I am lying on my bed in the middle of the night, eyes wide open. I was sound asleep but the energy in the air woke me up. It’s the kind of sensation that is inexplicable. It can only be felt deep in the core of the place inside your body that reminds you you’re alive. Maybe it’s intuition. Maybe it’s something more primal than that. Whatever it is, I know something is fundamentally wrong in my space, in the room that I can navigate in pitch blackness with absolute certainty and steadfast steps.
I am sitting up now, astutely aware that there is something moving in my suddenly open closet. The temperature in my room has spiked; it’s sauna-thick humid sticking to my arms, the feeling of wet paper towels wrapped around every inch of my body. It’s suffocating but I can’t pay attention to it now; there is still something moving in my closet.
I see its tail first, long and rubbery, and then the rest of its body; a rat with wirey brown hair and dagger-like nails scampering around in my once-clean clothes. My mouth is open—I’m trying to scream. The sound is rising in my throat but won’t come out of my mouth. It’s stuck in a thick, rubbery coat on the inside of my esophagus; something is wrong there, but I can’t focus on that now. My attention is on the rat—no … the rats. There is more than one now, all exploding out from my closet with hitch pitched squeals. They’re multiplying before my eyes; I still cannot scream for help.
Now my feet are rooted to the floor, taken over by a tacky paste that it takes a minute to recognize; it’s not a paste, it’s a shifting mound of bugs. And they’re moving up—no, they’re burrowing into my legs. I can see where they have overtaken my feet and are sinking into the front of my shins, moving their way up my legs in a steady crawl. My skin, usually paled and freckled when healthy, looks unrecognizable now. It’s bubbling beneath the surface and then rotting into a holed pattern reminiscent of honeycomb.
The tiny bubbles beneath my skin have moved up now, overtaken my arms and my hands. There’s nothing I can do but stare as my flesh pebbles and then caves into clusters of deep, dark holes while the rats populate over and over again….
“The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another” -
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (page 30)
TIME Magazine published an article titled “The Science Behind Your Weird Coronavirus Dreams (and Nightmares)” back in April to bring awareness to the widespread phenomenon of people suddenly having vivid and intense dreams about similar subjects since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent quarantine protocols. They note that this is not an unprecedented event. After moments of monumental tragedy on a nation or worldwide scale such as the 9/11 attacks in New York, people have reported similar dream experiences. National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and The New York Times have all published similar articles, discussing the nature of dreams during periods of high anxiety and stress and why people seemingly have the same kinds of nightmarish dreams during those periods.
The most common dreams that have been reported over the last two-month period of isolation have been dreams and nightmares involving dangers (abstract or otherwise), potential hazards, bugs, disease/illness, disasters, and death. Caity Weaver for The New York Times reported an influx of dreams about tidal waves, monsters, invisible attacks (by something like poison gas) while Rebecca Renner, in her article for National Geographic, noted the influx of dreams of zombies, bugs, and shadowy figures. Christina Pierpaoli Parker for CNBC’s health and wellness column echoes the sentiment of neurologists, writing that the brain likes order so during times of intensified fear and anxiety, the brain attempts to process its own concerns (or make sense of its new chaotic normal) during sleep. Basically, the lingering concern for COVID-19 and what it means for us on an individual and global scale is following us into our dreams simply because our brains do not know what to do with this kind of stress.
It’s easy to believe that Virginia Woolf would have found this period of paralleled dreams utterly fascinating. Much of Woolf’s fiction presented a strong awareness for the world of dreams. Looking just at a novel like The Voyage Out, dreams frame Woolf’s characters and their stories through nearly every chapter. Her characters daydream, fall asleep and dream, and often escape the realities of the world by entering into dream-like trances of rumination. In the final chapters of the novel, Rachel Vinrace’s unconscious mind is explored through her dream patterns during her illness and subsequent death. Woolf’s embrace of a multi-layered self which existed in both the real world and the world of dreams seems entrenched in a similar kind of psychoanalysis that dream-interested psychiatrists use today.
As for us, the ones who are neither psychiatrists nor Woolfian novelists, we simply see the dreams as what they are in the moment. We live through the disease, the vermin, the fear and anxiety on a nightly basis, only hoping to wake up in a peaceful place again. But the world is not peaceful now, nor has it ever been. It’s easy to believe that maybe we’re all much more in tune with each other and the fabric of existence we all share than we ever thought we were; that there is a gentle, low frequency hum running through us all that we are all dialed into which leads to a Jungian-type of shared experience.
I think that, perhaps, it’s more complicated than that. Maybe it is not the shared experience of living in the same world that unites us in a shared dream, like leaves all growing on one branch. Rather, it’s the primal recognition of the illness experience. Woolf touches on that very thing in “On Being Ill,” suggesting that illness warrants very specific responses from people, often involving their memories of their own illnesses as a response to the ailments of others. I think something similar is being evoked here. It’s not just that we all have human brains which are wired in similar ways, it’s that the essence of illness and the stress it causes illuminates a deeply human response that registers in similar ways within our minds. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is the universal experience is not life itself, but the emotions and anxieties surrounding illness, especially illness on a worldwide scale. We may not all be experiencing COVID-19 in the same ways; we may not be suffering because of it or even greatly affected by it, but the anxieties it causes still resonate within us, within our bodies, and deep in the recesses of our minds.
Woolf understood that dreams are very much another world within us that we are not privy to entirely, but that we glimpse into them when we sleep. If the pandemic is causing us all to experience a very similar internal world (that is then causing similar, vivid dreams), how does that map onto our real world? What does it illuminate about us as connected beings? I would not attempt to guess what Woolf would say to those questions. However, I would attempt to answer it myself in a way that she might appreciate: perhaps it illuminates nothing.
Facing a similar situation and internalizing the fallout of it in our hours of sleep does not equate to authentically understanding one another and each other’s state-of-being. Sharing similarities does not make us the same, even if that similarity is something as deeply personal as the world we have within ourselves. Maybe it just makes us recognize the looks in one another’s eyes as we peer at each other from six feet away, half hidden behind face masks; we recognize that there could be a true connection made there… even if we never attempt to make one.