Tag Archives: dreams

Shifting Dreams

I’ve already shared that I almost never dream of people that are currently in my life, dreams for me usually include people I have not seen in a while. That has shifted a bit recently. So has the number of dreams I seem to recall. I am waking up regularly during the night with a full dream in my head.

They are ridiculous. One of them last night included me being a twin double agent that was subjected to a life-altering test administered by a rogue lizard-man. This beast was an escaped prisoner that we were not allowed to catch, and when we found him we just had to surrender to being hit with spray from a water gun that had dangerous chemicals in it.

Another dream last night turned into a covid dream… I went to visit the archery range, without my bow, and one of the volunteers talked me into shooting guns with them since archery was cancelled. He loaned me a gun, had me sign a waiver (that I didn’t have to read) then took me to a signup building that ended up being an indoor shooting range. Only after being packed into this thing with dozens of people did I realize that I was in a crowded room of anti-maskers, with a sick kid coughing next to me. Stressful. And bizarrely stupid.

When I was in university, I went through a phase of really vivid dreams and I trained myself to make them lucid. The trick was to realize I was dreaming and raise my hand in front of my face. Once I could do this, I realized in my dream that I had the power to choose what I did in the dream. The first couple times I did this, I got too excited about it and woke up.

The third and subsequent times I was able to stay dreaming and I would choose to fly. The sensation was exhilarating and absolutely amazing. I loved it. The only two times I had sensations stronger than the sense of flying in a dream were when I woke up once before my body did and I was comatose, trapped in a disconnected body, this was horrifying. The second was when I met the Messiah in a dream and felt compassion that was so intense, it brought so much love and joy to me, that I crumbled to my knees. One day I’ll share that dream, but not today.

I think I’m at a phase of dreaming where I could get back to lucid dreaming. I think I’m going to go to bed reminding myself to look at my hand and then take control of my dreams. I want to shift from dreams that are silly and stressful to ones where I can enjoy sensations that I can’t in real life. I want to fly again.

Covid dreams

I woke up this morning from a dream in which the entire focus was on getting the proper face protection to do the task I wanted to do. I can’t remember the task, only the concern for not being safe.

I often have dreams where the preparation for the task takes over the dream. This goes all the way back to being a pizza delivery driver in university. I’d dream of getting in my car to go to work and my car would only go in reverse. The whole dream would be about trying to get to work driving backwards.

Obviously these are stressful dreams. I can control stress in my waking life, can’t do it in my sleep. It’s not surprising that months into this pandemic, I’d have dreams related to the challenges we face. Going back to work last week has added to this.

Dealing with Covid-19 isn’t something normal. It’s a unique challenge that adds stress to our daily experience. Being around other people used to be easier. Understanding how to give others their personal space used to be easier. Supporting one another used to be easier.

Stress responses are not designed to be triggered again and again over long periods of time. While I was bent on the idea that this isn’t the ‘new normal’ and we need to remember that things will get better… the timeline for change is too long to not call this normal. We need to normalize mask wearing, social distancing, covering up coughs and sneezes, and staying home when we don’t feel well. We need to make this normal enough that it isn’t a stress, but just what we do.

I look forward to dreams where I’m wearing a mask, but the concern of it isn’t the focus of the dream.

It’s seeping in

Last night I had a dream and while I don’t remember all of it, I do remember that social distancing played a part in what was happening. Having to keep my distance from others was hindering the task I was trying to do. This is the first time that I can recall the pandemic seeping into my dreams.

I wonder how this is affecting our psyche? What impact is it having on people who already felt isolated? How is it adding stress to our family dynamics and our jobs?

I don’t know why, but a short (pretty insignificant) scene that I witnessed weeks ago keeps replaying in my mind as sort of a ‘statement of impact’ of the pandemic. I was in my car at the closest traffic light intersection to my home, and I was the first car stopped at the light. On the far left curb a dad and his young daughter on bicycles rode up on the sidewalk to the intersection. The 3 or 4 year old girl got off her bike to press the crosswalk button. She put her bike down, went to the button and raised her elbow to press it.

That’s the whole scene which keeps replaying in my mind. That simple motion of a little kid pressing a button with her elbow rather than her finger. It somehow defines the pandemic response for me. Things have changed. We will do things differently in response to Covid-19 for years to come. Young kids won’t know how this has impacted them because they will just grow up doing things that are culturally ‘normal’, even if the behaviours were not normal just 6 months ago.

I lived in China for a couple years just after H1N1. It wasn’t pervasive, but some people would wear masks in public. It became something that was just part of the public landscape. We will see that here, for a long time coming.

Automatic doors are going to be everywhere. Voice operated elevators will ask us what floor we are going to. Hand sanitizer will greet us in shop and restaurant entrances. Lineups will be spaced out, and social distancing social etiquette will be ingrained into our behaviour.

For many of us this is an adjustment. But for young kids, dreams involving social distancing will always have been there, and pressing buttons with elbows is just what has always been done. For us we see these things seeping into our dreams and habits. For young kids it is already the norm.

Weird dreams

I have this weird thing about my dreams that I don’t think I’ve known to be true for anyone else. I almost never dream of people that I see on a regular basis in my waking hours. It is very rare for my wife, or kids, or my current coworkers to be in any of my dreams that I remember having.

That’s kind of weird. I often dream of friends and family members I have not seen in years. But if I have a rare dream of someone close to me, it’s usually a shallow, not quite awake dream about something I’m thinking/worried about. Beyond these rare occasions, the people that are usually in my dreams are almost always from my past, or strangers.

The other thing about my dreams is that when I wake up in the middle of the night, I tend to go back to my dream even if I don’t like the situation I’m in. I might feel relief that it was only a dream, and think that I’m glad I’m up and can forget the dream, but then I go back to it anyway. Last night was one of those nights.

I was dreaming that this man and woman were spying on me. I knew they were spies, and that they had guns, and I spent most of the dream trying to lose them. At least three times last night I woke up from within this dream and the stress of being (slowly) chased by armed spies was something that made me feel relieved that I could stop. But each time I went back to sleep I was thrust into this same dream again. The spies followed me, they pretended they were not, I tried to lose them. At one point I double backed and spied on them. At another point I booby trapped their weapons stash to blow up if they tried to get to their weapons, but they never triggered my trap. Even after waking up with resolve to end the dream, I’d go back into it again,

Those are my silly stress dreams. Dumb plots, unrelated to any real stresses, with people I don’t know, or people who visit me from my distant past.

I know dreams are supposed to be weird. But does anyone else dream void of people regularly in their lives? Does anyone else keep going back to dreams even after they wake up relieved that they were only dreaming? Or maybe it’s just me and my dreams that are this weird?