Inspired by reports of unusually vivid dreaming during the first Covid-19 lockdown, a small group of postgraduate students at the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit were inspired to start collecting Lockdown Dreams, forming the basis for this series of films. In this third instalment, we asked an international group of psychoanalysts to reflect on their experience of dreams during the pandemic.
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MARTIN GAUTHIER: Here, the lockdown was certainly a shock. It was a narcissistic blow, putting the ego in crisis.
LIZ ALLISON: Freud thought that psychoanalysis was responsible for dealing the third of three major blows to human narcissism. After Copernicus had shown that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, and Darwin had revealed our descent from the apes, our dreams serve as constant reminders of the third painful blow, perhaps the hardest of the three, that the ego is not master in its own house. During the pandemic, the disturbances caused by these night visitors became more frequent, more vivid, and often more upsetting. However, when we decided to start collecting specimens of lockdown dreams, we discovered that many people were very pleased to be offered an opportunity to share them.
RUDI VERMOTE: As analysts, we are used to listening to dreams as part of a process over time, reflecting the inner world of a patient. This project, however, is unique. It presents many dreams without any background of the patient, but all the dreams are related to COVID.
LIZ ALLISON: There have been other examples of collections of dreams, both before and after Freud.
DANIEL PICK: I think Jesuits in the 17th century collected dreams from various far-flung parts of the world. And there's a long history of collecting dreams, I think, in the hope that it would tell the researcher something important. So, there's something, I think, that is interesting to just think about the timing of when researchers and academics as well as psychoanalysts return to the fundamental question of our dream life.
LIZ ALLISON: In the past, collections of dreams have often been motivated by deeply unwelcome and disturbing experiences that feel impossible to process.
DANIEL PICK: These kinds of collective dream projects often seem to come out of periods of conflict and obvious political and social disturbance. So, in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the early Cold War, there seemed to be, also, this interest in gathering collective experiences of dreams.
I want to quote something from Charlotte Beradt's extraordinary project, which culminated in the book, 'The Third Reich of Dreams'. She leaves aside certain dreams to do with violence and war, which she thinks are recurrent through the ages, and instead she tries to focus on dreams that she thinks are really specific and telling her something about fascism and totalitarianism and the period in which she's living. And she insists that those dreams she's gathering are not necessarily to do with the inner world and just the psychic conflicts of the dreamer but might be more to do with the surface of the dream, the manifest dream, that that might be what's interesting, not the depth internally of the dreamer but the actual surface context and content.
And she writes, "Instead they arose from conflicts into which these people had been driven by a public realm in which half truths, vague notions and a combination of fact, rumor, and conjecture had produced a general feeling of uncertainty and unrest." So there's something here about that febrile and anxious, disturbing climate of the 1930s in Germany that she's trying to document and archive through the dreams.
LIZ ALLISON: Freud thought that the meaning of dreams could not be determined without the dreamer's associations, that is, the thoughts that occur to them about the various bits and pieces of the dream if they don't worry too much about whether what comes to mind makes any sense.
DANIEL PICK: If you look at the dream book of Freud, you see how a very brief bit of text, like in, say, the botanical monograph dream, can lead to a massive hinterland of thoughts once he starts to associate from the manifest content to the underlying thoughts. So, a question for historians or social scientists who want to think about this is what can we do with dreams when we don't have the dreamer on the couch?
LIZ ALLISON: What are the risks of considering the dream without knowing very much about the dreamer?
DANIEL PICK: Coming back to that question with Freud, one has to keep in mind the risk of a wild analysis, where we could just use a dream without knowing the associations and end up back in a pre-Freudian tradition of drawing out certain symbolic meanings of dreams in general, which was commonplace in the Victorian period with dream readers - dream books that gathered dreams and gave you their symbolic meanings, as though there was some kind of code where x equals y.
And Freud sometimes does revert to that himself in 'The Interpretation of Dreams', where he takes dreams to be typical in some way. But I think the main thrust of his argument is against that idea of a general discourse on dreams and towards the specifics of a particular dreamer having dreams that have meaning for them.
LIZ ALLISON: Yes, Freud did also consider that dreams made some use of common symbolic connections. He wrote that some of these are as old as language itself, while others are being coined continuously down to the present time. He mentions the example of the Zeppelin, which in 1914 he thought had emerged as a new phallic symbol. But he thought that even if a dream features some common symbols, their meaning can't be fully understood without thinking about the context. Do you think that some of the metaphors Freud himself uses need to be understood in the context in which he was writing?
DANIEL PICK: For Freud, one of the metaphors is censorship - the idea of an internal censor in the mind as well as his ideas about repression and defenses and all the different connotations those terms have. But censorship is striking. And other people have written about Freud's use of images from the Hapsburg Empire and have wondered about his use of metaphors in thinking about the mind and the life of dreams in relation to the politics and society he was living in.
LIZ ALLISON: What about now? Has the virus become a metaphor for the society and politics of our time?
DANIEL PICK: That's always something interesting to look at, both in the past and the present, the metaphorical dimension of ideas like, now, the virus, which is so much part of our thinking. The virus is something that's invisible but also a word we deploy from one context to another. Words can morph just as they can in dreams, but in our language, like the computer virus rather than another kind of virus. We talk about ideas that go viral, but perhaps ideas can also go viral and affect people's unconscious lives.
Their dream lives, too, affect us in shared ways, in our shared feelings of disturbance, now in the age of COVID. So these intersections between what is irreducibly personal and what is also more shared, cultural, and social would be interesting, I think, to think about with the Lockdown Dreams project so that the way in which the COVID crisis might transform and affect the political crisis we're living in, or the other way around, the way in which the political crisis also mediates the way we might understand the pandemic.
So, there are many ways this could go in thinking about the language of dreams, the language of politics, what's shared, what's also more contingent on our particular moment in history, and what's perhaps more recurrent.
LIZ ALLISON: If we think about the experiences of individual patients, we can begin to see how the public and private realms intersect, with the public not only providing metaphors for the private, but also complicating our experience of our private lives.
LYNNE ZEAVIN: I'm going to report a dream of a man in analysis during COVID. And, significantly, this was in the wake of George Floyd's murder here in the United States. The patient is a man in his 60s. He's a human rights lawyer with an early history of object loss. He dreams of being with his daughter. He's close with his daughter, but, because of COVID, he's been unable to see her.
They're on a cruise. In the water are various strange animals, dead and floating, a horse, a coyote. He says to his daughter in the dream, "How did the horse get in the water?" And then there is another scene with a shipping container full of animals, squeezed in, nearly dead, the conditions awful. How can they stay alive? How can they manage? The dream has many contemporary resonances with COVID, with anxiety about survival, reunion. In the background are the terrible conditions of slavery, but it's also uniquely about his and my situation as it depicts his anxieties about his treatment ending. It was due to end that summer and now is being maintained virtually until we can see each other again in person.
The question of dead or alive haunts his analysis. Can it survive? What is the nature of the container, now, in COVID? It's about his uncertainty about my being able to keep him in mind. It's about his own fears of making it out alive. The container keeps the animals alive, but they're highly restricted and compressed, barely moving. The dreamer awakes with a scream. There's the need to deaden terrifying feelings that are now arising, feelings of being locked down, penned in, claustrophobic feelings familiar during the time of COVID. This patient also has a deep well of anxiety about being swallowed up by his object, dehumanized in a way, made unparticular. And then, too, with the end of analysis suspended, a certain quality of life is suspended, upended. He lives in a timelessness of a virtual present.
For this patient, the question of life and death are always around. He's keenly sensitive to loss and affected by it. With COVID, loss is all around us, and looming here, is the question of the loss of his analysis.
LIZ ALLISON: Is it possible that our eagerness to talk about and share our dreams represent individual and collective efforts to process both the disturbing experiences we've been going through and the earlier difficulties that they may evoke?
MARTIN GAUTHIER: There were more dreams reported, altogether, and, for many patients, more curiosity was present. I was observing a greater capacity to be interested in the inner world of feelings and representations. Vividness was part of the presentation in the remote sessions, and it seemed to be a mix of the quality of the dream itself and of the general level of anxiety in my patients coloring the reporting itself. It was, I thought, a sign of how much reality was intruding and how much needed to be worked through in order not to feel overwhelmed.
Two patients also brought dreams with a hypnopompic continuation, where dreaming continued into waking life. Those situations were frightening, not nightmares as such, but close to it. In the two situations, someone was intruding-- perceived as present in their personal space. In fact, their bedrooms, both times. In the sessions, those different dreams were creating an atmosphere of constructive work within, often, the more positive alliance between us. I was surprised not to see the social paranoia invading more of the treatments themselves.
LIZ ALLISON: Our dreamers often reported waking exhausted, as if they'd been working extremely hard during the night. In 1900, Freud had showed that even the most apparently fantastic and outlandish dreams draw on our experiences in waking life. Later, writing in the wake of two world wars, Wilfred Bion proposed that our waking life depends on our capacity for dreaming.
Bion was a survivor of tank warfare in World War One, and he was no stranger to nightmarish experiences which there was no waking up from. He suggested that, in the absence or failure of our capacity to dream, we can neither sleep nor wake up properly, like Martin's two patients who had terrifying experiences that can't be called nightmares because they weren't actually asleep.
ANTONINO FERRO: To my way of thinking, dreaming is a constant feature of mental life, even when we are awake. I also consider the analytical session as a dream to which both the analyst's and the patient's mental lives contribute. To make my comments, I would like to play a game of sorts in which I focus on two of the dreams submitted to the COVID-19 collection and imagine them as dreams recounted by a patient to an analyst during an analytical session in the midst of lockdown. I have chosen this framework because without it, any one of these dreams could have an infinite number of meanings.
So, in the first one, the dreamer gives her dog away to a seemingly trustworthy family, but later comes across a photograph of it lying dead on the road, having had its throat cut. She decides to go and move the body and asks her husband for help. Unfortunately, he seems unable to hear her.
In the patient's account, I would hear that COVID kills. But what is it that it kills? COVID kills the dog or, rather, faith and hope in life, and everything we used to take for granted in our daily lives. The husband who can't hear reflects a difficulty in getting these feelings across to the unhearing analyst.
In the second dream, the dreamer meets a new date in an art gallery, which also sells food and seems to be inhabited by white horses coming from a dark forest. As she moves closer, they appear still and unmoving, almost like a painting. They then come back to life, and she is, again, scared. Before leaving the gallery, the pair decide to get a takeaway.
In this case, it seems that a positive encounter generates powerful and, in some ways, frightening emotions. So much so that she has to transform the horses or ungovernable emotions into a painting, which she can contain and keep them at bay. But it seems that the fear of something wild and unpredictable pervades. Nevertheless, she seems to want to take something of the experience away with her.
RUDI VERMOTE: Some features of the dreams struck me. They are all very vivid. They are all emotional, also, often, bodily experiences, and they are all related to the self. But there is something that I realized with a shock. I was not so much aware of it. It is how realistic dreams are. These dreams all show the real, deadly danger of the virus reflected in skulls, vampires, bats, and so on, a slit throat of a loved dog. They reflect the powerlessness and how we are victims of the virus. They reflect the indignity and the humiliation. They reflect the distrust of others and, also, distrust even of reality and what is fake, and so on.
LIZ ALLISON: As if these dreams are attempts to wake us up to a reality that can be hard to face when we're not asleep.
RUDI VERMOTE: For me, you could say that there is like another channel of being in contact with the inner and external world. Another unknown way of perceiving, and contact with it, you could say. This other zone is maybe without images and without words. And it is like dreams are desperately trying to tell us something from this other world by putting it in words and images. It is like what Freud thought about the umbilicus of the dream - dreams that are referring to another world.
MARTIN GAUTHIER: The lockdown was certainly bringing people to be more in the company of their mind, less able to move away from it. It called for a new hold on inner and outer reality, and it stimulated a spirit of inquiry. This is, at least, what I observed in my practice. But I also observed a greater need to feel the contact of another. Hence, I was also questioning the impact of the lockdown on the reporting itself, and on the need to share the dream experience, to feel the persistence of the link with me while so much was shaken.
LIZ ALLISON: The psychoanalyst, Thomas Ogden has drawn on Bion's work to suggest that two minds are required to help us think our most disturbing thoughts. Maybe we can think of the sharing of these sometimes bewildering and terrifying dreams as an expression of faith and hope that, by reaching out, we may find friends who can help us to be awake to the challenges humanity currently faces without being overwhelmed by them, and support us to keep thinking in unthinkable times.