The lockdown of 2020 was not the first time the phenomenon of vivid dreaming has been observed. This second instalment from the Lockdown Dreams series considers some of the ideas formed from historical precedents on how disturbing events might trigger outbreaks of intense dreaming. Following on from "The Day’s Residues", "Diaries of the Night" introduces these ideas through the lens of our dream collection.
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NARRATOR: Charlotte Beradt, who collected dreams of people living in the Third Reich, suggested that in extreme circumstances, when reality seems to verge on becoming a nightmare, dreams provide a seismographic record of the impact on the psyche. But these diaries of the night are written independently of their author's conscious will.
The pandemic has been a nightmarish experience for many, and our project reveals its dramatic impact on people's experiences of their dream lives. Wilfred Bion, a survivor of World War I and the 1918 pandemic, thought that our dreams protect us from madness. Dreaming allows us to process emotional experiences that would otherwise overwhelm us. If our emotional experiences prove too much for our ability to dream, we can neither sleep properly nor wake fully. When this happens, we feel imprisoned in states of mind that we can't escape as if we are trapped in a nightmare that we can't wake up from.
Some of the dreams we collected represented efforts to shut the door on the disturbance.
DREAMER: What's going on? What's going on? What's going on?
NARRATOR: However, other dreams opened unexpected doors to the things we fear.
Freud's ideas brought about a Copernican revolution in the way we think about ourselves. He once compared the ego to a rider forced to go in the direction his horse chooses. The emotional turbulence we have experienced during the pandemic reminds us that, as he stressed, the ego is not master in its own house. Our dreams record our struggles with this painful realization, but perhaps they can also help us to come to terms with it.
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