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More Vivid Dreaming During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Standard weird, unique dreams for me, but part of this one last night took the cake, as-it-were....

I'm skipping the backstory. Myself and a friend were hanging out, trying to decide on dinner. Then the floating cat-head came.

Apparently, and I knew this in the dream, there was a severed, floating cat-head that would occasionally appear. If it "chose" you (meaning it would come and sort of attach to you) you got "super-luck". Well, I love cats (and in the dream world, even decapitated ones it would seem), so when it appeared I went and pet it. It liked me, so sort of glommed onto my chest. As I was petting it, it grew a modular kind of body. It was furry, but its torso appeared to be made of rectangular blocks. Eventually, as it got happier as I was petting it, it also grew legs.

That's...well that's all, really.
:actw:
 
Standard weird, unique dreams for me, but part of this one last night took the cake, as-it-were....

I'm skipping the backstory. Myself and a friend were hanging out, trying to decide on dinner. Then the floating cat-head came.

Apparently, and I knew this in the dream, there was a severed, floating cat-head that would occasionally appear. If it "chose" you (meaning it would come and sort of attach to you) you got "super-luck". Well, I love cats (and in the dream world, even decapitated ones it would seem), so when it appeared I went and pet it. It liked me, so sort of glommed onto my chest. As I was petting it, it grew a modular kind of body. It was furry, but its torso appeared to be made of rectangular blocks. Eventually, as it got happier as I was petting it, it also grew legs.

That's...well that's all, really.
:actw:
Cheshire cat in reverse?
 
I was sitting at a table (desk?) trying to avoid paying attention to someone seated nearby who seemed to be bursting with chattiness and scanning for a conversational partner. A third person smoothly walked up to my table, said "These came for you", laid three envelopes before me, and walked away before I could focus on him / her. Relieved at the excuse to openly ignore the second person, I examined the envelopes.

All three were letter envelopes (as opposed to small item mailers). One was almost square in shape, had the heft of a birthday card, and was addressed in handwriting. The other two were essentially identical - longer US business-letter sized envelopes, so light as to suggest they held nothing more substantial than a fortune cookie slip, and addressed in identical handwriting. One of these latter two envelopes was sealed. The other was crumpled, its closure flap was completely unsealed, and it was held shut by a single small strip of cellophane tape.

These latter two envelopes had the same return address, of which I could make out only the city and state: G****** S****** N.Y. I was trying to figure out what the city name might be (at one point suggesting and rejecting "Google Scholar") and who it might be that I knew in New York.

I opened the third (unsealed; crumpled / taped) envelope to find two small sheets of paper. After unfolding the sheets I could see that the first page / sheet was water(?) stained on its top half. In the stained area an extremely weak / infirm hand had written "Dear {My Name}" and about 4 lines of poorly scrawled, sometimes printed and partially smeared script. Below this first / top part the paper was unstained and a decidedly different, florid and definitely female script took over and continued for the remainder of the first page and onto the second.

I was having a very hard time reading the first portion of the letter. The only thing I thought I could decipher was "my accident." Combined with the obviously weak writing this shocked me into thinking the letter must be from someone who needed my help, had written from some random location, and who was in such a state they'd needed a second person to finish the letter for them.

I shifted my gaze downward to see what the second hand (perhaps a friend or nurse?) had written, but that action and the adrenaline rush from recognizing someone may be in trouble pushed me into wakefulness.
 
I should keep a dream-book by the bed. The dreams have been very vivid but fade very quickly. I blame the shallow sleep of the early light but the virus may be responsible for the recurring theme of work-related anxiety. A classic no-trousers one left mercifully few detailed memories.

A lot of these dreams involve me in difficult situations with groups of people I seem to know well, within the dream. They are dream - or nightmare - colleagues, often with strikingly vivid faces and personalities but not ever exactly identical to people I have worked with before.

Navigating difficult work-situations is horrible enough but the sleep versions are worse and seem just as serious, though irrational. Last night, I had to comfort a difficult and fragile colleague, who had just puked in a sink. I was informed that it was part of my remit to kiss her!
Such a vivid dream! My first taste-dream! :truce:
 
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Sorry dear. We did have a good thing going, and you did once say to Julie that I was the man of your dreams. Just delivering on the call.
 
OK I can only remember a fragment of the dream I had when I was woken up this morning... but it was suitably creepy.

I was paddling at the seaside, and looked down and realised I was walking on large fragments of/fallen down gravestones. The one I was standing on I just remember the name "Elizabeth" on it. They were Victorian gravestones, but laying flat and smashed up, in very shallow water.

I can't recall anything else about the dream or context.
 
I went to bed last night feeling rather down, and this was compounded by a much-too-involved dream about my ex-boyfriend. Thanks for nothing, psyche.
Oh heck yes must be a pandemic thing. I've had quite a few dreams about exes (one a nightmare ex and the other a lovely one). More than I normally have, for years on end.
 
I was in a dimly lit room talking to a man whose appearance I could not quite make out, deep soothing voice and seemed kindly disposed to me and we shared a bottle of port as we chatted. But the conversation kept shifting, at one point he told me he was a former fighter pilot, thats why I could see his wings. I challenged him to speak sense and stop the nonsense, he sighed and said he was there for me and I would know he was looking out for me by this sign.

He then solemnly gave me an orange and vanished.

I am not keen on oranges or port.
 
I had a dream this morning in which I went to a pub. I had to leave my bike outside untethered as I didn't have a bike lock with me & queued up to get in. Didn't seem to be any covid connection as plenty of people, no masks etc.

There was a slight lucid dream element as whilst queueing at the bar & checking through the window to see my bike wasn't being stolen, I knew it didn't really matter as I was dreaming.

On checking the draught beers available, I noticed one was called Thematic Jesus! I had to laugh & plumped for a pint. I woke up at this point & wrote the name down as I knew I'd probably forget it when I properly woke up.
 
Saturday night, I dreamed I was sat on a pleasant green bank, apple trees were fairly evenly spaced around me, the sun was shining, all in all very pleasant.

At some point I became aware of a very striking African woman standing in front of me, think of one of the warrior women of Wakanda in the Marvel film Black Panther for reference.

She says to me "Look at the leaves on the trees, soon they will begin to fall, your task is to note the place where the last leaf comes to rest, that is the place where you must plant the seed"

woke feeling well rested and was in a good mood all day Sunday :)
 
I was visiting a mine museum and it wasa bit disappointing. So I went into the cafe. There were wooden seats around the edge attached to the wall but nothing between the seats and the bar. My friendmdscwent to the loo while I looked after the seats. I leaned over to put a bag on the seats next to me to save it for my friends which meant i wasn't fully sat on the seat when some irritating woman slipped into my seat and just laughed when I sat down. I did tell her she was out of order and to shift her backside now. She did cave in. Then the bar dissolved into a live production about the history of the mine, complete with the actors appearing as if they were a black and white still of people dressed in victorian clothes turning into colour drama. A bit like the start to the Sullivans.

I think i need to go out.
 
Chains of very odd dreams continue and still fade almost immediately. They continue to be set in grim, workplace settings and with irksome colleagues; many seem grindingly dull, as work often is.

One sequence stuck with me. The nightmare colleagues had clustered around me, more out of curiosity than sympathy, as I was retching at a sink. No, I did not have a killer virus! I held up what had been painfully coughed up: the two sides of a jaggedly-broken VHS video cassette.

No wonder my throat was sore - the pain was a part of the dream! I was - briefly - relieved that it had been only this massive obstruction in my throat. There followed a close-up shot of the cassette parts. Small glands and organs had become parts of the mechanism, which morphed into a kind of organic circuit-board*. These wired-in body-parts, serving in place of capacitors and resistors, were still bloody and pulsing . . . and then I woke up! :puke2:

*Shades of Videodrome, perhaps but this version lacked the squelchy, sexualised imagery of that film, which I had not thought of for ages.
 
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Recently published research from Finland indicates the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed infected our dreamscapes ...
COVID-19 infects majority of bad dreams -- study

Study applies artificial intelligence to analyze content of nightmares using crowdsourced data from more than 800 people during pandemic lockdown in Finland

COVID-19 has turned 2020 into a nightmare for many people, as they struggle with health problems, economic uncertainty and other challenges. Now a team of researchers in Finland has evidence that the pandemic really is a bad dream. In a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists used artificial intelligence to help analyze the dream content of close to a thousand people and found that the novel coronavirus had infected more than half of the distressed dreams reported.

The researchers crowdsourced sleep and stress data from more than 4,000 people during the sixth week of the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland. About 800 respondents also contributed information about their dreams during that time - many of which revealed a shared anxiety about the pandemic.

"We were thrilled to observe repeating dream content associations across individuals that reflected the apocalyptic ambience of COVID-19 lockdown," said lead author Dr Anu-Katriina Pesonen, head of the Sleep & Mind Research Group at the University of Helsinki. "The results allowed us to speculate that dreaming in extreme circumstances reveal shared visual imagery and memory traces, and in this way, dreams can indicate some form of shared mindscape across individuals."

"The idea of a shared imagery reflected in dreams is intriguing," she added.

Pesonen and her team transcribed the content of the dreams from Finnish into English word lists and fed the data into an AI algorithm, which scanned for frequently appearing word associations. The computer built what the researchers called dream clusters from the "smaller dream particles" rather than entire dreams.

Eventually, 33 dream clusters or themes emerged. Twenty of the dream clusters were classified as bad dreams, and 55 percent of those had pandemic-specific content. Themes such as failures in social distancing, coronavirus contagion, personal protective equipment, dystopia and apocalypse were rated as pandemic specific. ...

The study also offered some insights into the sleep patterns and stress levels of people during the pandemic lockdown. For instance, more than half of respondents reported sleeping more than before the period of self-quarantine, though 10 percent had a harder time falling asleep and more than a quarter reported more frequent nightmares. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/f-cim092320.php
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published dream research from Finland. The full research article is accessible at the link below.

Pandemic Dreams: Network Analysis of Dream Content During the COVID-19 Lockdown
Anu-Katriina Pesonen, Jari Lipsanen, Risto Halonen, Marko Elovainio, Nils Sandman, Juha-Matti Mäkelä, Minea Antila, Deni Béchard, Hanna M. Ollila and Liisa Kuula

Front. Psychol., 01 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.573961

We used crowdsourcing (CS) to examine how COVID-19 lockdown affects the content of dreams and nightmares. The CS took place on the sixth week of the lockdown. Over the course of 1 week, 4,275 respondents (mean age 43, SD = 14 years) assessed their sleep, and 811 reported their dream content. Overall, respondents slept substantially more (54.2%) but reported an average increase of awakenings (28.6%) and nightmares (26%) from the pre-pandemic situation. We transcribed the content of the dreams into word lists and performed unsupervised computational network and cluster analysis of word associations, which suggested 33 dream clusters including 20 bad dream clusters, of which 55% were pandemic-specific (e.g., Disease Management, Disregard of Distancing, Elderly in Trouble). The dream-association networks were more accentuated for those who reported an increase in perceived stress. This CS survey on dream-association networks and pandemic stress introduces novel, collectively shared COVID-19 bad dream contents.

FULL PAPER: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.573961/full
 
I see my post above re gravestone was "last night" and posted the 26th.

A couple days after I mentioned the dream here, I found out that an old friend of mine died on the 25th. (I hadn't known he was ill - he fell ill and died rapidly). His relative posted the notice of his passing on FB. Her name? The one on the gravestone I saw in my dream.

Not an uncommon name, but still.
 
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Saturday night, I dreamed I was sat on a pleasant green bank, apple trees were fairly evenly spaced around me, the sun was shining, all in all very pleasant.

At some point I became aware of a very striking African woman standing in front of me, think of one of the warrior women of Wakanda in the Marvel film Black Panther for reference.

She says to me "Look at the leaves on the trees, soon they will begin to fall, your task is to note the place where the last leaf comes to rest, that is the place where you must plant the seed"

woke feeling well rested and was in a good mood all day Sunday :)


Wowser!!!! dreamed it again last night!!!!!
 
So last night I dreamt my boyfriend woke ne up and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I looked at the clock and it was quarter past 3 but the lighting was like dawn. The next moment we are on a beach with some beach huts and rocky hills behind us and a headland to our left. It felt like a cold grey windy October day. I asked "where are we" , and was told East Middleton. We decided to walk into town and i got distracted by pretty gift shops, it was later in the day and getting sunny. As we were driving along all the houses had christmas wreaths on the door and it was a nice well to do area. I stopped aymt a friends and the house was beautiful with a beautiful Xmas tree. But we needed to go to the pub around the corner. But I woke up.

I am definitely missing a social life.
 
Maybe as the leaves start changing, you'll find the seed.
 
Nothing to report, since the intensely vivid dreams I posted here back around May and June time.

I take this as indication that, after some 7 months of this surreal reality, my subconscious is no longer freaking out and enjoying unfettered play at night, but has become used to this "new normal".

As the news gets grimmer and we head towards the next, inevitable lockdown, perhaps it will kick off again?
 
Maybe you could help Mouldy13 find the seed . . .:sherlock:
 
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