First published in The Times on 8 June 2020
In late April, in the depths of lockdown, my friend Claire dreamt that she casually murdered her husband, decapitating him with a shovel. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is a bit of a shame,’ ” she tells me. “There was reluctance and I felt a bit bad about it — but for some reason it just had to be done.”
You could understand her husband, Hywel (thankfully alive and well), being offended by this, but luckily he’s too distracted by weird dreams of his own; recently they have included an encounter with “a dangerous lion with human hands (furry)”, he tells me by text. He adds that one night he dreamt that I rang him at 3am to tell him that I was eating sausages. “You wouldn’t get off the phone,” he says resentfully.
This is not how I hope to appear in people’s dreams, as a nocturnal sausage bore. Luckily, my friend Steve recently dreamt that he stumbled across his aunt’s birthday party, which he hadn’t been invited to, and spotted me there wearing silver shoes and doing the conga. So it’s swings and roundabouts.
Suffice to say, many of us have been enjoying a bonkers parade of night-time visions since coronavirus loomed into view. A survey of 2,254 UK residents by King’s College London and Ipsos Mori, conducted in May, found that two in five people report having had more vivid dreams than usual, with those who are stressed about coronavirus being twice as likely to experience them.
In some, the threat of the pandemic has been disguised by only the thinnest symbolism. My sister Ellie dreamt that she was being chased by a huge black fly, which eventually flew down the back of her neck, waking her with a start, while an acquaintance tells me that early in lockdown she dreamt she was on a cliff, carrying something heavy, and saw a formation of Chinook helicopters flying ominously out towards the sea.
On Twitter I have invited strangers to tell me their dreams, and I got a keen response. Someone has had visions of his teeth falling out, while another dreamt wistfully of a post-lockdown party, which culminated in her friends shaving each other’s heads while singing Give Peace a Chance. One man tells me his lockdown dreams have had a theme of “huge and underlying anticipation — travelling hopefully and expectantly and never quite arriving”.
Perhaps the travel writer Melissa Twigg would be able to relate to this, because she has only recently managed to return to the UK, she and her brother having spent April and most of May stranded in South Africa. It was a fruitful time for her subconscious, she says. “I kept dreaming about deals we made with the Devil to get on a charter flight. In one my brother agreed to shrink to 5ft 3in [he’s 6ft 2in], and I said I’d have a Stalin moustache and antlers for ever.”
Another pal has been plagued by work-related anxiety dreams. “In one I was hosting a remote book launch and had to make a speech from our local café to thousands of people over Zoom, but I couldn’t find a plug,” she says. Meanwhile, Tom, a statistician, has been revisited by a recurring dream that could keep a psychiatrist busy for years; in it, he is the number 400 and is being laughed at by all the other numbers, with 187 as their ringleader.
Not all dreams are entertaining to recall. Since lockdown began Penny, a photographer, has found herself plagued by nightmares whenever her children spend a weekend at their dad’s house. “Every time I’m not with them, I have night terrors,” she says. “I wake up thinking I am dying, my heart racing, in a complete panic and shaking.” An Australian in the UK also contacts me to say that her worry about not being able to get home gave her weeks of upsetting dreams, including one in which her sister’s hair grew so long that it engulfed her.
Although it can be tedious to hear someone recount a dull dream, many of those I’ve heard while researching this piece have been rich in imagery and meaning, as powerful as fairytales. Erin Gravley, an admin assistant in California, noticed the same thing when she asked her friends about their lockdown dreams; it gave her the idea for the website idreamofcovid.com, which she launched in March, inviting strangers to contribute. She has had thousands of submissions, and you can browse the published dreams (with delightful illustrations by Gravley’s sister Grace) by date, location or theme (“business”; “crowds”; “rules”).
Among them I find that someone in Washington state has reported something similar to a dream that I have in times of stress, which has popped up again in recent months. In it I’m trapped in a large house, trying to hide from a lion that is stalking in and out of the kitchen and up and down the stairs.
I describe my lion experience to the therapist and author Philippa Perry, who has been interpreting the dreams of her followers on Twitter. She thinks that the animal could represent an element of myself that I’m hiding from, and suggests I try imagining it from the lion’s perspective to see if that sheds any light. Similarly, my friend who “murdered” her husband, Perry suggests, was probably reflecting on having to close down a facet of herself. “I wonder if he represented her contact with other people, which she has had to ‘murder’ in lockdown — and it is indeed a shame, but it sounds as though she can manage.”
She counsels that dream dictionaries – which may tell you that fish are a positive omen, for example – miss the point; what’s important is your own associations with the people and things that appear as metaphors in your dreams. “It’s such a shortcut to the psyche and people can get insight to suppressed emotions quite quickly if they can understand their dream,” Perry says.
That said, originality stretches only so far, and water has cropped up for many as a metaphor for the crisis. “Somebody reported a dream to me that I really liked: there was a great tsunami coming towards her,” Perry says. “She was perfectly fine on top of her surfboard, but everybody else was running away and panicking. And then when I talked to her about it, it seemed like she was actually coping with the emotions that the pandemic was throwing up, but all around her other people didn’t seem to be — and the dream just reflected that beautifully.”
Dr Ivana Rosenzweig, the head of the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre at King’s College London, wasn’t surprised by the results of the survey; participants in her clinics have also been reporting an increase in bizarre dreams. She thinks that this finding may be linked to two others. First, that 50 per cent of the population is experiencing disturbed sleep; you’re more likely to remember a dream if you wake during it. Second, it may be relevant that about half of respondents report that they’ve been sleeping for longer than usual.
“The most elaborate stories and visual presentation occur during rapid-eye-movement [REM] sleep,” Rosenzweig explains. We sleep in cycles of 90 to 120 minutes, and REM comes towards the end of each one, but in longer chunks as the night progresses. “If we sleep longer, we allow ourselves to have a proper five or six cycles, so towards the morning we have our own ‘virtual reality’ dreaming, and that’s good. I think something constructive that should be coming out of all this is maybe that we usually cut ourselves short, and we should be sleeping more.”
As for the purpose of our wild and anxious dreams, there is a theory, supported by the research of the neuroscientist Matthew Walker, that dreaming operates as a sort of self-therapy: the brain explores our difficult feelings while we’re asleep, when our levels of the stress hormone noradrenaline are very low, allowing us to process them calmly and wake up a little more equipped to cope.
The neurologist Guy Leschziner, the author of The Nocturnal Brain, explains that there’s evidence for this in sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who are often woken by nightmares that echo the original trauma. “The difference between somebody who is waking up repeatedly as a result of their nightmares and somebody who has a dream and then carries on sleeping is, of course, that in the latter the process is completed,” he says. “So one theory for people with PTSD is that the emotional memory of that event is so strong that it actually results in you waking, and you never have the opportunity to fully resolve it.”
There could be good news in this for those of us who are gathering at breakfast to scratch our heads and tell tales of lions on the stairs and Chinook helicopters on the horizon; our dreams might actually be helping us to cope with the pandemic. As Rosenzweig puts it: “We are doing our own storytelling of these events in a safe environment, allowing ourselves to process those emotions safely. It’s almost psychotherapeutic.”