There have been reports in the news, and I am also hearing from many clients that people are experiencing strange and more intense dreams since the beginning of social isolation for the COVID-19 pandemic. That is not surprising to me for different reasons. One very simple reason is that people have more opportunity to remember dreams. For most of us dreams tend to be strange and intense most of the time. Since more people are working from home and keeping different hours, many are not setting the alarm clock to rush out of the house and deal with traffic in order to arrive at work on time. If one is waking slowly there is more time spent in the twilight between sleep and awake, a time when dream recall is most prominent.
Another reason for the strangeness and increased intensity of dreams might have to do with the nature and function of dreams. If dreams are an existential message, as Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy says, and seeing how most people’s existence has been turned on end with stay at home orders, it is no wonder that people’s dream world has been lit up. An important function of dreams, I would argue, is to tell ourselves how we are deceiving ourselves. This self deception is related to what the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called Bad Faith (mauvaise foi). Dr Betty Cannon, the founder of Applied Existential Psychotherapy, says there are two ways in which we enter into bad faith; trying to be a fact in the world without freedom, and trying to be freedom in the world without fact. Most of the dream work of Jung dealt with the latter, dreams describing the dreamers decline into psychosis. Most of the dream work described by Perls and most of the dream work I have done with students and clients have to do with the later.
So, what does it mean to be a fact without freedom, and why on earth would anyone want to deny their freedom? These questions are at the heart of existential philosophy and the answers are complex. A simplified answer is, with freedom comes enormous responsibility. I am responsible for every choice I make. I choose everything I do and I choose how I present myself to and how I throw myself into the world. This makes me responsible for everything in my life. As Sartre said, “We are all alone with no excuses”. Very few people, including Sartre scholars, feel comfortable facing this.
What happens when our way of being in the world, working, shopping, socializing, exercising, nearly every aspect of our life gets disrupted to the point of being unrecognizable. This can be a moment of what Sartre called double nothingness and Perls called sterile void. They are described as, I can no longer be what I thought I was, and I can no longer become what I thought I was becoming. These are usually periods of very high anxiety, often accompanied by a feeling of no way out, sometimes even feelings of despair. The term existential crisis is often applied here.These are also the times in our life with enormous potential for change and growth. Perls describes the process of moving from the sterile void to the fertile void. When we recognize our nothingness, our no-thingness we recognize our freedom. When we recognize our freedom we connect more fully with life.
The situation of the COVID-19 pandemic is offering many people the opportunity to let go of who they believe themselves to be. Many people did not know that is something they desired and many people do not desire stepping off the rock of solidity into the freedom of nothingness. This is where dreaming comes in to tell us about the nature of our existence. As Sartre said, “We are condemned to freedom”, “The only way we are not free is that we must choose.” This may very well be a very good time to listen to your dreams. You might find yourself connecting more fully to life.