My random pandemic partner

My dreams about COVID-19 are back.

And they’re vivid.

I woke up this morning after sleeping a whopping 9.5 hours (who can sleep that long?!), trying to make sense of what my subconscious mind was trying to tell me.

In my dream:

• There were about 50 people milling about in different groups, in a tropical setting with bamboo and thatched huts on risers.
• They were chatting, kind of like people at a party would be doing. I was observing from ground level.
• There were critters (mongoose type) trying to crawl under the thatched roofs. I kept trying to shoo them away.
• I kept my distance from the people, partly because among them, were corpses. I clearly remember walking up wooden steps (like a ladder but sturdier), seeing a big man standing at the top chatting with others. I knew he was dead. I knew he had been infected with COVID-19. As soon as I saw him, I turned around and calmly retraced my steps down the stairs.
• As I watched, the COVID corpse then also walked down the stairs, over to the mound of dirt where his grave had been dug. He crawled into the dirt, lay face down, all covered up.
• His grave was one of many. All above ground. No coffins. Just mounds of dirt. In one, there was the body of a very skinny woman, also lying face down, covered by dirt. Her left leg was poking through. This COVID corpse was bending her leg, bringing her foot up to the back of her butt, repeatedly, as if she was trying to work out stiffness one gets from being in a certain position for too long.

What does all this mean?

Search Google for dream meanings and you’ll get as many interpretations as there are so-called “dream experts”. I do think there is some validity on focusing more on how I was feeling during the dream or when I woke up, than on the actual events of the dream. It’s something scientists and researchers are studying.

Tore Nielsen is a professor of psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and director of its Dream and Nightmare Laboratory. She writes: “One way to understand direct and metaphoric imagery is to consider that dreams express an individual’s core concerns, drawing on memories that are similar in emotional tone but different in subject matter.”

Memories of Ebola

If we take the first part of that quote, it seems pretty clear my “core concerns” are about the spread of COVID-19; specifically, about me getting it, but also trying to protect others by shooing away the mongoose-type critters.

The second part of that quote about “drawing on memories that are similar in emotional tone but different in subject matter” also resonates with me. It won’t resonate with a lot of you. Trust me, that’s a good thing.

I am certain that this dream, and others I’ve had about death and graves during the pandemic, draws on memories from my time on the frontlines of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. A time when I was seeing death in the streets, seeing multiple new grave sites being dug, hearing the wailing of the women, smelling the prevalent odour of the chlorine disinfectant.

Perhaps the dreams are tapping into unresolved emotions and feelings that I have boxed up and put on a shelf high up in a cupboard.

Perhaps – given the timing (2 days into a State of Emergency being declared here in Ontario) – it’s simply my brain helping to protect me by processing new developments in the pandemic’s progression that I don’t sort through while I’m awake.

Regardless, while the dreams can be unnerving, I don’t fear them. I don’t dread falling asleep. And I am sure there will be more before this is all said and done. Figuring out what they’re trying to tell me? That’s a different story.