Vivid dreams and their increase in frequency is apparently experienced by a lot of people during the Covid-19 pandemic. Causes of this increase in reports of vivid dreams are believed to be stress and anxiety. People are also sleeping more and thus dream more in general.
I don’t believe that is exactly true in my case as these started during a time of little stress or anxiety for me and well after the pandemic began. I have often had vivid dreams. Dreams with complex narratives that involve color, plot, touch and sometimes taste and sense of hot and cold. Some have plot points that involves surprises only revealed at the end, which makes no sense given I would think I would know what is coming, especially if the setup occurs at the beginning.
What follows is a series of dreams I had one night:
The Aquarium
The location is an aquarium. Inside, a woman throws a sphere over the side and into a tank. The object is about the size of a bowling ball. The aquarium tanks are windows with the tanks lit lightly. Like a giant pearl the thing she drops goes to the bottom of the tank and sits a few inches from the glass. In the water floats tiny sea stars. The sea stars are light orange globs floating all around when they are young and when they get old enough they fall to the bottom as sea stars and the spheres eat them. The aquarium room is empty except for the woman and the viewer sitting on a bench.
Pole Travel
Men sit atop poles to travel from one place to the other. The poles bend back and forth until the person atop the pole can jump to the top of another. If someone is atop that pole they have to switch places. Not enough room for two. Some men sit stop the poles to help others cross. On the top of each pole are slings, or hand holds, in case a traveler barely misses a jump. They sway back and forth and travel long distances from pole to pole.
The Web
My mother-in-law is standing in a yard putting clothes on a line. My father-in-law, Fossil, sits at a picnic table reading. They talk. I hear them. I say that I won’t comment but she says something smart ass. In mid-air, hanging like a spider web, is the word YES written in twigs. My view moves around this hanging word. It’s 3d and the twigs hold the word vertically in a single plane as if in a web. The web hangs there suspended by nothing. I apparently comment and they comment back about how fast I changed my mind about not saying anything. Which itself was a comment about how quickly she had said something worth commenting on.
The Shadow
Underwater, people free diving. A woman plays with sea life swirling around her. Midway between surface and bottom. She has long hair that floats around and obscures her face as she twists her body. She floats vertically. She’s running out of air and needs to surface. She’ll be back. Others watch as she swims off into the murky water to the surface, but she doesn’t surface.
The next view is her swimming horizontally extremely fast. I hear and feel an explosion of force go by from back right to front. The shadow of a giant sea turtle goes over the viewer and hits her. It bites at her, she squirms away and retreats to a bed of sea grass below to hide. Swimming with the speed of a fighter jet. She pushes through sea grass to get away. The view does not move with her. The group watches as she swims into the distance, only the shifting of the sea grass gives away her position and that of the sea turtle pursuing her.
Moments later a man surfaces, Looks like Emilio Estevez, and the man and viewer get into a boat. They are in pursuit. Like a national geographic special, the narrator talks of the boat going a long distance in pursuit. An aerial view of the boat traveling. You see it move through the water, the duck weed and surface debris giving away its path of travel. ‘they have moved into a new media world’ says the narrator. Meaning they have traveled a long distance between environments, like going from one world to another, Jules Verne style. They are trying to catch up to her but it’s a big lake and they travel a long way.
They reach the other side of the lake and see things floating at the surface, an object, something they saw earlier in the day diving, floats at the surface. Somehow it traveled here, as if at the end of a whirlpool. They comment on it and then further up they see a woman floating lifeless. They flip her over using a wooden pole. It’s not her, not the woman they are pursuing, but is someone they know.
Next thing, the same group, there are about five of them, one being the viewer, they are in a garage or shop not far from the water. The large garage door is open and the lake is viewed outside revealing a bright day. Scattered on a white table top are three or four books of paper, neat, clean paper stacked and loosely bound about an inch thick. These are scripts, movie scripts, but the words on the page are printed as if the printer was running out of ink. The manuscripts have been submitted but returned. Someone is sending scripts out and is upset to find them rejected. Some pages, as the viewer flips through, are scribbles as if blocking for a scene. But even these hand written scribbles are barely showing. Mostly just the impression of the words on the page with little ink.
One of the books has a title. I can make out the words, read them, clearly at the time though I don’t remember them now. They denote a location, a corporation or university name but not capitalized correctly. The character with the viewers perspective alters the words to fix the title and wonders should the word ‘from’ be capitalized with the rest?
The men go up poorly lit stairs in an old apartment building. They go in a room, turning the light on as they do, like an apartment, its very small, only a couple of rooms. Like police investigators they are searching through it. They are looking for a man. Still something to do with the lost woman. The rooms are messy, but the impression is they are modern but for a small kitchen that has a white refrigerator and cabinets that have an old style to them. They are in a hurry.
The main character, “Emilio”, and the viewers perspective leave the room. They entered and the viewer says “was the light on when we entered the room we just left”, as if to say they should leave the place as they found it. The guy says yes but the viewer remembers that it wasn’t, worried they are giving themselves away. This is an important but small detail typical in my dreams, that is able to stay consistent through the narrative.
The two leave the other three in the first room behind and go to the next room. The other three men in the group are never seen but their presence is known. The man has a revolver, small, and he holds it in his hand at the ready. The viewer comments about how next time he would like to have one. He is apprehensive. All he has is a utility belt with odd tools. The next room they turn the light on. After a short time of looking through, the man looks through the blinds of the window down into a parking lot at night. It was daytime before, with the light showing through the open garage.
He sees a car pull up in the darkness below. The parking lot is otherwise empty. They are on the sixth floor of an apartment building. The viewer is still standing at the doorway. The men wait hoping to see the figure step out, to know what they are dealing with. The car’s lights turn off and as it does the lights in the room flicker and brown out. They feel something ominous. Why are the lights dimming? The man looks away from the car. They wanted to see what this thing was but his attention turns to the door and the hallway. The viewer, my perspective but not me, says ‘no don’t look away’ and the man looks back.
The room light returns. The man at the window peels the blinds open to look down at the empty car just as the viewer says “no, its too late, That was enough time’. Time for this creature of a man to leave the car and be headed up to the room.
The viewer thinks about whether he was watching the lights on in the rooms. He thinks ‘Did we turn them on or not?’ Did he somehow make them brown out, and if so, how? The viewer knows they did turn them on and knows the man somehow did control the lights and therefore knows they are here. He peers down the dark hallway. He’s coming, he’s somehow already at the end of the hall in the darkness, unseen but seeing.
My feeling is the sea turtle and the ominous man are the same entity.
I wake up.
For the past four months I think I’ve had vivid dreams every single night. I have had vivid dreams like this before but usually only about once a month. Now they come non stop, every night, never the same.