(no subject)

[rachelmanija]

I have dreamed of forgetting to wear a mask at a large maskless gathering every night for at least the past week. STOOOOOOOOOOP.

If the pandemic is still affecting your daily life, what sort of pandemic dreams have you all been having? Or do you dream of going to movies and parties and other Before Times?

Comments

[loligo]

Ever since my concussion, I have been having awesome dreams!! Well, some of them have been creepy, but awesome in the sense that they are colorful, detailed surreal adventures. For a long time, my dreams had shrunk to boring, stressful repetitions of daily tasks, like trying to run reports at work and making one typo after another in the commands.

But yes, I have had some dreams about social distancing and masks.

[rachelmanija]

That is amazing! I've never heard of that side effect before. Nice to know you got one good thing out of it.

[davidgillon]

Haven't had any dreams so far, but tonight may be an exception as I've been buried in the health and safety guidance of school reopening for the last four hours! (My sister wants me to review her school's risk assessment).

I'm thinking something Kafka-esque.

[mildred_of_midgard]

As I commented to my wife recently, it took me almost 5 years to dream about living in Boston after I moved here. It took me less than 2 months to start dreaming about wearing masks, standing in line outside the grocery store and waiting to be waved in, and people refusing to stay 6 feet away from me. I think I dream about the last one the most because wearing a mask is essentially passive, but constantly being on the alert for where people are and trying to do a dance of staying away from all of them, minute to minute and second to second, activates the predator-avoidance parts of my brain that are responsible for most of my dreams.

[lemonsharks]

Mostly nightmares featuring my family at their worst, and not being able to protect people and cats I love from my family at their worst

[minoanmiss]

Most of my dreams are ridiculous adventures anyway, but every so often I have an old classic like "I'm in school and missed my classes" or "I went outside naked" and the most recent "went outside naked" one explicitly mentioned a mask as one of the items I wasn't wearing.

[gwynnega]

I've had several maskless anxiety dreams, mixed with dreams of the Before Times.

[graydon]

Dunno if it precisely counts, but had a recent dream I had been hired as a wedding planner and it slowly became obvious that, of everyone in both to-be-wed families, the intended bride was the only one still alive.

Didn't find out why they weren't alive, so maybe not a COVID dream.

[naomikritzer]

I had basically that same dream last night. I was at a large, well-populated party, indoors, full of people not distancing or wearing masks, and I spent the whole dream thinking, "I really should leave, but it's so nice to see people..." and then not leaving, because apparently my dream-self has TERRIBLE JUDGMENT.

[yhlee]

Masks or masklessness haven't shown up in my dreams at all, but then, I am STILL having metaphorical anxiety dreams where I am about to flunk my math degree and it's been 20 years since college, so my dream brain is not really hip to the times.

[pameladean]

My brain has effectually fled into the past and is presenting me with both weird dreams and anxiety dreams set in a dream version of our current house that appeared before we moved into it and persisted for ten years or so, but gradually faded out. It's an amalgam of a bunch of houses we looked at -- we looked at SO MANY houses -- and it has a lot of extremely weird issues but also some lovely gardens. It is always about 1999 in my current dreams, which is not just well before the current horrors, but also before 9/11. It's also before I had any major health issues, but those do turn up sometimes, usually in the form of having trouble getting hold of vital medication. The reason is never the pandemic, though. It's always a sinkhole or a tornado or an invasion of bears.

P.

[sabotabby]

Tons. One where I tested positive and I was away from home and couldn't get home except by transit, where I'd risk everyone; one where I was trying to rescue my mom in a crowd, one where I had to teach and I was in a wheelchair and a kid had to pick me up to get me away from a track team that was about to barrel over me.

I haven't had any dreams where things were normal.

[princessofgeeks]

Love your icon.

I dreamed that I was at a big big gathering, a banquet and an outoor party and there was a beachfront, and there were over 100 people there, and I was wandering around thinking "I have to get outside, none of these people are wearing masks, no one said we would be indoors, shit"

And I have dreamed about teaching in mask, going to the store in a mask... it's definitely come into my unconscious.

[sheliak]

I have been dreaming of outdoor gatherings in which people are mostly the correct distance from each other, but no one is wearing a mask, including me. In the dream, I feel guilty about forgetting.

[dhampyresa]

When I was at my lowest/most isolated during lockdown I went through a phase of dreaming about everything I had ever felt a sense of belonging to/in.

I've also dreamt of going swimming again and the dreams are so vivid that it hurts when I wake up and I can't go

[isis]

I have had that dream a few times.

[starlady]

The pandemic actually improved my dreams because I stopped dreaming about my own death (that was pretty obviously due to stress about the election). I only had my first "I'm in public without a mask" dream a week or so ago.

[sholio]

In general it hasn't been happening to me, but it has definitely crossed my mind that "I'm out in public without my mask" is going to be the new anxiety-dream version of "I'm out in public without my pants."

[lilacsigil]

My usual anxiety dreams (customers flooding into my workplace and I can't find anything) have morphed into customers flooding into my workplace and I can't find anything AND no-one will put on a mask. Masks have been mandatory here for a week but we've been wearing them every day for three weeks.

[grayswandir]

The majority of my pandemic dreams are also about being maskless, usually at a grocery store (the only place I ever go at all anymore in real life) or, for some reason, Target. In the dreams, no one else is ever wearing a mask, and at first I think everything is normal, until I remember that there's a pandemic on and why is my mask still in the car? or did I leave it at home? and is it even worth bothering if literally nobody else is wearing one?

I've also dreamed twice about having my tires slashed. In the first dream, I called the tire shop, but they told me they couldn't fit my car in for new tires because everyone's tires were being slashed, all across the city, and they were booked out for days. The second dream was another not-wearing-a-mask dream, but when I went to get my mask from my car, I remembered that I hadn't driven my car because the tires had all been slashed, so I had no idea where my mask was.

I also keep dreaming about people I know dying, which is something I've almost never dreamed about before. :/

But then in the midst of pandemic dreams last night, I also dreamed I was watching a weird Star Trek movie that involved Captain Kirk in cowboy getup riding a horse off of a magical island into the ocean, then onto an alien space ship powered by special crystals, where there turned out to be a crisis because the only family of aliens who knew how to make the ship-powering crystals had gone on strike. Which is basically a totally normal dream for me.

[rosefox]

I've been having a lot of dreams about moving house, which I think is a straightforward allegory for wanting to be not in the current situation but literally anywhere else.

One unemployment anxiety dream: I dreamed that everyone at the newspaper I worked for got laid off because they were moving operations to Boston where labor was cheaper. We were all outraged because of course you can't properly do local news from hundreds of miles away. I asked an older woman how she always managed to land on her feet and find a new job quickly, and she said, "Find out what people need and be that, meet that need." I've never been good at that, but I decided to try.

And one political anxiety dream: I dreamed there was a protest going past our house, and I gave the raised fist salute from our window as some white queer people went by with big flags for queer identities that I didn't recognize, including one that was a gradient of teal stripes. But they thought I was too white to do the raised fist and TP'd our house, and I went down to try to talk to them but couldn't find any of the people who did it. Some people did talk to me but I couldn't understand what they were saying because everything was too noisy. (A friend says this is a dream about being middle-aged and worried that I don't understand the Kids These Days and they don't respect me. Probably true. But it feels more like it's about wishing I could be doing more than just standing in my window saluting the people out in the streets, and judging myself for staying home.)

[ellarien]

I've been getting my usual travel-anxiety dreams (being at the airport but not being able to find my flight, or knowing I have a flight but no way to get to the airport in time), but now with extra social-distancing issues. (In real life, I haven't so much as caught a bus since the middle of March, and all my international travel is cancelled until at least next summer.) And there was one dream where I'd gone somewhere with my mother and we needed to go inside a building, and we had no masks, and a young woman on the door was handing out crudely knitted ones in an ugly shade of dark gray-green.

[sgac]

Thank you for saying 'if the pandemic is affecting your daily life' instead of assuming that of course everyone in the world is in the same place. I know I am tremendously lucky to live on an island with closed borders, but it feels like I'm not just geographically isolated from the rest of the world, but in a parallel universe. Any small acknowledgement that not everyone is experiencing this the same way is quite meaningful.

For the curious, I live in Tasmania.

[rmc28]

I am having lots of very vivid dreams of extremely mundane activities that I can't do (or at least feel extremely dubious about doing) in the waking world. Sitting in crowded cafes. Attending a boring work-related conference talk. Riding trains and buses with friends. Queuing for the toilets. (Ok that last I really really needed the loo when I woke up from it.)

The key commonality is that in the dream I'm not worried at all. I don't think about masks or distancing. It's completely fine to be in close quarters with a bunch of people many of whom I don't know. And then I wake up and remember it probably isn't.

[mrissa]

Night before last, I dreamed that my friend A (who lives in Paris) called and said I should not come visit her that day, it would not be safe with the COVID and stuff, and I was like, yes, this seems sensible.

Then she continued, "It's different for [mutual friend S], she can just use the virus rifle hanging on the wall of the observatory," and dream-me was like, sure, sure, legit, but I woke up just then and was like--

WHY DO I NOT GET A VIRUS RIFLE. WHY IS S HOGGING THE VIRUS RIFLE. ALSO WHERE IS HER OBSERVATORY WHY DID SHE NOT TELL ME SHE HAD AN OBSERVATORY.

I have asked S, and she has promised that if she ever gets a virus rifle, she will share.

[alessandriana]

Last night I dreamed about going to a large pool party; there was no mention of COVID in the dream, but someone was attempting to murder children, so, y'know. (I found the kid before she drowned, thankfully.)

I definitely have had a few 'oh no I'm at a restaurant/store/etc and forgot my masks and there's too many people' dreams.

[edenfalling]

No pandemic-related dreams.

My recent stress dreams have been entirely related to work (I'm trying to give prospective tenants a tour but the buildings are logistically impossible and we wind up walking through a super-fancy restaurant or a stock exchange instead of an apartment/my office has moved to a new building that's only half-constructed and I can't get to my desk to answer the phone/tenants illegally install a swimming pool in their living room and flood the entire building/etc.) or to libraries/bookstores (I try to find a specific book/specific author/specific section but nothing is in the right place, or the shelves keep moving, or the librarians take all the books away for cleaning/donation, or my library card doesn't work, etc.).

My stress dreams are almost all about repetitive everyday tasks that go wrong, with a strong bent toward "I'm trying to go somewhere and can't get there because Reasons," and it's hard for me to map medical worries onto that template. But I've been having a significantly higher rate of stress dreams than usual over the past few months, so I suspect I may be displacing some pandemic stress into more familiar patterns.

[gwyn]

I don't remember dreams well at all, and mostly that's good because they pretty much always turn into nightmares at some point. But I keep dreaming of being in public places with lots of people. Last night I woke up from something scary, but the only thing I remember now is that once again, I was surrounded by lots of people, like at a concert, before it went bad. I think I must be longing so bad for such places again, especially movies, that my dreams always take me there.

[ellenmillion]

I've been having travel and show dreams (suddenly realizing I have things scheduled and am about to miss them, arriving without luggage or anything to sell, etc.), but not regularly. In some, I'm distantly perplexed that no one at the airport or convention hall is wearing a mask and I'm fine with being crammed together with people, but that hasn't been the key point of the dream.

[holyschist]

Covid measures aren't really affecting my daily life at all in Sweden at this point except insofar as movie theatres are still closed (though I'd hesitate to go, even though I think they're lower-risk than a crowded restaurant or a long bus ride) and I'm still mostly avoiding indoor dining, but I have been periodically having dreams since March about suddenly having to scramble to pack up and go home with everything possible logistically going wrong in the process, like somehow I magically end up in the wrong airport in the wrong country with no luggage (in reality, if my extension is rejected, I have 4 weeks to figure out how to get home, but sleeping me is like OH GOD 30 MINUTES TO PACK AND FIND A FLIGHT!!!). I still have all my usual work/teeth falling out/cat health anxiety dreams, though, but fewer dreams about being on the run from/fighting assassins sent to kill me, so on balance, I guess that's good.

[jadelennox]

This isn't a pandemic dream, but this morning I woke up in the screaming heebie jeebies because I dreamed I was an undercover plant in the Trump white house, and I'd convinced him that hammering nails crookedly into the walls would make him popular, because the nails were cursed. It obviously wasn't working, which was good, and he was getting madder and madder, and someone figured out I was a spy and he sent someone to break my kneecaps.

[larryhammer]

Ugh. I just woke up from a dream of getting a haircut at a busy shop, and realizing as I finally sat down in the barber chair that I’d forgotten a mask.

[oracne]

I have also had the "forgot my mask in public" dream, and also "trying to find a mask" and "mask I found is inadequate."

[ravens_quill]

Oof. Not many as of yet, thankfully, but I had one a handful of days ago about going out to a store wearing a mask and at some point the mask was gone and I couldn't find it and couldn't remember taking it off.

Last night, I dreamed that I had gotten sick and was in the hospital and again I didn't know how it happened. They were really insistent on me staying in my room (there was also a ghost or something, moving a heart monitor across the room--things got a little weird as it went on).