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Many of my friends are reporting very vivid dreams during this time. I myself know my dreams have changed in quality, though I am having trouble remembering them. Wondering who else has noticed changes in their dream themes or what they have been hearing from others? As we pull inward in our day to day life, dream life seems to be expanding.
This forum is a great place to look at what’s happening in our collective dream life. Would love to hear what people have been experiencing! Are there any recurring themes you see?
Might suggest if you choose to describe a specific dream, to do so in an active way: “I am walking down my street and see ….” It’s a great way to begin working with them.
Also, be sure others would be ok with their actual dreams shared…
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My dream life has always been active; over the last quarter century or more I’ve recorded roughly a thousand dreams in a dozen successive dream journals. They don’t come as thick and fast as in my hitchhiking days, but I still record three to six or so each month.
But since Covid, dream activity has jumped into hyperdrive. More nightmares (or so my wife tells me; I have persuaded her not to wake my when I cry out and am agitated, as that interrupts the dream’s work, which usually resolves itself these days without having to chase me across the threshold into consciousness.).
The first one that stands out from this most recent period was roughly a month ago. I find myself in a large throng of people, entering a huge room with a low conic ceiling; the throng are dressed in drab and colorless apparel, moving slowly because there are so many, winding their way in an S pattern around the center of the room and out a round hole in the wall on the other side through which light is shining. As I approach the center I decide I don’t want to continue and go out the other side, so I turn around and try to make my way back, standing out because I’m wearing bright colors, and am essentially swimming upstream, so to speak. Definitely had a sense on waking that the throng reflected the vast numbers who have died or will die in this plague.
Since then multiple other dreams where people I know who have died are speaking to me, beckoning to me, trying to get my attention. And then several where I am doing something that makes sense in the dream (like taking a pink frothy beverage a five year old girl offered me in a dream around 3 a.m. on Easter Sunday) when a day world thought intrudes (“I should not be drinking out of cups offered me by random children”), which pulls me out of the dream and back into consciousness.
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of talesThis is a follow-up on my previous post about Covid-infused dreams.
As noted above, I have recorded well over a thousand dreams the past 28 years. Though by no means the majority, there are times when waking is triggered by the recognition that I must be dreaming. Usually this happens when I become conscious within the dream of an external reality. For example, I’m skipping down a path or across the lawn, and my skips become longer and longer, and with a little concentration I can extend that until there’s a sense of gliding through the air, even twisting and wafting around a corner. I’ll wonder if people are watching and thinking it’s strange that I’m practically flying, which on the one hand is a bit of a thrill (are they impressed?), and on the other hand makes me a touch self-conscious – and that self-consciousness does me in, for I will realize that what I am doing is impossible, which leads me to wonder if I am dreaming … and with that the dream dissolves and I wake.
Or I will be visiting an old girlfriend in her apartment, and find myself really enjoying her company, perhaps about to get physical, but then find a vague sense intruding that something feels off about this experience . . . and then remember that she is long since dead and buried, which means this isn’t “really” happening, so I must be dreaming – and poof! the dream is gone.
There are other occasions where I realize I am dreaming, but instead of waking, I stay within the dream, reveling in this dual reality. Those are magical moments – to be awake within a dream can be so empowering! This will continue for a space, but usually, after a time, the dream pulls me back in, moves on, and I forget that I am dreaming.
The past few months though, there have been several moments when the reality check that pulls me out of the dream and back into waking consciousness is supplied by Covid. A couple I don’t know comes to the door and I hug them, and then abruptly realize that’s not safe anymore, which triggers the awareness this is a dream, and I wake. Or, just few nights ago, I am excited to be taking a bus cross country with a friend – but experience irritation, a thought not fully formed nagging me in the back of my head, and eventually realize no one is masked and of course I wouldn’t be doing this in waking life, and zap! the dream goes away.
Am I the only one? I’m curious if Covid is invading anyone else’s dreams?
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of talesDreams in times of pandemic: I might have had a couple along the lines of people wearing masks. But one that I recorded was when a revered thinker and I crossed paths. It was a celebration, a gathering to celebrate Joe’s 100th. Many had arrived, but none with masks. To myself, I said, where is everyone’s mask? Soon, I am walking out of the celebration, and who comes walking in, looking handsome, lean, young, youthful, yes, none other but, Joe Campbell. Again, I say to myself, ‘must be the 44 laps at the NY Athletic Club’. I said, “Good Morning Joe!”
This dream was immediately after I had read Rebecca Armstrong’s beautiful piece on Jean, written a few days after Jean passed away. In this piece, Rebecca wrote, “She reminded me again that Joe’s greatest distress was that he felt modern man had lost the capacity to grasp symbolic language; that literalism had eradicated metaphor which, therefore, could not be used as currency for the purchase of insight that leads to true wisdom. He lamented over and over again that his work depended on the reader’s ability to understand and appreciate metaphor, the mythopoetic intent behind story, and without that capability much of what he was trying to say would fall on deaf ears.”
Then Rebecca concluded her essay, recalling a poignant moment in her conversation, with Jean. “Sometimes, I’d come back from the theater and he’d be working in his studio surrounded by books and papers and he’d look up at me and sigh and say with a little laugh: ‘Jeanie, if even one other person truly understands what I’m trying to say, it will all have been worthwhile.’”
Jean stopped and her eyes filled with tears and she said in almost a whisper; “What would he think if he could see all the people who are reading his work now?”“Oh, if only Joe could hear, touch and feel, all the love, admiration, awe and gratitude, pouring out from the hearts of all those who have eyes to see and ears to hear — thousands and thousands from every corner of the world”, said I, before I fell asleep. That night came the “Good Morning Joe” dream.
- What a cool dream! It’s a collective setting, a celebration, and none are wearing masks. I’m curious, Shaheda, if the dream you was similarly unmasked, or were you the only one wearing a mask?
And what is a mask? It’s a face we put on, the way we present ourselves to the world, a “persona” we adopt, if you will (from the Latin for mask) that keeps others from seeing who we really might be (and maybe keeps us from seeing ourselves).
A mask might also signify the veiling – or obscuring – power of Maya (the world illusion we mistake for reality).
And then, given who you bump into, can’t help but also reference Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God – the many representations and incarnations of deity which so many mistake for what is behind the mask, that which is transcendent of deity.
And then, in the dayworld here in the age of Covid, masks speak to protection: protecting one from the dangers of the world outside oneself (the invasive virus), and protecting others from oneself.
Of course, my guess it’s not a case of choose-one-and-be-done, but rather that these possibilities, whether seeming to be at odds, or overlapping, all resonate within that image.
And then there’s that collective scene: in one sense, one could think of the crowd as myriad aspects of your own being: drives and impulses, sub-personas, those bits and pieces of your being that make up you (the polytheistic self, as James Hillman might phrase it), yet indistinct (nothing that stands out from the crowd), not fully emerged from the undifferentiated unconscious. And none of these are masked, none are hidden (including, perhaps, the dream you), a detail underscored when the dream you notices that.
And the celebration you are at – Joe’s 100th birthday (which I seem to recall you actually were, in waking life – the weeklong centennial celebration of his birthday at Esalen, in 2004). Birthdays in dream strike me as significant, suggesting birth, of course, initiation and renewal – and a 100th birthday celebration even more so.
An initiation is composed of two movements: death, and rebirth. Well, the dream is set at a celebration of Joe’s 100th birthday, and the waking you knows, as you did at the actual event you attended, that Joseph Campbell has long been dead at that point, which satisfies the first part of that equation – and yet, surprisingly, he reappears, renewed, with youth and vitality restored!
Intriguing that you credit “those 44 laps at the New York Athletic Club” that he swam daily, which he performed in an Olympic-sized pool; the reborn Joseph Campbell has thus emerged from the water, which is often associateD with the collective unconscious, the collective psyche. There’s a tarot reference there too (as Joe swam two laps every day for each card in the Major Arcana).
That spirit of renewal is underscored when you wish him “Good Morning!” Morning begins with the break of dawn that marks a new day.
My first take, Shaheda, is that this dream presents a hopeful, positive, optimistic image. On the one hand it could be compensatory to all the doom and gloom in the world today, but it could just as much reflect the energies that carry and sustain you amid so much uncertainty and suffering.
I’m sure there’s much more to it than just that, but I can see how that would give you such a lift! No wonder it’s stayed with you!
Namaste . . .
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of talesGood Morning Steve. I apologize for being almost a month too late, but honestly, I did not see this post, and thank you ever so much for taking the time to read and give various pointers to this dream, which remains locked in my dream box.
In my dream there were many others, but none wore masks, and neither did Joe. Again, many thanks for your wise words, “An initiation is composed of two movements: death, and rebirth. Well, the dream is set at a celebration of Joe’s 100th birthday, and the waking you knows, as you did at the actual event you attended, that Joseph Campbell has long been dead at that point, which satisfies the first part of that equation – and yet, surprisingly, he reappears, renewed, with youth and vitality restored!”
I recall seeing a post of yours where you mentioned that you are in the midst of setting up a dream forum. Is this that forum? Then I have arrived at the right place! Ah, @Mary Ann, this is the forum, I had in mind.
As I reach the sunset years of my life, life appears to me ‘like a nightmare that I am walking up from’, really. And so, I like what you wrote: “My first take, Shaheda, is that this dream presents a hopeful, positive, optimistic image. On the one hand it could be compensatory to all the doom and gloom in the world today, but it could just as much reflect the energies that carry and sustain you amid so much uncertainty and suffering.”
In 1893, Mark Twain began exploring the conscious and the unconscious, it was also a time when he wrote : ” Which Was the Dream?” In this essay, the principal thought is that a man who had followed success, all through his life, is suddenly faced with a nightmare of failures and sudden reversals. It was also a time when the new psychology was taking a fresh look at the conscious and the unconscious realms. It’s just when he wrote, “I dreamed I was born, and grew up, and was a pilot on the Mississippi, and a miner and journalist…and had a wife and children…and this dream goes on and on and on, and sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is?”
And so my dream of “Good Morning Joe”, was on the heels of wonderment, very much like Twain’s, “I dreamed I was born, crossed two continents, sailed away from home…I had a career…and this dream goes on and on and on, and sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is?” Those were indeed my very own thoughts before I came across “Which Was the Dream?” and “Which Was It?” (MT)
I think the Norwegian language says thank you best. So “Tusen Takk” a thousand thank yous Steve.
Oh I am not a month late Steve, I misread the date. Instead of reading your response date of Sep 1, 2020, I read the date below, August 19, and of course I missed the years, otherwise, I’d be much too confused.
My August 30 post was a reflection on how Covid has manifested within my dreams (or rather, at the end of them – an intrusion from the day world that pretty much derails my dreams); since Karen had opened a thread months ago on dreams and the pandemic, I thought I’d place that here.
But the dream thread your are looking for is Dream a Little Dream …
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of tales
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