A Pandemic Dream
In early February, I was writing nonstop to revise our spring issue of Reinventing Home to reflect the challenges of dealing with the coronavirus. In the middle of my deadline, I came down with all the classic symptoms — high fever, fierce headache, dry cough and delirium. After two weeks, I had to drag myself out of bed to meet a deadline. Still fatigued and out of breath, but I kept pushing myself, refusing to admit that I was running on empty. At this point, I had the following dream:
I’m trying to get to an important meeting but the subway station is closed. It’s an arduous walk, and when I arrive, the office is in chaos. Armed men are taking the workers into custody. There’s a shoot-out, and our lives are in danger.
At the core of my fear response to the pandemic was the knee-jerk reaction, “If you just work harder, everything will be all right.” My “deadlinitis” had probably made me more susceptible to infection. And it certainly was an impediment to a full recovery.
Then a second dream gave me just the medicine I needed: A Bengal tiger is walking down the middle of main street. This magnificent animal roams freely through the town — its fur gleaming, its muscles rippling. The creature is one in itself. It has no agenda but to simply be
When I shared this pair of dreams, Sabini said, “Your fear of being stopped in your tracks came up in your first dream. Then you were actually taken down by the virus. Later, in the tiger dream, your psyche gave you what shamans call a power animal — a guide to your healing process. Draw on it!”
This animal was wild. It had never been trained to jump through hoops. There was no way to hold that tiger. Its energy was immense. This was the reservoir I would need to start drawing on as I began my recovery.
“Since the virus struck, we’ve all been holding our breath, waiting to see what will happen next,” Sabini said. “The tiger dream is telling you to focus not on deadlines but on maintaining your own life.”
After this enlightening conversation, I began to think about the biological purpose of dreaming. If the dream acts as a regulator of the body and the psyche, that would explain why our pandemic dreams often come in pairs. First, a terror dream complete with bodily symptoms and reactions. Then a dream that reassures us and show us how to cope.
The Image Provides an Antidote
To explore the healing potential of dreams, I turned to Robert Bosnak, a Jungian analyst who created a technique called Embodied Imagination®. This involves running an image through the body to see what physical changes it produces. Bosnak’s method has been used by the Royal Shakespeare Company and applied to medical research and psychotherapy around the world.
The premise: If we work with an image physically we amplify its power—then it has the capacity to alter our whole organism.
Bosnak hosts the weekly Spooky Dreams Café showing people how to use this method to understand their dreams and create a personal remedy for living in the age of the coronavirus.
This week, there were dreams of encountering a wild animal in a swimming pool, losing a grandmother’s home, facing the end of the world.
Yet in each case, these images led the dreamer to some deeper wisdom. The lion turned out to be a calm and reassuring presence. The grandmother’s backyard was home to a strong and stalwart rhino. And as the world was about to collapse, the dreamer and her family were saved by a great winged bird.
Bosnak asked participants to run these two sets of images through the channel of the body – to experience the tension at the start of the dream, then the sense of calm they had in the presence of the animals.
In these sessions, the dreamers moved from an experience of foreboding to a place of trust and comfort. This resolution wasn’t achieved through thinking or analysis, but by listening to the body and charting its responses.
When I to applied this method to my own dreams, I was astonished by the physical and emotional reactions they evoked. As I explored the feeling of getting shot at by the armed men in my office, my body went rigid and my heart rate increased.
When I focused on the tiger, my neck and chest muscles released, my heart rate slowed, and I felt an almost cellular infusion of energy.
Bosnak believes somatic dreamwork changes the immune system. My office dream represented my usual response to danger — “Work harder!” Yet now I can counteract that anxiety by calling up the tiger.
Our worry about the virus and the shifts we have had to make in our way of life has put the immune system on red alert and our dreams reflect that. But dreams also give us the way to stem this over-reaction. If we listen to them carefully, they will tell us how to soothe and calm ourselves.
Bosnak draws on the emerging science of psychoneuroimmunology to explain how this works:
“We believe that the further we move away from habitual consciousness, the closer we come to the autonomic nervous system, our basic Operating System. In computers the OS interacts directly with the motherboard. In humans, this is the place where the image and physical body interact.”
The ancient Greeks knew that dreams have great healing power. Now we know that they can help us move from that “fight or flight” response to a place of safety and serenity. We can use this kind of support as we face new challenges to our health and well-being in the months ahead.
Tune into Bosnak’s Spooky Dreams Café, and learn how your dreams can help you to create your own personal remedy for life in the age of the coronavirus.
Recommended Reading
By Deirdre Barrett:
Pandemic Dreams
The Committee of Sleep — How Artists, Scientists and Athletes Use their Dreams for Creative Problem-solving, and You Can, Too.
Trauma and Dreams, essays by prominent psychologists and physicians, including Robert Jay Lifton and Oliver Sacks.
By Meredith Sabini:
The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life
By Robert Bosnak:
A Little Course in Dreams
Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming
Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art, and Travel
Wow. I just rediscovered this article and was thinking of a man at our writers group from Kansas who has had dreams throughout entire life…I wish I could download this honey! Personally I don’t dream at night much but I’m definitely a daytime dreamer! Thx Loreexx
Here’s where you can print a copy—-https://reinventinghome.org/pandemic-dreams-horrors-and-healers/
Thanks, Loree, for commenting. I’ve kept a dream journal for the past 55 years.
Thank you, Aldo. Always good to hear your response to these deep topics. I have friends who are artists who rarely dream becuase they are working with images every day. Your conscious confrontation with the reality of death may similarly have exempted you from the usual pandemic nightmares and any compensatory images of salvation! I do believe that dreams are the psyche’s effort to rebalance us…..and as always, I appreciate your sensibility and experience.
I learned a lot from this article.
I almost always dream and I got interested in the subject some time ago to understand the reasons, also because the next day I remember my dreams perfectly.
I do not seem to have had dreams related to the coronavirus, perhaps because I have not developed a particular fear from the spread of the pandemic, and I attribute this to the fact that, given my age, confronting death in a conscious way means attending – not suffering. – the power of the limit: it is a barrier in front of which cynicism and indifference are broken, but also our ability to plan, to solve, to manage. It is what transcends us, which is greater.