We’re 7 months into this pandemic and it’s still influencing my dreams. Here are the latest ones I’ve had that involve our new normal.
Apparently I’m sure that I’m going to forget something very important. I had one dream where I absentmindedly walked into a store without having a mask on and was immediately mobbed and quite violently chased out of the store because of this. I would try to explain that I had one and just forgot to put it on, but they would have none of it. I think stones were hurled at me and objects were used to shove me out the door.
Another dream I’ve had consists of me trying to go back to work, but it’s been so long since I’ve been there that I get on the train and forget to bring my backpack. Then I have to go all the way back to get it, which means I will have to take a train back and another train back to work and I think about all the people I will have to ride with and how long it will take. Then when I got there, I couldn’t figure out when to have the mask on or when I can take it off and whenever I would put it on, people would just end their conversations with me and leave.
I had one dream where we were having an in-person conference for the first time but we all had to wear masks everywhere, and as soon as you left your hotel room you had to mask up. This was making it super complicated for people with low vision because they couldn’t see anybody’s faces and so they couldn’t find the people they were supposed to meet up with for lunch and coffee and stuff. It meant that we all had to text each other to say where we were sitting, even when we were across the room from each other, so all you heard were phones beeping, sending and receiving texts. It was all very wacky.
I had one that I think was supposed to be happening after this virus was under control. I was supposed to meet a friend at a cafe that I hadn’t visited in a while that had really good desserts. All the way to the cafe, I was thinking about the desserts I would eat and the fun I would have sitting and talking to a friend at a restaurant. But as soon as I got there, I started to panic. Were we allowed to sit down inside, or did we have to find a patio? Were we supposed to grab our food and go? How did it work to sit at a restaurant table again? Did they have chairs or did we have to drag them over? We sat down and I commented that I felt a bit like David Milgaard must have felt when he got out of prison and didn’t know what to do with his freedom. Hey Headrick, melodramatic much? The funny part about that one was I had made a joke about that earlier, in the sense that we won’t remember how to go do all the things we thought of as normal. I kept imagining that scene from the TV movie about his story where he just kept walking in and out of the store because he could. It was weird to have it show up in a dream.
The saddest one simply consisted of me talking to Mom on the phone and she asked “So…if we were to send you Christmas goodies in a parcel, how should we send it?” I had this dream a few weeks ago, so I woke up laughing and thinking it was ridiculous. I should not have laughed. It feels like a very real possibility now that Thanksgiving got compressed to very small proportions. I know it’s a couple of months away and a lot can change, but it feels like the dream is not so ridiculous.
So apparently my mind is working in overdrive on something. I wish it would settle down. At least I’m not having full-on nightmares, but these dreams are weird enough.
I think full-on nightmares are my department these days. None of them are about Coronavirus though, which is kind of funny. I’ve still only ever had that one dream where everyone close to me yelled at me for tinkering with the genetics of it and making it worse.
All my nightmares lately seem to centre around Uber, which I suppose could be my brain trying to warn me that we shouldn’t take Ubers because we don’t know where those people have been.
There was the one where we got picked up by this nice lady who turned out to be the woman who nearly killed my mom and sister in real life years ago because she was reading a road map while driving. When I figured out it was her it was too late to abort the trip and I somehow had to pretend I didn’t know who she was because I was worried she would run us off the road and injure us if I said something. That was fun.
And then this weekend there was the one where we had to Uber to something, but instead of setting our destination for what it was supposed to be we ended up at the house my folks just moved out of. When we got out of the car, the Uber took off right away. When I realized where we were I couldn’t figure out how to leave because they lived in a tiny town that has no Ubers and if we’re lucky, maybe 1 taxi. But then the dude who bought the house from them appeared and told us that we wouldn’t be going anywhere and shoved either guns or batons into our backs, forced us into the basement and locked us in what we always called the cold room when we lived there. It’s a small, windowless room where we used to store things like pop, potatoes, beer, toilet paper and other miscellaneous things we didn’t have room for anywhere else. I don’t recall that door having a lock on it, but he managed to barricade us in there and there was no way out.
So I guess my brain works through its anxieties differently than yours does, not that we didn’t already know this.