“We were playing a review game and Mrs. Legrotte was leading it. Me and Lexie were on the team. The answer to the first question was osteocytes. Then Shawn Mendes is there and he tells us to be less loud. We’re in a big mansion packing up all our stuff. Then we go to an airport underneath the mansion and give them our bags. The lady turns out to be crazy and has our phones on lockdown and we’re stuck and can’t leave. We try to defeat them by putting them to sleep with chemicals. We finally called 911. Kylie Jenner was also there.” -An excerpt from “Dreams” by Yasmin Edrees.
If you’re like me and have been cursed with the ability to have the weirdest, most random dreams known to man, then you’ve most likely designated a page in your notes app to frantically type the odd and VERY incoherent sequence of events of said dreams- only to look back at them and be completely confused weeks later. A few weeks into quarantine and this ritual has become a lot more frequent for me.
Luckily when life was back in action I could wake up, be completely disturbed by whatever type of dream I had that night, be distracted by the million other things I had going on that day and simply forget that the Jonas brothers turned out to be my long lost cousins in my dream that night (this is a reoccuring dream for me since I was a kid and I have absolutely no idea why).
Unfortunately when the only things on my to-do list are “make whipped coffee” and “watch the past five lecture videos you’ve been putting off”, it’s been hard to get past the strange, often frightening dreams I’ve been having.
After much thought I was still confused as to why my dreams have been getting so strange. I have been on a more consistent sleep schedule, don’t wake up as early as I used to, and generally don’t feel stressed right before going to bed. Turns out there’s a lot more to this bizarre quarantine dream phenomenon.
To all you psych fanatics out there, you may be already familiar that dreams begin to occur once the body has reached REM sleep. In the beginning stages of sleep, your brain activity, heart rate and physical body finally chill out after a long day of Netflix binging and Zoom meetings.
Now some of you have been living it up- getting some really good quality sleep for the first time in forever. But to the rest of us worrisome kids out there, the stress of living through a life-altering pandemic is manifesting into our dreams on a new level.
But not only are getting more sleep than usual and the everyday inevitable stresses of life causing us to have unusual dreams, but a little thing called “REM rebound” has been playing a factor in all of this.
With that being said, a lot of what is happening in our reality because of this pandemic is out of our control. And unless you have a habit of lucid dreaming, you really can’t control what happens in your dreams either.
And although you may be like me and don’t necessarily express your stresses as openly as you deserve to when you’re awake, your mind will still experience that stress in the unconscious world.
Because with every entertaining random dream including a few celebrity cameos comes a very frightening nightmare that can make you dread ever going back to bed. So don’t be afraid to express how you’re really feeling- talk to your family, friends, or even reach out to KU CAPS to get connected to an online counselor.
No one expects you to be completely fine through all of this. It’s okay to be stressed and it’s okay to be confused. Prioritize your sleep and practice self-reflection before going to bed, and remember your stresses and emotions are completely valid.