Lockdown Dreams Film Launch: Animating the Unconscious

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LIZ ALLISON: Good evening, everybody or perhaps good afternoon or good morning, depending on your time zone. And welcome to this webinar, which we've organized as a pandemic-appropriate launch for the three animated films we've made about the phenomenon of lockdown dreams. It's a real shame that we can't offer you a glass of wine and snacks as would be traditional at a launch event, but we hope to provide you with plenty of food for thought instead.

I'm Liz Allison, the director of UCL's Psychoanalysis Unit. And I'm joined this evening by three key members of the Lockdown Dreams project, Zara Haghpanah-Shirwan and Vanshikaa Savla, former MSc students in the Unit and now honorary research assistants, and Dr. Angela Barrett, the Unit's research and communications officer. I'm really pleased that Connie Noble, the wonderful animator who brought our ideas to life, and Leo Garbutt, who's responsible for the music and sound effects on our long film, "Uninvited Guests" are also with us this evening. And I believe Professors Daniel Pick and Rudi Vermote, two of the analysts featured in "Uninvited Guests" are also in the audience tonight. Welcome, Daniel and Rudi.

We shared the links to our films ahead of this webinar and we hope you've all had a chance to watch them. If you haven't managed to do that yet then hopefully this webinar will make you curious enough to take a look.

So let's get started. One of the many reasons why I've enjoyed this project so much is that it began as a student-led initiative. To get us going tonight, Zara and Vanshikaa are going to tell us about how the project got started and take us back to those very frightening early days of the pandemic in March 2020. Then, I'm going to share a few thoughts about the experience of trying to bring dreams and the specific quality of pandemic dreaming to life. And I'll be talking with Connie and Leo about their experience of working on the films. Finally, Angela is going to provide a research update on our analysis of the data we collected, which is a work in progress. And then, there'll be some time for your questions and comments.

You'll have noticed that currently you're muted because of the number of people joining, but we'll be enabling the chat about 10 minutes before we open the floor to you, so feel free to post questions via that channel when it opens. And when we open up the discussion, you're also welcome to use the Raise Hand function and we can spotlight you if you'd prefer to speak. We're really interested in your responses to the films and we would love for you to share your thoughts about them, either during the webinar or in the feedback form we'll be asking you to please take a few minutes to complete. But for now, over to Zara and Vanshikaa to take us back to a time that we might all wish to forget.

ZARA HAGHPANAH-SHIRWAN: Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. So what I'm going to do at the beginning is just spend a few minutes here, I'm going to take us all back to a very strange and unnerving time at the very start of the pandemic. I want to briefly remind us all of the atmosphere, the anxiety, the fluctuating restrictions around at the time. It seems a long time ago, now. We all have our personal experiences and memories of the pandemic. And many of us have been deeply changed by what's happened and who we may have lost. So I hope that this general introduction helps us get back into the collective mindset that created some of our dreams and the struggles that many of us experienced in what was repeatedly referred to as an unprecedented time.

So this is quite UK-focused. Just to take us back, it was in January 2020 that Patient A landed in the UK. And that was the first confirmed case of COVID-19. By March, the government was advising people to stop non-essential contact. And for those of us in the UK-- and we all have our own experience of the countries that we were in-- there was an unnerving atmosphere around when we felt, what's going to happen? We're not quite sure. By March, Boris Johnson, our prime minister, announced the first formal lockdown in the UK and we were officially told to stay at home. Then followed phased lifting of lockdowns, introduction of regional tiers. We had various schemes to get us in and out of the house as government changed the guidelines-- "Rule of six". By October in 2020, the second UK lockdown was announced. And then, the world continued to go in and out of tiered systems, local, national lockdowns for the next two years. And as I speak now, Shanghai's ive-week recent lockdown is being extended and Beijing is tightening restrictions. So this is by no means over.

There's, sadly, been a total of over 175,000 recorded COVID-19 deaths in the UK so far. So here is some news headlines from the time. These are some front pages from the UK during the pandemic. And I put these here to show the emotive language and the urgency of the rolling news. Terms like panic, crisis, national emergency, and death filled the airwaves. Stuck inside at home by government mandate, many of us were glued to the news as the situation unfolded. We were subject to an onslaught of terrifying reports as the virus raged around the world, and we were all anxious at what news the next day would bring.

OK, a little reminder of what were these lockdowns? So the phrase lockdown's been used since the 1970s about prisoners or psychiatric inmates who are in an extended period of confinement. The term lockdown quickly entered our language, and it dictated our everyday lives. We all stayed at home. We looked to the government for rapidly changing guidelines about who we were allowed to meet, when we could leave our homes, or even when we could walk our dogs. Here, you can see some of the government posters and messages, along with some social distancing signage, as well. Lockdowns and the associated tier system included severe restrictions on our freedom. Some of these just included stay at home, planes grounded, travel stopped, and for some, a desperate scramble to get home as all the methods of travel ground to a halt. We had the government slogans. We had restrictions on visiting loved ones in care homes, which caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. Medical appointments were restricted. Women had to go into hospital to give birth alone. People had to have chemotherapy appointments alone.

And under all of this, there was no idea when these lockdowns would end, when we could see our friends and family again. This resulted in a Christmas that had to be held on Zoom for many people in the UK. And there was a complete shift to online where possible, including for us at UCL. OK, so here are just some striking images of daily life in lockdown. You can see here, empty airports, empty Central London. Therapy moved online where possible. There were daily press briefings. Schools were closed. The government itself met on Zoom to do its business. We were being beamed images from around the world of hospitals being overwhelmed. And there was runs on supermarkets, including toilet rolls, which-- those of you who've seen our animations will see pop-up in the animation.

Along with this, there was paraphernalia of the pandemic. As governments desperately searched for PPE for NHS staff, carers, and frontline workers, the rest of us incorporated social distancing, hand-washing, and face masks into our everyday life. We were told to disinfect surfaces and avoid touch at all costs-- the most basic, tactile, human sense. So, here you can see some of the signs and the real terror and paranoia about contamination, really, from other people.

So what did all this mean for us as students of psychoanalysis at the time? Well, at the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit all lessons actually switched seamlessly, quickly online. Whilst at home behind our screens, a small group of us began to notice people were talking of experiencing exceptionally vivid dreams on social media. Alert to the importance of dreams ourselves as students of psychoanalysis, we decided to start collecting them. And we put a form up online inviting members of the public to share their dreams with us. We were overwhelmed by the response. The project was built on the belief that the dreams of this period were a special type of information or a record of the emotions and unconscious of the nation, and that they deserved to be collected or preserved in some way. We went on to have more than 500 dreams collected from around the world, and our project was, in part, inspired by Charlotte Beradt's inspiring work, "The Third Reich of Dreams", which many of you will be familiar with.

OK, so here are some old newspaper cuttings I found on dreams. Just to give a bit of context, this is of course, not the first time that dreams and their meanings have captured the public imagination and hit the headlines. Here's some examples that I've just taken from UK newspapers from 1850 up to about 1920 as an example of the fascination with dreams. Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" is one mighty contribution to a very long tradition of dream books that have been flourishing since the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and throughout. So dreams have always really-- dreams and how to interpret them have always been news. Saying that, we were quite overwhelmed with the press attention about our online form. So our projects, along with other researchers who were working on collecting dreams hit the headlines around the world. People were looking for meaning in a senseless time. The media was repeating the same questions asked by the ancients to the oracles-- what do our dreams mean, and what can they tell us?

So, I'm now going to hand over to Vanshikaa who's going to talk a little bit more about the project.

VANSHIKAA SAVLA: Thanks, Zara. So, I'm going to speak a little bit about the scale of the pandemic when we started collecting the dreams, as Zara's already briefed us a little bit. I'm going to give more stats and figures about what was going on when we started collecting the dreams. So, in March 2020, nearly 10 million Americans were out of jobs, including a staggering 6.6 million people who applied for unemployment benefits in the last week of March in 2020. The unemployment rate rose from 4 to 14 percent, which was up by nearly half a million, at the time. I show on the graph on the right, you can see there's an absolute increase between 2018 to 2022. And the stark rise is right in the beginning of 2020 in tandem with the increasing spread of COVID-19 and the resultant lockdown in the US.

About April 2020, half of the world's population was under some form of lockdown, with more than 3.9 billion people in more than 90 countries having been asked or ordered to stay at home by their governments. These measures included compulsory or recommended confinement, curfews, quarantines-- all sorts of different partial or total lockdown. By May 2020, Japan and Germany, two of the world's largest economies, entered recessions. European Union leaders on the 21st of July agreed on a large spending package to rescue their economies, the amount being a total of $857 billion to benefit nations hit hardest by the pandemic in July.

The global hand sanitizer market was valued at $6.02 billion US dollars in 2021, and the disposable face mask market size was valued at about $38.9 billion in 2021. And it's continued-- expected to rise for both of them. The reason I mention this is because a large number of our dreams mentioned face masks and hand sanitizers-- things like that. In this slide, I've put together a few pictures to show what lockdowns were like across different continents. So, as you can see, these are some of the most populated areas in London and the US. London shops and streets were absolutely deserted after the announcement of the second national lockdown in the UK. I mean, rarely has anybody seen a sight like this-- of Times Square and Trafalgar Square this empty. In the second picture, you can see Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, was cut off by the Chinese authorities suspending all modes of travel. It's a city with a population of 11 million looking completely deserted, even on its busiest highways.

Towards the end of May 2020, Brazil had overtaken Russia and the second-highest number of cases worldwide. Venezuela imposed a national quarantine, while Colombia and Costa Rica closed its borders completely. USA remained the hardest hit in terms of number of cases of COVID-19 in May 2020. Four months after reporting its first COVID-19 case, the US recorded more than 100,000 deaths due to infection, higher than any around the world at the beginning. Next slide, please.

So, as an overview of our dream collection at this point of time, when we had just began to collect our dreams-- a large number of them were collected in April and May of 2020 during the height of the first national lockdown in the UK-- there was a rapid inflow of dreams, and more than 200 dreams submissions were received in May alone. Dream collection for the research project, which Angela will speak about later, began on the 29th of July 2020 and ran until the 6th of April 2021, covering the second wave of the pandemic and the second national lockdown in the UK. The second wave of COVID-19 was recorded beginning of September across Europe. In the UK, the second wave brought back the "Rule of six", working from home, and the 10:00pm curfew. The tier-based, more severe additional restrictions were introduced later in December 2020, leading to a Christmas over Zoom for many people and their extended family.

A preliminary analysis that we ran to figure reoccuring words and things like that were most commonly used and you can see the picture on the right, which shows the kind of words, emotions, things people felt, and occurred most often. Further research and analysis of the dreams will be discussed by Angela. Next slide, please.

So, this is a little chart to explain the distribution across countries and dream submissions for the research project. As you can see, it's actually quite varied. But a large number of them were collected from the UK, followed by Canada and the United States of America. This is just so you can understand that the timeline I will discuss next is picked up from the UK. And also, the distribution of the countries can be explained by the fact that it was a UK-led initiative with the majority of the press coverage in the UK itself. Next slide, please.

So, this is an overview of the volume of dreams we received and the timeline where we received them. Towards the end of July, the vaccine trials-- the first of which to be tested on humans was the Moderna vaccine-- had begun to show promising results. It's also the reopening of indoor dining and "eat out to help out". So, this was just the beginning of a hope for reduced measures of the lockdown and reduced dreams. August marked the easing of lockdown, which was followed by a subsequent rise in cases. In September, the UK recorded the beginning of its second wave of COVID-19. Restrictions, such as the "Rule of six", were brought back. And by October, England and Scotland were under the tier-based restriction system, which ranged from medium alert to strict stay-at-home rule for tier 4 cities.

So, you can see, the first peak appears just at the beginning of November 2020, when the vaccine efficacy was proven. This was the period of a month-long lockdown in the UK, but it was also the month where all three companies-- Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca-- declared vaccine efficacy over 90%. In December, the UK approved its first emergency use of the Pfizer vaccine, and it was also the month Prime Minister Boris Johnson abruptly issued a national lockdown just before the Christmas holidays. The second and the highest peak we see in the dream submissions was in January, when the UK witnessed the peak of its COVID-related deaths, with more than 1,000 deaths being reported daily for over a week. A new variant of COVID-19 was recorded, which appeared to be more transmissible. Several countries closed their borders to the UK by this month. This is when we observed the second highest peak since July 2020. Following the month of January, we saw a consistent decline in the number of dream submissions, as the lockdown measures were steadily reduced over the course of the next few months. After almost a year of dream collection, that's when we brought it to a close in the first week of April, with more than 200 dreams collected for our Lockdown Dreams project.

So, now I'm just going to discuss the project outcomes. We were impressed and thankful for the outpouring of dreams we received from the people across the span of our dream collection. The pandemic and the lockdown is a significant period in our history, and we found it important to keep a record of this special time. Furthermore, we wanted to find ways to share these moving dreams with the public in a way that truly captured the essence of the atmosphere of the time. As Liz will mention, we thought it would lend itself to the public through animations. We created three films, "The Day's Residues", "Diaries of the Night", and "Uninvited Guests". We wanted to find a creative medium that best presents the bizarre world of dreams. Like us, it seems most people were evidently curious about the meaning of their suddenly-vivid dreams. Now, I'll hand over to Liz who will talk more about using animation as a creative medium to uncover dreams, and how it converges with psychoanalytic thought. After which, Angela will talk more about the research paper.

LIZ ALLISON: Thank you very much to both of you. As you were taking us back to that time, I could feel my anxiety levels rising just with the memories of what it was like. It's quite a powerful reminder. Thanks.

So, as Zara and Vanshikaa's presentation shows, in early 2020, when the whole world shut down and we were shut up with our fears of a potentially deadly disease for which there was no known cure, our minds went into overdrive, generating dreams that could feel exhaustingly vivid. You've just heard about the initiative that the students of the Psychoanalysis Unit took to capture this global phenomenon. We were amazed by the response to their invitation to contribute dreams and the media interest in the project, and moved both by the immense curiosity that people obviously felt about what was going on in their minds, and by their evident conviction that it was somehow meaningful.

The stubborn belief that all this must mean something mirrors the bet on which psychoanalysis was founded. The origins of psychoanalysis lie in Freud's attention to his own dreams and the dreams of his patients, and his willingness to fly in the face of his scientific contemporaries by taking seriously what so many had dismissed as the mind's detritus, as in the German saying, "Träume sind Schaum" - dreams are froth. In "The Interpretation of Dreams", Freud came out in strong support of what he describes as the ancient and jealously-held popular belief that dreams really have a meaning. And above all, it was his investigation of dreams which, very importantly, he had in common with his patients, notwithstanding their pathology and his apparent normality, that led him to formulate his distinctive dynamic conception of the human mind in which our deepest wishes-- whose roots are ultimately infantile-- inevitably come into conflict with the rational, adult part of the mind, which recognizes and respects the constraints of material and social reality. Even though in his model, our capacity to think, plan, and reason only developed to enable us to fulfill our desires. Freud understood our dreams as disguised manifestations of our forbidden wishes which in waking life are kept unconscious, but are permitted expression-- albeit in disguised form-- while we're locked down in sleep paralysis.

I'd like to read you a passage from "The Interpretation of Dreams", which, in light of recent experience, seems to me to eerily prefigure the phenomenon of vivid dreaming that can occur when we're subjected to constraint. This is what he writes: "The censorship between the unconscious and the pre-conscious, the assumption of whose existence is positively forced on us by dreams, deserves to be recognized and respected as the watchman of our mental health. Must we not regard it, however, as an act of carelessness on the part of that watchman, that it relaxes its activities during the night? I think not. For even though this critical watchman goes to rest, it also shuts the door on the power of movement. No matter what impulses from the normally-inhibited unconscious may prance upon the stage, we need feel no concern. They remain harmless, since they're unable to set in motion the motor apparatus by which alone they might modify the external world. The state of sleep guarantees the security of the citadel that must be guarded." End of quote. Because the citadel is secure-- locked down in sleep, we could say-- the dream show can go on.

The rich, evocative, sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny, quirky, and diverse dream material that came flooding into the Lockdown Dreams database provided us with a striking reminder of the mind's immense creativity, even in the darkest times. But what were we going to do with all this material? A bit later, you'll be hearing about the research component of the Lockdown Dreams project. But actually, the response that initially felt most appropriate to this outpouring was a creative one-- a homage to the inventive capacity of what Freud called that most marvelous and mysterious of all instruments-- the mind. A creative capacity which was so dramatically displayed by the people who submitted their dreams to us. That's why we decided to create short animations, offering some psychoanalytic perspectives on the phenomenon of lockdown dreams with the support of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) who generously funded the making of the films and have published them as an open-access part of their archive.

So why animations? Many commentators have noted that cinema and psychoanalysis have their origins in approximately the same historical period, around the turn of the 20th century, and that some of the key psychoanalytic concepts have cinematic resonances. You might want to look at the writing of Andrea Sabbadini and Vicky Lebeau on this topic. For example, in psychoanalysis, we talk about projections and screen memories. And film enables a break with the unities of time and space enforced by classical theater, allowing for the deployment of the mechanisms of the dream work that Freud described in "The Interpretation of Dreams"-- condensation, displacement, symbolic expression, and distortions of time and space. Hollywood has often been described as a dream factory.

Another reason why film was the medium of choice is that so much of our experience of lockdown involved interactions with and through screens. And then, the playfulness of animation lent itself particularly well to the quirkiness of a lot of our material. It allowed for transitions and transformations that a more realistic approach would have made extremely difficult. And maybe it also provided a necessary counterpoint to the darkness of some of the feelings being expressed, just like dreams do.

When Freud was writing "The Interpretation Of Dreams", his close friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess complained that the book contained far too many terrible jokes, because the clue to the meaning of a dream is so often found via a pun. Freud's English translator, James Strachey, struggled with the difficulty of translating the dreams where this was the case. And he apologized to his English readers for having taken what he calls the pedantic and tiresome approach of keeping the original German pun and laboriously explaining it in a square bracket or footnote. He noted mournfully that any amusement that might be got out of the pun completely evaporates in the process. But Freud responded robustly to Fliess's complaint: "It is certainly true", he wrote, "that the dreamer is too witty. But it's neither my fault, nor does it contain a reproach. All dreamers are equally, insufferably witty, and they need to be because they are under pressure and the direct route is barred to them."

For the two short films, we took inspiration from a handful of the dreams that seem particularly evocative to us. If you haven't found them already, you can find details of these dreams on lockdowndreams.com. If you go to that website and click on the dream collection link, and you can click on the images, which you'll see correspond to some of the images in the films. For the longer film, we shared a selection of some of the dreams we'd collected with the participating analysts and invited their reflections and responses rather than asking them any specific questions. You might say that we invited their free associations. They individually recorded their thoughts on their phones and shared the recordings with us. None of them had any idea of what the others would say. We then combined these, in some cases, cutting the recordings into snippets and then piecing them together in different combinations to create an imaginary scene in which, ultimately, the six participants come together.

It has occurred to me that the work we did on the film is not dissimilar to the process of construction of a dream as Freud described it, in which the whole mass of the dream thoughts is broken-- is brought under the pressure of the dream work, and its elements are turned about, broken into fragments, and jammed together, almost like pack ice. But then again, is it more like what Freud described as secondary revision, in which incoherence is smoothed out to create a narrative with superficial coherence? This is a question we could discuss, but I think my provisional answer would be that to come down too hard on the side of conscious intentionality underestimates the point that we try to emphasize in all the three films-- that is that from a psychoanalytic perspective, the ego is not master in its own house. That is, we didn't fully know what we were doing.

I'll give one example to illustrate this. In "The Day's Residues" there's a scene where a purple rabbit is nibbling on some leaves, and there's then a close up of the contents of its stomach undigested. It was only when I watched the sequence that I realized how it resonates with the metaphor of digestion used most powerfully by Wilfred Bion to describe how the mind strives to come to terms with unpalatable reality. Bion also emphasized the important point that often two minds are needed to think unthinkable thoughts and digest difficult experiences. Working on this project has been an experience of a collective of minds coming together, which for me, anyway, was a really important antidote to the isolation of lockdown.

So now, I want to invite two of our most important collaborators onto the virtual stage, Connie Noble, our animator, and Leo Garbutt, who was responsible for the music and the sound effects on the long film. Welcome, Leo and Connie.

So, maybe I could start by just asking you to say a little bit about why you were initially drawn to this project. Of all the things that you could have been spending your time doing, you chose us, which we're very pleased about. But I'm just interested in what might have appealed to you about it.

LEO GARBUTT: Connie, you go ahead.

CONNIE NOBLE: Well, I think from my side, I think like everyone here-- I'm sure everyone in the world-- I think I also had some weird lockdown dreams. And I think I'm still having a couple of them. Like it's ongoing. I'm not sure when these COVID dreams will end, like about overcrowded space and masks. And I think seeing a project that was-- at the start when you approached me, we were looking at just interpreting the dreams and seeing how I interpreted them. So, I think it was a really interesting approach to work with an animator in that way, to see how I might use them-- well, how I might see other people's dreams. But from my side, yeah, that was it. Because I'd experienced it, which is great.

LIZ ALLISON: Thanks.

LEO GARBUTT: Yeah. Yeah, I feel the same way, really. I think I saw it as an opportunity to process the emotional difficulty, really, I think we all felt of lockdown and everything that was associated with that. Music, for me, has always been a really great way of doing that. And also, the challenge of the project looked really appealing, as well. In the past, soundtracks that I've done, it's been mainly music-based, responding to, obviously, what's in front of me, in terms of the visuals, but also to-- on this occasion-- that added component of looking at all these different visual cues brilliantly illustrated by Connie, and just trying to fit in these sound effects and trying to think about the sound effects in a creative way, which I, perhaps, go into later. But that was a lot of fun.

LIZ ALLISON: That's great, thanks. And I'm sure some people will be quite interested in the more technical side of what you did. And I was just wondering, Connie, whether you could say something about what the more challenging aspects of the animation process were with these films, apart from our constant perseveration on how Freud should look!

CONNIE NOBLE: Well, I was going to say, I think the main thing is recreating people who exist in real life. So for example, Rudi and Daniel, who are on this call-- actually illustrating people who exist, rather than just people in my brain who I've thought up. And I think it's challenging to get that gist of what people are, but also creating this funky, little animation that was also about the surreal and the unconscious, and seeing how they could work together. So, I think it was interesting, rather than just creating an animation or an illustration about something that exists, but also working on things that don't exist, and things that I've never seen or never experienced. So, that was, I suppose, a difficult thing, but also it was really exciting because it was the first time that I've created an animation that was about something I hadn't personally experienced or maybe you can't see, or can't explain in the easiest way. So I think, yeah-- illustrating real-life people was maybe the hardest part of that, and also getting that right without offending anyone. And Freud, of course-- and also illustrating Freud, who at the point-- I was trying to get him in his best shot, but obviously it's difficult, because Freud through the ages is very different.

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah. Yeah, I think you did a great job, though. Leo, do you want to-- say anything about the sound side of that?

LEO GARBUTT: Yeah, absolutely. I think that related to that, it's this process of taking Connie's animation and the narrations, and so on, and thinking about how to emphasize the structure of the long film-- 20 minutes-- and do it in a way-- take that as an opportunity to emphasize a certain sort of emotional journey throughout the animation and to try and create resonance-- so, the resonance that I felt with what was being discussed and try to do that in a way that's accessible and can be received by others. And so, there I am, late into the night on a few evenings with my keyboard synth in front of me, and I'm of playing the animation back on the software, looking at it whilst recording takes, and takes, and takes of different chord progressions, melodies, that sort of thing, and different sounds, as well-- hundreds of different things that I could possibly use. And just through a process of trial and error trying to land on, like I say, ones that worked. And obviously, that's a lot of fun, but you could spend forever doing that. And it's a question of, at what point do I stop? And also, how do I make sure all of these different sounds, all of these different progressions-- how do they transition between these different components of the animation?

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah. Maybe I'll just explain that the way that the process worked was that we completed the visuals before Leo started working on the sound. So he was basically presented with a finished film but with no sound, apart from the audio of us speaking-- the participants speaking. And then, he built the soundtrack around that. And I was thinking about how much adding those elements adds, and how much the music carries the emotion that we're talking about in the film. That was really striking to me when I saw it with the music, having seen it without previously.

LEO GARBUTT: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's, I suppose, a lot I could say about that emotional reaction to both the narration, and the dream data, and all of that, plus the animations, as well. And I mean, for me, I think-- I mean, Zara and Vanshikaa touched on the atmosphere of the lockdown and the regulations that were in place, the restrictions-- but it seems almost alien now when we think about it. Queuing for food, you can't see your friends, your family. Your geography is limited to your local area, unless you're a key worker, so the world becomes smaller, impersonal. Your experience of life becomes narrower. And you're sort of-- I found myself becoming quite reliant on trying to keep in mind memories of others and of places and how our relationships translate into the digital realm. How can a friendship, for example, where I see people face-to-face-- worrying about how that can be maintained over Zoom, or WhatsApp, or something like that. And noticing just-- perhaps rather than take a 20-minute walk, I'll go a bit further-- push the boundaries and go 45 minutes, an hour. And seeing a place and thinking, wow, I've lived in London six, seven years, but this place seems so different. It puts you-- I don't know about others, but it put me in a completely different state of mind. It brought me back to the before times.

And I think being surrounded by news of death and news of friends or relatives who've experienced bereavement and so on, it was very, very difficult. And something that I thought was interesting is that you start with this very bleak assessment of life. When you're confronted with death, you think, when does this end? What is my life now? What is the value of this? And then, I found, started transitioning, perhaps last year, into something a bit more hopeful. How do I want my life to look like after COVID? Who was I before lockdown? What did I like about that, and how do I want society to improve now? I think we've all had ideas about this. And it's got these parallels with World War II-- after that, and thinking about the collective sense of wanting something different. And I think, also, why there's been so much anger about the lockdown parties in Number 10. It's brought to the fore all of that-- I think people's emotions and sadness about that experience of lockdown.

And so, all these animations and the content of them-- yeah, a brilliant-- brilliant opportunity. And that was sort of the emotional journey and why I wanted the film to-- in terms of the musical component-- to represent that darkness, represent the eeriness-- the creaking of the door that sounds very menacing, that you can hear layered with reverb during Lynne's account of her patient. The dissonance, and then trying to make it more playful with the rabbit and the morbid humor-- the dog being scraped off the floor with the spade sound, and so on. Finally, I was particularly moved by Martin Gauthier's words, and that's where I really wanted that emotional transition-- the lightness. And Liz also, your concluding remarks to that cautious optimism about the future. To end on that note, I thought, was fantastic, and I think to try and accentuate that with the music to leave people with a sense of hope and what we want the world to be.

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking that sometimes when I reflect back on that time, it's like thinking about a bad dream. And then you realize, oh, no, that was real. That really happened. And sometimes, that feeling of, is it real, or am I dreaming all this, can still come back, but that maybe now, it's more possible to have a sense of all of that as having been in the past and there being a future. And maybe, one of the things about music is that it is a temporal experience. It's an experience in time. And so part of what that does-- adding that-- is to restore the experience of time.

LEO GARBUTT: Yeah.

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah.

LEO GARBUTT: Absolutely.

LIZ ALLISON: Maybe another question that you both might have thoughts on, which I'm quite interested in, which is, how does working on something like this differ from the more commercial work that you've done?

CONNIE NOBLE: I think, from my side, it was really enjoyable. I suppose, in a commercial project, I get told, this is what to draw. This is the outcome. And I know exactly how to get from A to B. But I think what was really interesting with this project is when we first initially sat down and spoke about it, it was like, we don't actually know at this point where the end point will be. We're just going through a journey of this research. And it was really nice to have like a collaboration.

And you asked my reflection of-- I got given some of the dreams and went through them and then had my interpretation of it. So, it's completely different, in a sense-- in my opinion, probably one of my favorite projects to work on because there was that freedom, but also that communication to create something completely different. Like, I've never worked on a project like this before, and I don't really think I will again, because there was that just complete collaboration throughout the whole film. And also, that we didn't just create one final piece-- there was actually three different, separate, final films that all do something different, but captivate the whole research project together.

So, I think it was-- yeah, it was very, very different to how I usually work, but I loved it, it was great. And it was nice when you would say, oh, we want a rabbit here, but actually that's it, that's the only piece of information I've got to go off. And I'm like, right, OK. So, you've got to piece it together. But I mean, that's amazing. That's exciting. So yeah, very different, but fun.

LIZ ALLISON:Yeah, and Connie added elements in that none of us had thought of. So, for example, there's that bit in the long film where Daniel is speaking about the dream of the botanical monograph. And there's this image on the screen at that point of a flower. And then, you see the roots spreading out below the flower, representing the network of thoughts that go into a dream. And that came from her, not from us. It was a really beautiful addition. Leo, did you want to?

LEO GARBUTT: Yeah. I think in terms of the commercial comparison, I found that you always want to make it sort of upbeat, and it always ends up being a little bit repetitive, a little bit of progression, but you just don't want to get in the way of whatever they're putting on screen to promote. And so, although I have had freedom there, within that freedom it doesn't have the same sort of flexibility, the dynamics that a project like this would invite. Especially one of this length, as well, which has been a great opportunity to be involved with.

The only comparison I could make with a previous soundtrack of this type was a soundtrack for a Dementia Wellbeing project in Camden, North London. And it was, again, that transition of challenges that people with dementia face and trying to look at all these positives of this dementia action group-- what they're doing. And that was a good sort of test bed, perhaps, for this project.

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah. Great, thank you. I've got a couple more questions that I'd like to ask both of you, which relates back to what I was saying about the way this kind of evolved in a way that we weren't fully in control of. Looking back at the three films, what are your favorite parts of the films and why? That's one. And was there anything that surprised you about how they turned out when you saw them finished?

CONNIE NOBLE: I think from my end, my favorite parts were animating other people's dreams. Because I think there's not a clear narrative, and we had the dreams and we were sort of intersectioning them throughout the film. So when I was working on them, I wasn't working in a linear order. So it was just really fun to take a small snippet, for example, like the rabbit's stomach and animate the swirling bits of that part. Or, for example, looking at the characters and how they might behave in a certain situation. And for example, when we were looking at Daniel's screen and there's computer pop-ups, and just adding elements on there that might not make sense if they were just sat on their own, but with the script and the sound they all made sense together. So I loved animating those bits.

And also, all the different foods and lockdown foods-- because I think pasta, bread, yeast-- all these things that are just so synonymous with the lockdown. They're just what everyone bulk-bought-- toilet paper, all these different things. They were my favorite parts to animate. And I think what surprised me is after creating the films-- a lot of the time on commercial projects I'm working on, I don't want to look at the stuff I've created afterwards. I'm like, once it's done, I can't look at it anymore. It's been too long, like it's gone. But it was really great to see films that I still find myself going back and just watching bits, and just seeing at that present time what we were talking about and what we were creating. And especially, since Leo added the sound, seeing this whole new light to it and this emotion. So, I think it's really surprising that I actually want to go back and watch stuff I created rather than block it out of my brain forever and never look at it again.

LEO GARBUTT: I think the best thing I can do, perhaps, is just comment on the first two-- so the short films-- in terms of what my favorite parts were. And I think I remember sending you an email, Liz, just with my instant reaction. And I think what I said in that was about just how it had perfectly balanced this thing about the darkness and the sense of inquiry and mystery about dreams with this playfulness that was brought about by Connie's animations and also the soundtrack writer for those two, Tobias Withers, who did a brilliant job. I thought that the tone, the approach, in terms of the music, the animation, but also the narration, and all of that was brilliant.

And I suppose, in terms of what surprised me, I guess I should talk about the visuals as I received them. With Connie's approach to visualizing what was being talked about, I really love that it was done in this very playful way, really. I think that it would have been easy to have done something that really went quite dark. But actually, I think by keeping it light and keeping it in that way, made it very accessible. You didn't go away feeling this sense of heaviness through what you'd watched. It was my job to, perhaps, make people feel a bit depressed, but it was-- yeah, I suppose that's what surprised me.

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah. Thank you. One of the things that I like most about them is the playfulness, I think. Thank you both very much. And we might come back to you when we get into the Q and A segment, because people may well have other specific questions for you guys. But right now, I'm going to invite Angela to come onto our virtual stage and speak a little bit about the ongoing research that we're doing on the dream sample.

ANGELA BARRETT: So hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us, and thanks for sticking around to the final section. I'm going to talk a bit about our research project, a thematic analysis of dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic. And yes, this is a work in progress. So, to pick up from Vanshikaa's introduction, our data collection period ran from July 2020 to April 2021. And during this time, we received over 200 dreams. And these came in from 21 different countries, with just over 80% coming from the UK, US, and Canada. And in addition to collecting descriptions of the dreams, we also collected measures of anxiety and depression using the GAD-9 and PHQ-9-- GAD-7 and PHQ-9, and over 90% of participants completed these. And additionally, we also collected other demographic information, such as age, gender, the type of work-- whether the person was a key worker, or furloughed, or working from home-- and also their living arrangements-- whether they lived alone, or with a family, or with a partner.

So, the thematic analysis process is being carried out by Liz and myself. And we've decided to follow Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis approach, which provides a flexible framework to allow us to systematically examine and interpret our data set. So, Braun and Clarke break this down into six phases-- familiarization with the data set, coding, generating initial themes, developing and reviewing these themes, defining and naming the themes, and finally, writing up-- so weaving together an analysis and contextualizing it. And I'm going to talk about some of these phases.

And currently we are coding. So, we are using NVivo for our thematic analysis. And this just shows you what it looks like, and this is the coding process. So, on the left, that panel is the list of our codes. So, a code is a short label allowing us to highlight important aspects of the content in order for us to better see the bigger picture in later stages of the work, so that is theme development. And we've decided to use an inductive approach to coding, which means that, as much as possible, we are allowing-- we are being led by the data-- so the content here-- and so, our codes are quite literal here. And so, some examples are distrust, drugged, drunk, emotionless.

And so, I'll just go through a quick example of how we code something. So, this is a very, very short dream. I'll just read out the content of the dream here: It was something connected to being in a queue, to making a selection-- some kind of food, special like rare sweets-- from a turning wheel like a tombola with a finite number to choose and a range of possibilities. Some not very nice, sticky or moldy. And so, this is one that Liz coded first, and she coded limited resources and queue. And, in my review of it, I additionally added contamination. So, that's how we've been working through the data set. So, as this is a work in progress, we don't have results to share with you at the moment. But here's just a glimpse of the current standing of some of the most common codes as we've been through the data set a couple of times.

So, as our coding phase draws to a close, we will be shortly moving on to generating initial themes. So a theme is an underlying concept. It's a meaning-based pattern within the data. And at this stage, it's really important to consider that themes are conceptualized, and they will always be influenced by the background of the researcher. And so, to quote Braun and Clarke on this: "The researcher is a storyteller, interpreting data through the lens of their own cultural membership and social positionings, their theoretical assumptions and ideological commitments, as well as their scholarly knowledge." And so, on this, I think Liz and I make quite an interesting team coming from quite contrasting academic backgrounds. So, my background is actually in molecular biology. So, I hope that that brings us a bit of a broader perspective as we do this.

So, just to finish off, I'll mention some of the other data that we've been collecting and what we hope to do with it. So, I think we're all really fascinated to work on a time series analysis. That is, once we have our themes, to try and map them over the time course of the pandemic. So, this graphic here shows the COVID death rates for the UK, US, and Canada, which, as Vanshikaa mentioned, 80% of participants came from those three countries. And so, if we do a time series analysis, these geographical variations are something we'll have to consider carefully, but as you see, in the shaded area of our data collection, they do follow a broadly similar trend, all peaking in late January. So, we can also look to see if we can see any links between themes and certain key events happening, such as the vaccine rollout or peaking death rates. And then, of course, we've also got our anxiety and depression scores. And so, we're keen to look at whether certain themes are associated with higher or lower scores for anxiety and depression. And lastly, we've got our demographic data. So we've got all our information about age, gender, the type of work that people did, and their living arrangements. And so, we'll look to see if the themes are connected to any of these factors. And so, just to wrap up, I think we've all found it really fascinating to be part of this research project. And we feel like we've got a really rich data set here that we hope will give us lots to examine. Thanks.

LIZ ALLISON: Thank you very much, Angela. That was a great overview of what we're doing, which I'm personally finding a really fascinating process to be engaging in. So, we've got some time now for any comments or questions that any of you might have. But I might-- if it's OK with everyone-- start this segment by just saying hello again to Rudi and Daniel, who've kindly joined us for the evening, and asking whether either of you have any reflections that you'd like to share?

RUDI VERMOTE: Hello. I first wanted to thank you and also to say that I really admire the animated film movie and how you made it. It is really wonderful. Maybe from my point of view, I can say something very briefly after having listened to you, Liz. I think what I do as an analyst is I use different, you could say, dimensions to listen to dreams. First, of course, the Freudian dimension with wishes, conflicts, symbols, and especially, we learn from Freud, the language of dreams and how you can understand it. But then, of course, you had Klein, which makes of the dream like a movie, a theater full of characters that reflect transference, countertransference, and internal figures. Then, we had Bion, which is very important, of course-- the psychic processing of what we see, what we live through, and how we can deal with it, and how it is very different in each person. And that is, of course, very, very important. And that, you see reflected in the dreams that you gave us to read. But what I learned from the dreams-- that we had no background-- and that, to me, is very important. And I just want to say one word about that. That is that, actually, we have the conscious part of our ego, but we do not know reality, we construct it with this conscious part. But the largest part of the ego with which we perceive and try to give meaning is completely unconscious. And in seeing, listening to, or reading these dreams without background, I was really struck by how realistic these dreams were. It was like people-- so, I had the impression that people felt very vividly and bodily the real danger, more probably than they did in a conscious way. And I must say, I was really amazed by it, and since then, I even pay, I think, more attention to-- when I listen to dreams-- to the reality of it. Often how, as Freud already said, that we, with our dreams, we have an intuition with which we are in contact with what is happening and which is warning us, often, also, and it's like dreams put that in images. And I think in these COVID dreams, to me, it was clear how often much more than, I think, patients were aware of with their conscious ego, that there were really a lot of warning signs in these dreams. That's what-- thank you, Liz. Thanks.

LIZ ALLISON: Thank you very much, Rudi. It seems like you're saying both that this collection of dreams has a specific quality, but also that maybe there's something about that that wakes us up to the quality of dreams more generally, that we might have underestimated.

RUDI VERMOTE: I think so. And if you look at the thematic frequency that you just gave-- there's so much reality in it, also, in these themes, actually. But of course, as Ferro said in the movie, there are an infinite number of meanings in dreams, so that's only just a small part. Thank you.

LIZ ALLISON: Thank you. Daniel, hello.

DANIEL PICK: Just to echo Rudi, really, I mean, just to congratulate all of you involved, both in the project and in the films, really. I thought, I learnt enough at Birkbeck doing an academic's filmmaking course at the film unit, not to be able make films but to appreciate better the skill and all the different layers-- the tracks, and Leo was talking about that-- of laying down the different tracks, but the skill that's involved in all of this. So, I thought it was very moving, really. I thought-- which you were describing Liz-- I thought, both the solidarity of collaborating as a group doing work, but I thought, also, it must say something about the loneliness that people felt that there was such a thirst to connect, to offer dreams, and to want to participate that it was a very-- I mean, of course, it varied with different social circumstances, but for many people, so lonely and isolating. I did wonder, listening to you all, just what it was like for babies and small children, as well, in a masked world and in this very eerie silence-- those streetscapes. But maybe enchanting, and that people had a sense of something magical, as well, didn't they? Often about the streets and something kind of strange uncanny. So, I thought that.

I thought, also, I just found myself admiring the animation and the brilliance of it and just Googling the early animations and found that one of the very early ones was 1908 called, I think, one of the very first animations, cinematic animate-- called "Fantasmagorie". People can find it online, but a French animation. And so, this history in cinema, you were saying, Liz, of trying to animate the unconscious or picture the unconscious. Which Freud was, in a way, skeptical, he didn't want to participate in a screenplay, I think, when he was invited. But some of his colleagues did "Secrets of a Soul". And then, thinking just these attempts to picture-- like "Spellbound" the movie or David Lynch movies. You just sort of thought-- anyway, this contribution, part of this tradition of trying to do something with our dream life that just seems so rich, really. So, there we are. I mean, I have other thoughts, but I think for all of us, it just generates lots of rich thoughts, really, about our dream life and our thirst to connect with other people, perhaps, in sharing our dreams.

LIZ ALLISON: Yeah. Thank you. I remember just before all the schools closed in the first lockdown, my son was traveling with his dad on a train. And there weren't many people on the train. The streets and public transport-- everything was emptying. And he was nine, at the time. He said to his dad, "Is this going to be something that's in the history books?" And his dad said, "Yeah. Yeah, this is going to be in the history books." But also, as you say, really magical experiences of cycling through Central London and there being no danger because-- none of the usual dangers, anyway-- because no cars or-- threatening people. Thank you both very much.

I see there's a few questions in the chat. Someone's asked about-- specifically about the impact of the lockdown experience on the dreams of people on the autistic spectrum. That would, indeed, be very interesting to look at, but it's not-- we don't have the data for that because we didn't specifically ask about whether people have neurodiversity. So, unfortunately, it's not something that our project would be able to cover. And somebody else has noted that we don't have any dreams in our collection from Africa, which is very true and reflects something that we'd all do well to be mindful of, which is that not everyone's experience of the pandemic has been the same. There have been massive differences. And one of the big differences, of course, is access to the technologies that we've needed to stay connected, as well as all the variations in infection rates and different circumstances in different countries. It is very West-biased-- the sample as a whole. And that's a limitation of the data.

So thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. I do hope that you enjoyed the films if you've watched them. If you haven't had a chance yet, do take a look. And we'd love you-- if you have a moment-- to share any feedback that you have about this event with us because we're always trying to find ways of improving and doing better. Thank you all very much, indeed. And good afternoon or good night, depending on where you are. Thank you.