Pandemic Dreams

"This fascinating little volume explores the stuff that dreams are made of and the role the pandemic is playing in them. The dreams from Barrett's survey are riveting vignettes--from terrifying to touching to hilarious. Her decades of scientific research and clinical practice inform incisive commentary on what these dreams reveal about society's response. She offers simple exercises for managing anxieties over COVID-19 and for inspiring adaption in this unique period of history. A great read!" -Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club DREAM: I looked down at my stomach and saw dark blue stripes. I "remembered" these were the first sign of being infected with COVID-19. DREAM: My home was a Covid-19 test center. People weren't wearing masks. I'm taken aback because I wasn't asked to be a test site. I'm worried that my husband and son (who actually lives out of state) will catch it because of my job as a healthcare worker. DREAM: I was a giant antibody. I was so angry about COVID-19 that it gave me superpowers, and I rampaged around attacking all the virus I could find. I woke so energized! Since the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world, people have reported unusually a vivid and bizarre dream lives. The virus itself is the star of many--literally or in one of its metaphoric guises. As a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, Deirdre Barrett was immediately curious to see what our dream lives would tell us about our deepest reactions to this unprecedented disaster. Pandemic Dreams draws on her survey of over 9,000 dreams about the COVID-19 crisis. It describes how dreaming has reflected each aspect of the pandemic: fear of catching the virus, reactions to sheltering at home, work changes, homeschooling, and an individual's increased isolation or crowding. Some patterns are quite similar to other crises Dr. Barrett has studied such as 9/11, Kuwaitis during the Iraqi Occupation, POWs in WWII Nazi prison camps, and Middle Easterners during the Arab Spring. There are some very distinctive metaphors for COVID-19, however: bug-attack dreams and ones of invisible monsters. These reflect that this crisis is less visible or concrete than others we have faced. Over the past three months, dreams have progressed from fearful depictions of the mysterious new threat . . . to impatience with restrictions . . . to more fear again as the world begins to reopen. And dreams have just begun to consider the big picture: how society may change. The book offers guidance on how we can best utilize our newly supercharged dream lives to aid us through the crisis and beyond. It explains practical exercises for dream interpretation, reduction of nightmares, and incubation of helpful, problem-solving dreams. It also examines the larger arena of what these collective dreams tell us about our instinctive, unconscious responses to the threat and how we might integrate them for more livable policies through these times. Deirdre Barrett, PhD is a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. She has written five books including Pandemic Dreams and The Committee of Sleep, and edited four including Trauma and Dreams. She is Past President of The International Association for the Study of Dreams and editor of its journal, DREAMING.

What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honored and valued queer and trans people’s lives, bodies and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure and liberation? LGBTQ+ health care doesn’t look like this today, but it could. This is the care we dream of. Through a series of essays (by the author and others) and interviews, this book by the editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Remedy offers possibilities—grounded in historical examples, present-day experiments, and dreams of the future – for more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. It challenges readers to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and asks what it would look if our health care was rooted in a commitment to the flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. This book is a calling out, a calling in and a call to action. It is a spell of healing and transformation, rooted in love.

Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss

“A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.” –Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.

Drawing on examples of artists, scientists, writers, and others who have used dreams to solve problems, the author of The Pregnant Man explains how dreams can foster creativity, enhance inspiration, and resolve problems.

This fascinating volume explores — from the perspective both of analysts and their patients—how the COVID-19 pandemic quickly and unexpectedly created profound and lasting changes in the ways psychoanalysis is conducted, and what those changes mean for analysis moving forward. The first part of the book is made up of interviews conducted by Stefano Carpani with authoritative authors in analytical psychology during the earliest phase of lockdown, centered on themes of the pandemic, lockdown, and how each individual was coping with the challenges those circumstances brought on. The second part features personal essays that further details the subjective experiences of Jungian analysts and therapists worldwide, comprising a collection of reflections on how COVID-19 affected and changed the way analysts work with patients. These reflections focus on the theoretical, clinical, technical, and also practical points of view, including clinical materials on transference and counter-transference considerations. The third part of the book is specular to the second and offers reflections from patients’ perspective on how the pandemic changed their therapies and lockdown affected their experience of therapy. Patients have provided anonymous testimonies through their writing of how they experienced of the change of setting, mindset and related implications. A comprehensive overview of an important and ongoing conversation, Lockdown Therapy is crucial reading for Jungian analysts and scholars, as well as other clinicians training in analysis, psychotherapy and counselling.

In this mix of history, journalism, political analysis, and first-person accounts, former chief coroner and Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell, renowned criminologist Neil Boyd, and investigative journalist Lori Culbert, offer a portrait of one of North America’s poorest, most drug-challenged neighbourhoods: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A Thousand Dreams raises provocative questions about the challenges confronting not only Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside but also all of North America’s major cities and offers concrete, urgently needed solutions, including: Continued support for Insite, the safe injection site Decriminalization of prostitution and drugs The transfer of addiction services to the Health Ministry, allowing detox into the medical system More government-funded SROs and more affordable social housing

The Science and Art of Dreaming is an innovative text that reviews the neuroscience and psychology of how dreams are produced, how they are recalled and their relationship to waking life events and concerns of the dreamer. Featuring beautiful original artwork based on dream representations, the book delves deeply into what happens when we dream, the works of art we produce when asleep and the relevance of dreaming to science, art and film. The book examines the biological, psychological and social causes of dreaming, and includes recent advances in the study of nightmares and lucid dreaming. It shows how sleep can process memories and that dreams may reflect these processes, but also that dreams can elicit self-disclosure and empathy when they are shared after waking. The playfulness, originality and metaphorical content of dreams also link them to art, and especially to the cultural movement that has most valued dreams – Surrealism. The book details the history of scientific research into dreams, including a re-reading of the two dreams of Freud’s patient, the feminist hero Dora, and also the history of Surrealism and of films that draw on dreams and dream-like processes. Each chapter starts with a dream narrative and accompanying painting of the dream to highlight aspects of each of the chapter themes. This highly engaging book will be relevant to researchers, students and lecturers in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, consciousness and social evolution. It will also be of value within the study and practice of visual art, design and film, and will be of interest to the general reader and anyone who holds a personal interest in their own dreams.