lyme Drop (6 comments total)

Nobody’s commented in response to this (long, interesting) article so I’ll just note that in the previous two night’s dreams I:
1) grew a beautiful handlebar mustache, except entirely from my nose hair.
2) caught my cat making out with another cat in my bedroom.
Then again, I’ve always had wild dreams and I’m not sure if this is an escalation or not.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:56 PM on November 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

Thank you, this was a spectacular article that really resonates with my own understanding of what my dreams mean to me.

My mother went through a really rough period of time with the pressures of simultaneously caring for 3 young children, and navigating daily care of her mom/my grandma, with whom she had a fractious and complicated relationship. She also had a challenging workplace structure with a lot of underlying tensions within her small team. Growing up and into university, she had experienced constant, screaming nightmares, which had mostly subsided by the time us kids came along.

During these 5-6 years, she kept a dream diary in the bathroom, which she wrote in every morning, immediately upon waking; she wouldn't allow us to interrupt during those few minutes, so she wouldn't "lose her dream". I was about 9-10 when she started journalling... she always asked us about our own dreams every morning while driving us to school, and what we thought they meant.... so I thought nothing of reading through her journal regularly. I was able to understand most of it, and would ask for more information about the sillier/absurd dreams (which she was happy to recount).

The threads of interpersonal dynamics and problems that she tried to keep siloed in the various parts of her life were clearly intertwined in her dreams, and gave me a lot of insight into my mom, and how she was processing life and various challenges/feelings.

She was pretty opaque, and didn't verbally share a lot of her concerns with us as kids, mostly to protect us from stresses and fears that weren't directly our concern.
However, we could always "feel" when something was wrong tense/etc., Mom seems distant or too quiet.

As a child/teen, reading my Mom's dreams helped me understand a bit more about what was happening for her, and acted as a barometer for how she was immediately feeling (deeper stresses that were too much/too adult/too personal share with her kids).

Reading that journal now, with adult eyes, it is easy to see the direct connections between her dream life and adult life, both terms of how events at the time played out, and how she continues to work through some related work/family issues today.

Anyways, what I got out of this article is a reminder that I too need to start keeping a dream journal, to help me understand myself better, and for my own kiddo to read along if she likes. When she starts to talk, I plan to ask her about her own dreams every morning too, as an opportunity to ponder and self-reflect.
posted by NorthernAutumn at 9:53 AM on November 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

That was really interesting... and long! I liked the parts the best that focused on what has been changing in our dreaming since the pandemic began and felt like some of the other stuff about "Why we dream" and "What we know about dream science" seemed a rehash for anyone familiar with the space.

As someone who pays attention to my dreams as much as I can--I meditate in the morning and sometimes by the time I am done I am have forgotten my dreams--I feel like a lot of my "Oh shit I am inside without my mask" dreams are definitely just the same old "Taking a test and forgot to study" anxiety dreams and definitely not "practicing" for future non-mask wearing and it felt weird to even presume the latter. Also this line stood out for me.

In Wuhan, a study of 100 nurses conscripted to work on the front lines found that 45 percent of them were having nightmares — a rate, Nielsen notes, that is “twice the lifetime rate among Chinese psychiatric outpatients and many times higher than that among the 5 percent of the general population who have nightmare disorder.”

That they didn't go on to talk about the role of trauma, direct trauma, in this seemed surprising. I'm actually somewhat surprised that 55% were NOT having nightmares, really.
posted by jessamyn at 11:54 AM on November 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

so I’ll just note that in the previous two night’s dreams I

I had an amazing dream last night. Don't remember any of it now unfortunately. This also happened pre-covid.

But seriously. From the article:

By the late 1970s, two Harvard psychiatrists, John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, were arguing that it was foolish to begin a theory of dreaming in the way that humans always had: by starting with actual dreams and their content. Dreams, they argued, were so bizarre and so subjective, with their frustrating ephemerality and their weird story lines and their odd non sequiturs, that they defied logical study.

I'm currently reading William Burroughs final "novel" My Education (a book of dreams). It's pretty much what you'd expect from a literary anarchist, unconcerned with coherence yet occasionally fascinating. One observation he makes early on is similar to what Hobson and McCarley argued. The vast majority of dreams lack context for anyone but the dreamer and are thus pointless to dwell on. Except, as Burroughs observes, every now and then he'd have a particularly vivid dream that had nothing to do with his particular context, experiences, desires, worries, obsessions. These dreams he describes as "not dreams at all but just like waking life [but] completely unfamiliar as regards my waking experience, but if one can specify degrees of reality, more real by the impact of unfamiliar scenes, places, personnel, even odours."

He then suggests that these are the dreams worth studying and, typical of Burroughs, proceeds to not really do that in any direct or articulate way in subsequent pages.

Rather like a dream, I guess.
posted by philip-random at 5:54 PM on November 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

philip-random, have you ever checked out Nights as Day, Days as Night, a dream journal by Michel Leiris? I read it more than 30 years ago, during the only few months in my life when I kept a dream journal, and I still think about it today.
posted by Lyme Drop at 6:03 PM on November 11, 2021

thanks for the tip.
posted by philip-random at 6:18 PM on November 11, 2021 [1 favorite]