Once Upon a Time: Dreams and the Pandemic
Paul Lippmann, PhD
Once upon a time,
there were dreams.
And once upon a time,
dreams touched people.
Life and dreams were lovers.
But times have changed.
“Lover, come back to me.”
Who knows where the world will be by the time you read this? The pandemic has so altered life as we thought we knew it, that what is written one day may well be completely mistaken or irrelevant the next. And yet, I write in the hope that looking at our situation through the lens of dreams may provide a useful orientation into the strangeness of our shared catastrophe. Life is weird. Dreams are weird. Perhaps, they have more in common than we ever imagined.
Recently, there has appeared an interest in dreaming during the coronavirus pandemic. On TV and radio, in the newspapers, and on various blogs, journalists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health experts of one sort or another have weighed in on the kinds of dreams people are reporting and on various related observations on sleep and dreams during this stressful time. Such interest in dreams and dreaming in the popular media is of particular interest to me because I have been thinking and writing (in a series called “the Canary in the Mind”) about a substantial erosion in interest in dreams, both in the popular culture and in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
I believe such a loss of interest in dreams has reflected meaningful trends in our culture in which the inner world has been consistently down-graded. Just as the Anthropocene has involved the destruction of the ecological habitat for millions of species, we can also witness a destruction of the habitat for dreams. That is, both night and sleep have been badly compromised in modern living. In addition, dreams have been replaced in social and personal significance by events on billions of external screens (film, TV, computers, iphones). In the face of such a long standing “disappearance” of dreams, recent interest during this time of plague calls for our attention.
Once upon a time, dreams were honored guests in our lives—whether we slept in caves or in fancy palaces, whether we thought they brought news from the gods or were confused ramblings of an inner madness, whatever we believed their source or intention, we tended to pay attention to their stories and their images. They mattered to us. After all, we didn’t always have 500 television channels or cities open, alluring, and throbbing for 24/7. At night, in the old days, before technology lit up the night, no matter our condition, all of us had our dreams—an entire democracy of experience.
On this democracy of the mind: Through all of time, and in all our varied cultures, on all the continents, dreams have always and forever made their appearance in the night-time, wrapped in sleep, a most natural and regular occurrence, a part of elemental human nature. They spoke to us of entire encyclopedias of experience. For men and women, for royals and slaves, for babies as well as the old, for each and every human no matter their condition, in every age, in every corner of the world, dreams provided a continuous echo to waking life’s concerns, an inner shadow of the experience of being alive. Sometimes, they seemed like a divine gift, sometimes an evil curse. They could leave us in great pleasure or horrendous pain, in confusion or clarity. Certainly, they touched our feelings and our lives. They mattered to us.
Every culture set its own dream interpreters to work on these highly private nightly wanderings of the mind. And each culture had a different and unique approach to bringing the sleeping mind’s excursions into line with its particular and cohesive traditions. The relationship between individual and culture can be conflictful, and the private nature of dreams–alone in sleep and mostly lost to memory–needed often to be brought into line with the prevailing habits, beliefs and customs of the collective social structure. Dreams often went their own way, at times opposite or subversive to the social norm, perhaps insubordinate to the prevailing ethos of family, community, religion or state. It became necessary for remembered dreams to be accompanied and escorted by dream-interpreters, dream-experts, dream-knowers. Looking into dreams, the interpreter was able to herd the dream into recognizable patterns and bring the highly individual, private, often irrational, zany, subjective and subversive dream stories into line with the aims, goals and needs of the shared social structure. Psychotherapists, while they may wish to think of themselves free from the biases of the collective, need to recognize their role as agents of the social while going about their business of translating dreams.
Within our psychoanalytic world, dreams were carried into the 20th Century on the wings of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis was carried into the 20th Century on the wings of dreams. This connection—dreams and psychoanalysis—was a marriage made in heaven. Both were good for each other. But no more. For many and varied reasons, dreams have taken a back seat in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, replaced by interest in the therapeutic relationship. The diminished fate of dreams in modern times and the fate of dreams in psychotherapy, I believe, are closely interrelated. The inner world may be found to be irrelevant, even troublesome within an Anthropocene epoch in which the natural world disappears and in which humans are transformed into virtual machine beings.
How is it that the “larger” we become relative to the natural world, and the more our skyscrapers crowd out our mountains, clouds, and critters, the more depressed, alienated, lonely and anxious we become? We are “huge,” as our beloved leader brags. But our hugeness, relative to all living being, has turned out to be a devastating problem. On the brink of environmental disaster, how will we possibly tame our outsized ambitions? Can we possibly turn away from a dominating and poisoned way of life in which “money is all,” toward a quieter, more respectful path on which we may rediscover our natural connection to all of life?
The coronavirus pandemic, as it continues into months, even years, may be having an effect on our “hugeness.” Could it be that a tiny, invisible entity (this virus) can force a necessary transformation in us? Could it be that a necessary diminishment in our sense of ourselves could be one result of this plague? The story has a biblical quality. Just as our gigantic and ambitious social ego threatens to crush the entire world, “God” sends the smallest of critters to bring us to our knees and our senses. Can a virus achieve such a necessary transformation? Is the dreaded virus a small but essential piece of our redemption? This plague brings with it enormous human cost, suffering and dislocation. Death, loss, damage, danger, fright—there is no turning away from the pain of these times. But there may also be another side to this nightmare in which we are forced to suffer changes that may perhaps help reduce our audacious capacity to dominate all of life on Earth.
And dreams seem to play a part in all this. This past week, as I wrote at the outset, I came across a number of articles, blogs, and TV programs that brought dreams to the center of concern after decades of neglect. From the National Geographic, the Huffington Post, the Sunday New York Times Style Section, Wired e-Magazine, and elsewhere, increased interest in dreams is showing itself. How come? I don’t know that any of us can be expert about such a development. It may also be important to “not know,” to not pretend expertise at this time. We are living through an extraordinary time—dangerous, frightening, unpredictable, life-altering. As psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists, students of human life—it is more a time for keeping our eyes and minds open, for curiosity, for questioning, for learning, for paying attention and gathering information than for any pretense at professional knowing. While humans have lived through plagues and other social disasters from the beginning of time, and while there is much to be learned from what has already been written (e.g., Camus, Defoe, Porter, etc.), there is much unknown about this current biological, economic, and social catastrophe.
One observation from the point of view of an interest in dreams is the question: why now is there concern about dreams during the coronaviral pandemic? Since there are always 24 reasons for everything*, there are many possible reasons for this outpouring of interest in dreams after so many decades of disinterest in the subject. Following are some tentative ideas on the matter.
(1) Desperate times bring one to magic. Dreams and magic have been close cousins. The ancient mind, i.e., the mind of dream thinking—imageful, imaginative, illogical—may be of greater interest in the current puzzling and frightening situation.
(2) A sudden silence in the usual dizzying, buzzing world of waking distraction allows one to pay more attention to one’s own mind. For some, an increase in aloneness and loneliness may lead to a greater connection with one’s own mind, often an important partner and substitute for social relationship.
(3) In the absence of strong leadership in an uncertain and dangerous world, the outpouring of one’s very own mind may take on greater authority. Disappointment in modern technology also may lead us back to an ancient interest in more personal pre-technological sources of knowledge and experience.
(4) Just as the response to the pandemic has led to cleaner skies and greater safety for many endangered species, it may also lead to a quieter environment allowing for more interest and expansiveness in dreamlife. One has more time to remember one’s dreams if the dreamer is not rushing off into a too-busy life as soon as awakened.
(5) The pandemic, responsible for the crushing of one’s “dreams” (as in wishes, plans, designs, expectations), may lead to a necessary basic return to the personal origin of one’s dreams (as in actual dreams)—the personal basic ancient exercise of untrammeled and private imagination—our dreams not our schemes.
These are just a few possibilities in response to an increase in public interest in dreams during these difficult times. Again, this is not a time for as-if expertise, but for curiosity and learning. So, I would be interested in any ideas, hypotheses, hunches you might have about these matters. Why an increase in interest in dreams now during the coronavirus pandemic? And what might be the effect of an increase in interest in dreams?
In several of these recent public media expressions of interest in dreams, one finds the usual trotting out of dream technology (e.g., how many hours of REM sleep per night, etc.) and some uninspired interpretation, but for the most part, there seems to be a genuine curiosity about an increase in dreams and their strangeness during these strange times. I am suggesting that this small increase in interest in dreams during this pandemic may represent a necessary but miniscule change in the culture’s life-threatening rush to power, success, domination, hugeness and planetary destruction.
In our field, we are familiar with the experience and the concept: regression in the service of the ego. I believe it is possible that we are in some measure going through such a collective experience. A regression that brings us back to an interest in dreams as well as to a quieter life, to cleaner skies, to less noise, to more family time, while troublesome and even deadly, can also serve to turn us away from the dangerous path we have been on collectively in which we have been turning into machines and into agents of vast destruction. Change often is accompanied by great discomfort. I hope we can tolerate the unease, anxiety and dread of these times. Things will not be the same. Nature is paying us a call. Will we be able to heed its message? Can we quiet down enough to listen to our ancient imaginative dreaming minds more than to our machines?
On the couches of psychoanalysts, once upon a time, dreams were allowed and encouraged to live and breathe. Could it be that, once again, even as a result of our deadly plague, psychoanalysts will rediscover the joys and adventures of the mind asleep in our most deeply private moments, mostly forgotten, so sweetly mysterious? Is it possible that we could allow the dreaming mind, like a spirit animal, to lead the way once again to the underworld of human experience? Could it be that we can refrain from too quickly reading our own meanings into dreams and allow dreams to speak to us in their own manner? If so, this plague, in its irony, will have had a small role to play in returning us to our deeper human nature. Time will tell. Meanwhile, dream away.
*In the Talmud, within the volume Berekhot, there is a story of 24 dream interpreters situated around the gates of Jerusalem. One dreamer takes his dream to all the interpreters and finds 24 different interpretations, all eventually correct.
Paul Lippmann, Ph.D. Faculty Emeritus, NYU Postdoc; Fellow, faculty, training and supervising analyst, William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute; Former President of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society; Past president and member of the Western Massachusetts/Albany Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology, Director of the Stockbridge Dream Society, and past co-chair of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group. Author of Nocturnes: On Listening to Dreams (The Analytic Press, 2000); Artist.
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