Dreams in the time of Covid-19.
It’s during times of uncertainty, when we perhaps struggle with how to respond when the ground continuously shifts and shakes beneath our feet, when our survival feels threatened, that working with our dreams offers us opportunities to see our best way forward. Provided we can sleep!
I write this blog at a time when most of us in the world are in varying degrees of lockdown, quarantine, self-isolation, and social distancing, while others are working at the frontline or are sick with Covid-19, and the global death count has just clocked 38,000. I don’t know what the situation will be by the time you read this, or well into the future as you discover this blog deep in the archives.
But I do know that our dreams are a wonderful resource that we can each rely on to help us monitor our wellbeing and make sound physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual choices about how we navigate these times.
If stress and anxiety is preventing you from sleeping and gathering those all-important dreams, here’s one tip you may not have encountered:
Before sleep, or when you wake up feeling anxious in the middle of the night, do ten rounds of breathing where you exhale longer than you inhale. Keep your breathing easy and natural, letting the breath begin in your lower abdomen. You might count, say, breathing in for a count of two and out for four, or in for four and out for six. The numbers don’t matter, just extend the outbreath. This moves you out of the ‘fight or flight’ of your sympathetic nervous system and engages your parasympathetic nervous system which moves you into ‘calm and relax’ mode.
If you’re home alone during this period, physically isolated from others, perhaps you have extra time available to establish a new routine of recording your dreams in a journal and learning how to interpret them. Routines, old and new, help ground us during times of uncertainty and transition.
If isolation at home looks more like you and your partner each trying to find space and peace and quiet to work from home and show up looking smart for Zoom work conferences while home schooling your children or keeping a round the clock eye on your pre-schoolers, then finding time to write down your dreams might be a bit more challenging. But is there a space, can you do it, can you slot it in somewhere? Because if you understand your dreams you gain access to creative solutions to lockdown challenges and repercussions.
Have you been stood down from your job, has your workplace or business gone into hibernation, will you have a job to return to, a business that will survive the Covid-19 crisis? Or is this a time to retrain, rethink your career, explore how to transition your business to thrive in the post Covid-19 world? Dreams help us identify our specific problems or challenges – conscious and unconscious – and find creative solutions that may otherwise evade us. Occasionally we may wake up with an amazing solution after ‘sleeping on it’, but usually we need to apply a little more work to a dream to reap the creative nugget at its heart. This is a time to look to your dreams.
Your dreams during this period help you to understand – and get clarity on – your deepest conflicts around the kinds of issues these times present. They present potentially healing pathways you can take.
Relationship issues will be forefront for many people, triggered by living and working in close confinement with a partner or other family members for an extended period. Those who live alone may experience relationship issues around physical isolation, emotional support, and how their community, friends, and family are responding. Dreams provide deeper insight and pathways through these issues.
Dreams process fears around survival (physical, emotional, and mental) and, once you know how to understand and work with your dreams, offer potential approaches and solutions.
Dreams process any resistance to change, any need to control, and offer clarity on how to grow through and emerge from this period with a deeper sense of self and how you want to be in the world.
Far into the future, or maybe not really so far, we all hope and trust that our world will have shifted and changed in positive ways. Understanding and working with our dreams can help direct that process. This is something you can begin right now.
Post script, April 8: I have just written a longer blog for my other website about the specific dream themes many people are experiencing during this time, and what they mean. You can read it here: Dreams during the coronavirus epidemic.
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