Quarantine Dreams

Image Source

The first couple of weeks of lock down, when I first started teaching online from home, all my dreams were work anxiety dreams of the typical sort, like those I have at the beginning of every school year. Those were often variations of dreams I had when I was a school student.

The last 9 weeks of lock down have been different. My dreams are complex, thick, dark, mysterious. They seem pregnant with meaning, almost prophetic. I've read some articles online that this is a growing phenomenon.

Here's an example from early this morning:

I am out in downtown somewhere, perhaps traveling, perhaps in my home city, but I can't tell. I'm trying to get back to some place which is either a travel agent's or a shop of some sort. I know the proprietor is a woman and in the dream I knew her name but I can't remember it now.

As I'm walking home the roads are dark and decrepit, almost as if there were a fire, earthquake, or maybe a war. Walls are down, streets are busted up, pipes hang out. The streets are narrow and there are small row homes around me. Then I'm slowly driven to the left and off my intended path by rising flood waters. I have to carefully step from block to block and crumbling walls sticking above the flood to avoid getting swept away as the current gets faster. I end up at a highway and the northbound lanes heading my way are flooded and cars are swirling in the water, but I manage somehow to get across to the southbound lanes. I am moving between the cars which are moving slowly and are packed in. Somehow I get a taxi, the driver of which rather painfully finds a way to back and forth his vehicle into the other direction when I tell him where I'm going.

We are driving around the neighborhood I'd just been walking in before the flood. There is rain, water, dripping, sloshing and splashing all about. I'm confounded that the driver does not know where he's taking me, as the destination is well-known and famous. Curiously, the anger I feel is not internal to me but is being shouted by Tom Cruise's voice outside of the vehicle behind my left ear. He is screaming about how it's unbelievable nobody can ever find this place because (woman's name) and her business are well-known.

Suddenly we are in the parking lot of a strip-mall, but the parking lot BEHIND the strip mall, not the front lot where the entrances are. This is my destination, but the taxi took me to the rear. The driver turns to me and says "If you knock on the door, she will let you in." I nod and while gathering my belongings to get out of the taxi some drunk young men are climbing in. They are stepping on my belongings which have spilled out in the taxi and onto the pavement, and include shoes and bags. I'm trying to pull everything out without conflict but I think I might have to fight these men. I think there were three or four but it's hard to remember. Then I wake.

Context

I'd been reading a psychoanalytic manual about the ongoing psychological primacy of Greek myths, heroes, and gods yesterday, and in particular about the Anima and challenges faced by Perseus with the feminine, and how the feminine eventually derails Perseus because of a lack of caution and what that story portends for those who encounter the Anima unprepared. I woke at 2 am, and unable to sleep started listening to a YouTube recording of a lecture about neoPlatonist philosophy and its mandates for developing self-control and the true purpose of religion. I recall the line "at a certain point of life the soul requires one to stop seeking things that are harmful to Self and others, and one must learn to sit quietly and develop self-control in order to..." After about an hour of this lecture I drifted into sleep, but the earbuds were still in my ears and the lecture was still playing. Later the earbuds fell out and I was awakened by a large insect buzzing by me and banging into a wall in the darkness,  and then I fell asleep again before having the above dream, which was dripping with Anima and religious and Quest symbolism.

Just moments ago my wife saw the insect fly out from behind the TV--it is a huge fly of some sort, perhaps 2 inches long. I was unable to catch it and it disappeared.