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More Vivid Dreaming During The COVID-19 Pandemic

This morning I was dreaming that my family were living in my dad’s house, and our cat was out in the front garden, in her skinny kitten phase - she died last month, so I was happy to see her. She came into the house, jumped up on a chair and promptly vanished; I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh my God, I have to put this on the Forteana board!” Then I went and did something upstairs, and when I came down again the cat was sitting on a cushion on the piano giving me a look that said “What do you expect? I’m a cat.”

Waking up from this, I found myself rather anxious - it occurred to me that my dad wasn’t in the house and we were cleaning it thoroughly, as you might do after someone had died. I’m not an overly anxious person, but I’m just hoping it’s the current surreal situation playing on my mind rather than a premonition.
 
Further up-thread I mentioned having no dreams that I could remember but waking up with a feeling of dread. However, once I started doing the NHS scrubs sewing I felt much better. Purpose, y'know.
 
Strange one last night: in my dream somehow I opted to do something I knew even before the event was beyond my technical abilities or personal competences (think it had to do with managing a sports side). Knew it was going to end in disaster and it'd be letting down and dissappointing a lot of people, but my dream-self got stubborn and bull-headed about it; somehow I was compelled to do it, knowing I would fail. The dream then skipped to the inevitable failure and the aftermath - tried to justify myself, was aware of being shamed and humiliated in front of people who now had no reason to like or think well of me; instead of apologising I became unpleasant, petty and frankly nasty and felt the whole weight of a lot of other peoples' revulsion and scorn coming straight back at me. A sensation that I'd gratuitously made myself friendless, alienated and alone. Awful. So it wasn't the events of the dream - more the intensity of emotion and feeling - that made it feel like the worst nightmare I've had in ages.

Gods know where all that came from, but a kind of relief when I woke up and realised - I'd dreamt it all, whatever world it belonged to, it wan't this one... what the heck goes on in my head? Better dreams tonight, I hope!
 
I had another very vivid dream last night that related to this thread at the end ! I was in a hospital room with five other beds, all of them empty. A nurse ( that I recognised from real life ) put a cannular in my arm which actually hurt a bit in the dream, then left but left the door at the end open where I could see and hear a party going on, a manager type started getting couples to come into the room and dance in front of me, so after a bit of this I got pissed off with it and got out of bed and told the manager type to leave me alone and close the door, he wouldn't so I started shouting, and then someone who I new was Catseye ( we've never met ) walked up to me and said " lighten up, its only a dream ", that is when I woke up ! I'm really starting to enjoy having and remembering these vivid dreams, and I haven't had cheese for ages.
 
This is an interesting exercise: when things suddenly start coming at you like this from left-field, concerning people you haven't met or even thought about for a long time, or put you in situations you think are completely unrelated to what's going on in your life now, it's good to have the leisure to reflect on them and reconstruct, as far as you can, the sequence of events in the dream, for what it might say about your psyche and your preoccupations. Not being tied to a schedule helps - being able to lie in bed a little longer with no imperative to get up is also useful for this.

The only associations I can make concerning last night's nightmare is that there was a time in my life a long time ago now where I behaved irresponsibly and in a way that could be called sociopathically and out of touch with reality - my only defence for that is that there was a degree of mental disorder and mental illness present (written about this elsewhere on these forums) - and I'm aware I did alientate myself from a lot of people then, including, I suspect, somebody who might contribute here; I know she also pops up on the Fortean Times page on Facebook in her own name (I suspect she has "blocked" me as I haven't seen her name there in ages - although I do scan to see if she's posted on any threads, and if she has, I avoid contributing to them: some things are best left in the past and I don't want to cause any offence or concern to her - seriously so. I don't know what identity she uses here, though, and maybe that's as well too!) Last night's dream might have just been my subconscious stirring that period up, perhaps.

But that's past history now, and I think I'm reconciled to it. What can I say? It happened.

Another "fragment" from last night: browsing in a second-hand bookshop and discovered a beautifully hand-written autobiography, with interspersed hand-drawn sketches done to a really high standard: some drawn directly onto the pages, others drawn/inked separately and pasted or sellotaped in. I really wanted to buy this book - priced at £5.70, I remember - but was concerned the outer covers were tatty, moth-eaten and falling apart with the pages separating from the spine. This worried me, possibly out of proportion to the attractiveness of the book's contents. Woke up, thinking "Why the hell didn't I buy that?"
 
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Fairly frequently during this lockdown I've had disrupted sleep.
Typically, I sleep for a couple of hours and wake up between 01:00 and 02:00.
Last night's vivid dream was a shocker.
It was one of those where you think you've woken up, but you're really still in the dream.
I got out of bed and noticed a light out on the landing.
I was convinced an intruder was in the house.
I saw something like a fuzzy old black and white image from a Frankenstein movie.
I then woke up in bed
and then it all happened again.
Finally fell asleep around 04:30.
Don't like this at all.
Hate the night and look forward to the morning.
 
Things are quieter at night. There's very little, if any traffic. So we're sleeping deeper and for longer allowing our dreams to become more vivid. That's my take on it.

I live in a very rural village though, where there is little through traffic even when we're not in lockdown. I also run Audible books during the night every night, to block out any extraneous noise, and my dreams are definitely more vivid now than they were. Although it does seem to be settling down a bit now.

Condolences to BugMum on the loss of your cat. I have dreams about one of my dogs who's now gone, but I NEVER dream of the other dog. Who was my Big Old Boy and the best dog ever. No idea why I should dream about the terrier but not him.
 
I had another very vivid dream last night that related to this thread at the end ! I was in a hospital room with five other beds, all of them empty. A nurse ( that I recognised from real life ) put a cannular in my arm which actually hurt a bit in the dream, then left but left the door at the end open where I could see and hear a party going on, a manager type started getting couples to come into the room and dance in front of me, so after a bit of this I got pissed off with it and got out of bed and told the manager type to leave me alone and close the door, he wouldn't so I started shouting, and then someone who I new was Catseye ( we've never met ) walked up to me and said " lighten up, its only a dream ", that is when I woke up ! I'm really starting to enjoy having and remembering these vivid dreams, and I haven't had cheese for ages.

Sorry, I should at least have said 'please'...
 
Evening, had a couple of dreams during the week. First one was, I was sitting on a swivel chair but rolling down the street( more like bombing down the street). Thing was, I could see all around me without motion sickness. And then I just came to a stop, no slowing down, just stopped, that's when I woke up.
Second one was yesterday. This one was bloody weird but scarily worrying, I was at someone's house who I had the impression, I knew. It was a wake and there was only 3 or 4 people there and I had the impression that I was not wanted. I went into the living room and glanced at a mirror and I was wearing, what I can only describe as a "Deputy Dawg" hat( if anyone has seen the cartoon, they know what I mean). Anyway, I turned around and there was one of our union reps and he told me that the family didn't want me there, I went out to the door and woke up.
Those two dreams were the most vivid that I could remember. Would love to know why I dreamt them?, Cracking up under the lockdown ?
 
Compred to some of the borderline nightmares I've been having recently, had a better one last night: I've been listening a lot to a Russian folk group called Otava Yo, who come across as a sort of a folk-rock russian version of Steeleye Span, only with less of a finger-in-the-ear attitude to performance. They appear not to take it too seriously, they're good musicians, and they appear to have a whale of a time doing what they do - joyously infectious. Certainly on the bucket list to see them live if they ever to Britain again. Really good videos too. Anyway. In last night's dream I attended a performance. Damn, can't remember what the song was; might have been the one about the guy who falls for a rusalka (that is one Hell of a good video - very fortean, like an extended dream sequence where bloke sees a gorgeous woman but every time he tries to get closer to her, something gets in the way - like his old schoolteacher who drags him off to give him a lesson, and treats him like he's only twelve)

after a while realised I was the only person there but the band played on, very obliging of them, and I remember, with warmth, the pinball smile for me from the violin player, who I find oddly gorgeous. (Thought that was just me, but Yulia Usava does have her fan club, most deservedly so in her case)

again, unrestrained ego and libido?

But a hell of a good dream! Have to say - the music in the dream was loud and clear, as if I really was watching a live group. I cannot remember on waking what the tune was, though! So, a dream with full orchestration and stereo sound. Interacting with the group - all six members were distinct, none was just "making up the numbers" - and appreciating their talent.


Otava Yo, on the River Neva in Leningrad/St P

This is the one that's pretty much an extended dream sequence - begins in "normality" then gets odder and odder as more fortean elements creep in - at the end he discovers the captivating dream-woman he keeps glimpsing is in fact a sort of freshwater mermaid, a rusalka

You knw the dream you have, when you glimpse a gorgeous woman but something always stops you getting closer to her?
 
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Morning, had another one last night. I'm in an office block fighting aliens, now this really got me, I was zapping them with a plug in soldering iron!!!! So everytime I'm zapping them, I have to plug in the soldering iron. Not only that but there's a crowd of American soldiers from the 50's fighting them as well.
 
On BBC R4's Woman's Hour just now there was a feature on vivid dreams. Seems we're all getting them.

I'm still hardly dreaming at all. This may be because I feel I'm doing my bit towards the National Effort.

(A photo of Techy in scrubs may follow later for anyone who REALLY wants nightmares.)
 
I used to attribute my cyclical vivid dreams to the full moon. Not for any fortean reason but because, in my old house, the moon used to shine in through the window and I'd have to move around in the night to avoid getting the full blast in my face.

But now I've moved, the moon no longer shines directly in at the window, and I'm still getting the vivid dreams. But they seem more constant now and less cyclical, although I can't remember last night's.

The night before last I dreamed I was on a train heading to a shopping centre and carrying a load of bags of shopping. When the train stopped, the doors didn't open and the train began moving back the other way, with other passengers and I all yelling at the driver and hammering on the 'door open' button. Which sounds like a very 'psychological' dream, until I remembered that, when I was on the bus from Sydney to Bondi in February, the bus driver did something very similar. He would open the doors at the front of the bus, but fail to open the doors half way down, so those passengers trying to get off either had to run down the bus or get stuck. There was a lot of very Ozzie shouting and swearing!
 
I used to attribute my cyclical vivid dreams to the full moon. Not for any fortean reason but because, in my old house, the moon used to shine in through the window and I'd have to move around in the night to avoid getting the full blast in my face.

My bedroom gets a lot of light so I made myself sleep masks which work very well.
This morning I woke up, took off the mask and squinted at the time, ooh, 05:10, not getting up yet! but then looked again and noticed that it was actually ten past 8. I'd never have slept until that time without the mask.
 
More from the Very Vivid Dream Files:

Mr. Impy and I were back living at the old condo. He was asleep beside me and I was pretending to be asleep. IRL there is a large window next to the bed but it was now the slider with no curtain or blinds. I saw our upstairs neighbor walk by on crutches and he stopped to peek in several times. Later, a group of people showed up (in the dream they were Russian mafia) and a fight broke out. One of them was a James Gandolfini lookalike who then tried to break into our unit. Bigfoot from Harry and the Hendersons (!?) came out of the closet (so to speak) and attempted to block them from coming inside. They disappeared.

The next part of the dream involved Bigfoot giving me a bunch of seeds. I went downstairs and there was a round table with a Seed Committee who wanted to know what I'd been given.

Another recent dream involved Captain Spaulding from House of 1000 Corpses, who was terrorizing the family who lives at my parents' old house. I ran door to door up and down the street warning people but Tony Todd (guy who played Candyman) showed up and began chasing me through the neighborhood. Of course, everything played out in slow motion.
 
I'm still hardly dreaming at all. This may be because I feel I'm doing my bit towards the National Effort.
During the last two nights I've emerged from the longest dream drought I've had in ten years, and the scraps from those couple of nights aren't at all vivid, but I can't claim to be doing much of anything for anyone other than wearing a home made face mask in public.
 
I was woken from quite a deep sleep this morning by a telephone ringing. A proper old-fashioned 'ring ring' noise, which jerked me awake and I was sitting upright in total silence, reaching for my phone before I realised that a) there are no old fashioned phones in the house (or village, as far as I am aware), b) my phone is set to silent, so, at most, it would buzz, not ring c) my phone hadn't made any noise at all (it's set so that in an emergency someone can get through).

It was early enough (7.15) that it was unlikely to be an external noise that sounded like a phone. The feed wagon goes through around 7am, but that rattles and bangs and usually gets translated into dream noise or wakes me to that half-awake state where I realise what it was and then fall asleep again. This phone ringing woke me completely with my heart pounding.

I know that it was probably just a hypnopompic hallucination, but gosh it was LOUD.
 
The increases in dreams remembered and dreams' vividness has been noted globally, and there's already research afoot ...
Insomnia and Vivid Dreams on the Rise With COVID-19 Anxiety

Fears around the pandemic are causing sleep patterns to change and strange dreams to linger in people’s memories

A novelist recalls a trip to a comic store with Ronald Reagan, who swipes his wallet before he can make a purchase; someone else remembers escaping a collapsing building by climbing into a pilotless plane, where he hid in a toilet; and NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly says that one night, she broke into a colleague’s apartment and stole from a hoard of toilet paper—and then she woke up.

As parts of the United States enter their second month of stay-at-home orders, people’s day-to-day lives are becoming paired with an increasingly strange and vivid dreamscape. And a growing group is experiencing insomnia, an inability to fall asleep, as Quartz’s Amanat Khullar reports. Both seem to be symptoms of stress, part of the shared anxiety surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Common dream scenarios collected by a group of psychoanalysis students in London, called Lockdown Dreams, include the dreamer running away from something or discovering that they’ve done something wrong.

“These are typical anxiety dreams. It’s very pedestrian stuff in that sense, but it’s acted out with such vivid imagination, it becomes very strange,” Jake Roberts, a spokesperson for Lockdown Dreams, tells Donna Ferguson at the Guardian. “Everyone’s quite shocked by the fact that they’re having incredibly vivid dreams. That’s so interesting because our material waking lives have become, in a way, more dull.”

The London-based group is not the only research project tracking the pandemic’s parallel rise in strange dreams. In France, a group at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center began a study on dreams and dream recall in March, National Geographic’s Rebecca Renner reports. And Bay Area resident Erin Gravley and her sister have begun a website called “i dream of covid” that asks visitors to share their recent dreams.

“One of the earliest patterns that I noticed was people associating hugging with danger or menace,” Gravley tells NPR. “So there are a couple dreams where the dreamers described that someone wanted to hug them, and it made them very frightened, even to the point where they would yell, like, you're hurting me; you're going to kill me.”

Another growing theme, Gravley says, relates to anxiety around going to restaurants.

The Lyon Neuroscience Research Center study has found a 35 percent increase in dream recall and a 15 percent increase in negative dreams. For people not on the front lines of healthcare and emergency response, fears of the novel coronavirus are projected onto threats like zombies, bugs, and shadowy figures, which represent the pandemic metaphorically, per National Geographic. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/insomnia-and-vivid-dreams-rise-pandemic-anxiety-180974726/
 
Dealing with a lot of pandemic management stuff in my dreams, boring, mundane just like real life.

I need business as usual, zombies, ghosts, aliens, Nessie, and scantly clad women, who want to sleep with me.

Also - Real life cats could you please stop fucking around in the cupboard at 03:30am? I'm sure the stuff you are doing it vitally important to Catkind but can't it wait??? :incan:
 
Every single night now. Long, complex, vivid dreams. It's exhausting. And if I wake up in the night, I have another dream after I go back to sleep. I'm used to frequent quality dreams but this is another level. And since bragging on here about how enjoyable my dreams were, I've had anxiety dreams almost exclusively.

This morning I woke up from walking around the country trying to find my workplace. I ended up in a quite frankly creepy village called Tehnay in Gloucestershire. (no it doesn't, I looked).
 
A few nights ago I dreamt I was doing some sort of astral projection/out of body thing. Not surprising as I'd been reading about it and it was probably on my mind when I went to bed. This was quite vivid and I remember being surprised at how easily I sort of came out of my body and floated above then buggered off for a bit. Thing is, I totally can't remember where I went or what I saw during the dream. If I try to recall, it's just tantalisingly out of reach. I know it was somewhere fairly mundane, I went, as I remember going back to my body and thinking it had been a bit of a let down but now I could do it effortlessly, would try again probably the next night and this time give it more thought and go somewhere more interesting. I wasn't that bothered because I knew I could suddenly do this almost at will. (In my dream, not reality).

Anyway the point to all this is, when I woke up the next day - this was several days ago - I felt utterly exhausted like I'd been awake all night and had barely any sleep. In fact I'd had one of the longest and most uninterrupted sleeps I've had in weeks. I didn't dream about astral projection the next night or want to - it was exhausting!

To clarify: I don't for a moment think I was having an OOB experience - I was just dreaming about one!
 
The latest batch.
Dreamt I accepted a temp employment contract to cook at a university/college. Got most of the way there and realised I hadn't packed my chef whites and I was wearing unsuitable shoes. For a moment I realised I was dreaming and in a moment of lucidity, realised I could wear anything I damn well wanted - "changed" colour and type of my clothing accordingly. Or thought I did - I looked down and realised I was still wearing grey street trousers. Then realised that didn't matter, as other people around me were seing me in kitchen whites - thought "result, but not the one I intended. Hey, it works".

My working boots were uncomfortable - took one off, the left one, and discovered the insole was rucked up. Straightening it out I noticed it was an inch thick, and there were electronic components sandwiched between two layers of fabric - felt indignant that "they" had fitted me with a tracking device, and han't bothered to make it inconspicuous or even comfortable.

Then realised yet again I was in a universirty setting, in the concrete canyons of a hall of residence complex. (The lucid moment had gone by then). Met a student who took a shine to me - he offered to show me around his rooms in halls which, once we went in through the door, were massive and went on for ever. This guy had a pasion for gaming, modelling and wargaming and some of his work was - wow. He'd constructed elaborate and wonderful scale landscapes with miniature armies manoevring on them, true works of art. I looked at a set of models on a workbench; one was a truly realistic model of a large ominous insecty thing, part centipede, part scorpion, black, coiled and still, about fourteen inches long. I was taken aback when my guide said "That's not a model. don't wake it up. Seriously. Don't wake it up."

I felt a vague guilt at not turning up for the work contract - but also thought "sod it, this is ten times more interesting".

And a second dream... having to do some sort of online aptitude test for work. distracted by being in the company of a girl I used to travel on the bus with - she was gorgeous - and trying to conceal sexual arousal which was, shall we say, obvious. It was the opposite of the usual sort of "naked in public" dream - nobody around me noticed what was hideously and embarrassingly obvious to me and were genuinely oblivious... I wasn't just naked at work, I was also... yes indeed. And nobody around me noticed.
 
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The latest batch.
Dreamt I accepted a temp employment contract to cook at a university/college. Got most of the way there and realised I hadn't packed my chef whites and I was wearing unsuitable shoes. For a moment I realised I was dreaming and in a moment of lucidity realised I could wear anything I damn well wanted - "changed" colour and type of my clothing accordingly. Or thought I did - realised I was still wearing grey street trousers. Then realised that didn't matter, as other people around me were seing me in kitchen whites - thought "result, but not the one I intended. Hey, it works".

My working boots were uncomfortable - took one off, the left one, and discovered the insole was rucked up. Straightening it out I noticed it was an inch thick and there were electronic components sandwiched between two layers of fabric - felt indignant that "they" had fitted me with a tracking device and han't bothered to make it inconspicuous or even comfortable.

Then realised yet again I was in a universirty setting, in the concrete canyons of a hall of residence complex. (The lucid moment had gone by then). Met a student who took a shine to me - he offered to show me around his rooms in halls which, once we went in through the door, were massive and went on for ever. This guy had a pasion for gaming, modelling and wargaming and some of his work was - wow. elaborate and wonderful scale landscapes with miniature armies manoevring on them, true works of art. I looked at a set of models on a workbench; one was a truly realistic model of a large ominous insecty thing, part centipede, part scorpion, black, coiled and still, about fourteen inches long. I was taken aback when my guide said "That's not a model. don't wake it up. Seriously. Don't wake it up."

I felt a vague guilt at not turning up for the work contract - but also thought "sod it, this is ten times more interesting".

And a second dream... having to do some sort of online aptitude test for work. distracted by being in the company of a girl I used to travel on the bus with - she was gorgeous - and trying to conceal sexual arousal which was, shall we say, obvious. It was the opposite of the usual sort of "naked in public" dream - nobody around me noticed what was hideously and embarrassingly obvious to me and were genuinely oblivious...
This made me laugh out loud several times... apart from the bit about not waking that insect thing *shivers*
 
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