Dreams under confinement

[dreamsunderconfinement]

100 pages of dreams under confinement!

Since 18th March 2020, we have received over 100 pages of dreams from people all over the world. Here’s part of the one that tipped us over into 100 pages: "In the second dream the Devil is having a kind  of sex party in an apartment."

[dreamsunderconfinement]

dream recordings

You can listen to recordings of our dreams at 

Droplet Radio // Radio dråber Denmark 

website:  http://www.fredagaften.net | email: [email protected] | insta: @droplet.radio

- radio dråben #2 early confinement dreams read by friends in Denmark

- radio dråben #5 Animals in dreams, read by RL

and at Mayday radio London

website: https://audio.maydayrooms.org | twitter: @mayday_audio 

 - In confinement: bulletin 2 on hands, read by RL Thanks to all our friends in confinement making things like this happen <3 

[dreamsunderconfinement]

Bulletin 3: Places that are other places

A collection of ‘Metamorphosing topographies of dreamland’ from the dream document - assembled by JS, 14 April

Dreamt that I arrived in Santiago de Chile by bus, except it was in southern Spain.

Late evening in London. Brother’s been arrested so I go to bail him out. When I get there he’s already out, waiting for me in a bar from the 80s Japanese movie Violent Cop.

Was in a dream last night inside a flat that contained different rooms from all the different places I stayed when I still lived in Edinburgh.

Im at S’s flat in jerusalem, it’s not the flat but it is.

Dream is set in “Brussels Archive” located in Paris.

I am in Berlin at his place tho everything looks very different than in “real life”

i am in Florida. i seem to work at Disneyland, or at least the university is situated there. we are being sent home. there is a catastrophe or something we've done wrong. with jess we want to cross country but we don’t know if we have a car. something is too late. i am in a georgian square near my parents’ house in London - some kind of remunerated sexual act with a businessman who came to pick me up one afternoon on a motorbike.

Am in a big market place, later which later becomes fixed as 19th century les Halles, but I’m in Norway, for now it is faceless

It’s Norway except it’s clearly 19th century Les Halles and Devon stitched together.

I dream in fragments, all intense, all differently city-flavoured. My mind is trying to convince itself there are still places to go?

I’m at a crowded club which is also a theatre and an airport.

We’re in a room, a big white room. No: it’s more of a zone, a situated space that turns into something else as it lands. At one point, it feels like the sandy bed of a dry river – all white sand bushes bright sky and us free exercising. And then it’s a room again. Clear huge walls, so huge we can’t see where they end and the roof starts. But we live here. Actually it’s a club and we live upstairs and we are the new roommates

The setting was based on a photograph I made of the Block Island Ferry, which I realized later. We were there, on that Long Island Sound, but this ferry boat was actually in the Mediterranean and the angle of view (frame) was different than this camera I used in the photograph of the Ferry, because I was experimenting lazily at this moment in with a 6x9 frame, but the dream frame today was more like my normal 6x7, tighter frame,

I had to meet my friend Jane at a pub in Galway and it was snowing and I was on a bike but it looked actually like a tiny Prussian-empire kinda town

all seemed to take place in M’s bedroom.  At least the house ‘compressed’ into that space, which is differently configured in the dream.

We’re heading back to the house of one of L’s relatives, in a village called Les Malades, “The Sick Ones”. I suggest cutting through the fields, rather than walking along the road, and claim that it is more direct. The field becomes a mountain

I was in Ibiza, except it was clearly Bournemouth seafront.

I am in China. It looks like a mixture of LA and an affluent North London neighbourhood. A lot of standalone houses with incredible windows.

I’m in an airport lobby, I’m going to Brazil. I am going to someone’s birthday, but the first thing I do when I get there is to go to a luncheon with one of my friends from college (IRL she is protestant and used to be very into theology, went on to work in the Economy Ministry and now has a baby girl with a French guy). A guy I hate, who used to go out with one of my best friends is also there, with his girlfriend (IRL as well as in the dream all the girlfriends he’s had since my best friend are basically always the same girl, they all look a lot like my friend, the same exact features and always super nice. They all stay the same age while he gets older and older). We talk a bit, but I don’t remember what we talked about; this guy is a class A mansplainer, but I think I was actually enjoying this conversation. We are eating black beans, wonderful feijoada and rice. My friend from college starts laughing and says that they took the lunch from the patriarchs, I realize that we are actually in some kind of farm,

I’m looking for somewhere to live on the internet, in the physical space of my dream, the room I look at adjoins directly on to the room we live in

Dreamt I was in Ms Wheeler’s maths class again. But it was in Scotland and I was doing A Levels. I see someone running along the seafront and into the water. The room I am in is in Bloomsbury anti cuts space and it is high up on a platform. (On reflection I suppose this space resembles the first floor of the CLC - community learning centre - which was built at my school in the 2000s to make it a ‘specialist learning’ school, merely because the quality of education and the grades were so bad and the school was possibly on ‘special measures’). On the east side is a garden, on the west side, an airport which is a similar rectangular room at an angle to the rectangular room we are in, or a walkway or highway leading to an airport.

I’m going to the airport. The road for the airport is on the left, it adjoins on to the room I am in. Off to the right, something else - it is like the Beirut highway city system, where you emerge up onto a highway and can see the sea.

On our way to the airport we stop by a mall, which finds itself near to the maths classroom, on the ground floor, to the North side of it.

I move home. To a big house, in an anonymous location, except the trees are like those by the Forum in Rome, and the air is sunny, slow and grainy-grey. It may be Tunbridge Wells, possibly a private school.

He was traveling back to California from Berlin, going to his parents’ home first then coming to visit me. He was on his way, in traffic, it would take about an hour and a half.

I vaguely remember walking and running around this house which looked more like a ship made of wood than my actual flat, but I felt it was my home. I knew this place very well even if all the furniture and the architecture was different. The next thing I remember is me standing in a room that kind of looked like my bedroom, but without a roof and the op bjen sky.

I was in London (that of course had nothing to do w london, and was more of a mashup between green hills and product design degree show booths

I am moving through a city in an uncertain light flickering between day and night, there is a

I dream that my parents have bought a new house during quarantine. In my dream I call it a tudor building in my head, but really, it’s a kind of suburban red brick Victorian construction, like a mixture between what you find in the North of London, next to the M25, and Victorian Gothic in Salt Lake City.

On the way to Berlin, somewhere level with the south of France there were chaotic scenes of my adolescence, changing schools, and I got caught in a loop going round and round St Pancras way and Camley street in a caravan of vehicles going through the bayou.

Some images of Cubitt street and suburbs (Cubitt st is a kind of street where the council puts all kinds of ‘social cases’, it is a kind of containment strategy of theirs), that I float through or watch from a distance. It is like Nice: lilac-y grey modernity, palm trees. It looks like an architect’s drawing, a twilight zone.

We are in my grandmother’s house. But it is not her house, it is much more English, like a house in a Wilkie Collins novel. It is more ornamented, English and gothic than her house is. She is dead.

Very briefly it’s the 2nd version, with some dispute as to who sleeps where in a series of connected messy rooms on slightly different levels of what feels both like an office building and an 18thC (?) European battle ship a la Billy Bud maybe, separated by short staircases and strewn with floor mattresses. Money is due someone - police are in the distance, invisible but working to close in on us (‘us’ is who knows).. Dissolves into what I recognise as my room.

I walked through an urban street. I felt I was both in London and a Midwestern American city. I passed under what had been a theater awning with hundreds of individual light bulbs; many were missing. I thought how nice it must've been when this city was in its heyday. I saw a black London taxicab, which suggested I was in London.

I dreamed that I visited you. Except it was Australia.

I was in central London, maybe Paris, maybe Norwich, in a place like the Southbank. There was a large concrete wall / bank which was inset with a huge array of telephone exchange connectors.

I am walking through narrowish streets in the city I’ve been living in, maybe it’s Leeds or London or Glasgow or maybe it’s just a mix but it feels more like London, and up a back alleyway, at night,

My next dream ends with looking at a map of the Firth of Clyde OS map (which hangs next to my bed) wondering where I could do a long bike ride and realising that the town of Ayr isn’t actually on the coast any more but inland, just southwest of Glasgow. Then I find myself with my friend Callie out on some marina or dock on the Clyde estuary or the sea itself.

[dreamsunderconfinement]

Bulletin 2: Hands

These are explicit references to hands found in the dream document. 

I know if can concentrate and keep my hands on the brakes I will be safe.

The mayor said the sulphate kills the bacteria but Orban had a secret plan to seal us in the baths. There was a potent smell of sulphate and more steam than I had ever seen before. C and K were beside me.  We held hands under the water.

Afterwards I was walking around a little in a loose robe and put my one hand between my legs to feel my vagina which was completely numb and swollen to my touch. There was blood on my hand when I looked at it afterwards. I remember thinking: I should see a doctor at some point.

crawling on my hands and knees thru a classroom of poets. 

I reached out for the breadknife which was O’s hand and spoke into her palm in Ukrainian. And her palm whispered to me a very detailed and hilarious plan about how to depart with the next boat.

When I look again at the piece of soap in my hands, it has been broken up into two symmetrical halves, but not by me. This realization is accompanied by a feeling of relief.

My face in the lacework, a hand behind my neck. And my last sensation, the best. I’m on my knees on a velvet sofa, I feel a woman’s foot slips between my thighs, against my pussy and between the cheeks of my ass, and the toe of this foot presses a few times on my anus. 

Holding a balloon that must've been twenty feet high. I thought it was the only balloon at the party. But I saw others. The balloon was striped like the flying balloons. I knew my balloon was holding air only due to my holding it closed. It wasn't tied. At one point my hand came loose and half the air came out. I was then holding a balloon only four or five feet high. That's when I think I noticed the other balloons, which were about the same size, now, as my smaller balloon. 

I'm in a large and untidy bookshop. The owner's hands are covered in oil from working on an anglepoise lamp (restoring it for some kind of DIY TV show). There are loads of remaindered copies of The Anatomy of Melancholy and of Bacon's Essays. 

I reach into the tank and it happily crawls into my hand. It nestles down as I wrap my fingers around its body and when I bring it to my face it rubs its cheek against mine and smiles.

I don’t have the right equipment. I say I will strip the cream coloured, flaking walls with a nail file - though what I have in my hands is a file that you would use to file through the bars of a prison. 

The time machine itself is an assemblage of mostly curved fragments made up of a metal alloy, smaller and bigger ones, all intricate and deformed - now solid after having been molten? I am nevertheless sure that they form a fully functional unity while I hold them in the palms of my hands and inspect them, standing on a round square with a panoply of trees shedding their green leaves.

We were nervous about how people would react to her as a member of the Trump family but her beauty was blinding. In my dream I woke up to find a pen to write these keywords on my hand but I knew my writing hand wasn’t working at all in order to write the words down but I tried anyway to do some chicken scratch on my nonwriting hand but there was simultaneously a very bad case of pins n needles preventing me from doing this. 

Behind me, someone I do not know, a woman with blonde hair, has her hands on my shoulders, and she seems amused by this and everything else that occurs. She has the kind of overfamiliarity characteristic of many people, which prevents us from having any  number of preliminary or introductory conversations. I can’t tell if I like her or not. 

 they are bullying a small girl, playing this game with her hand where they hit it very hard. they might decapitate the hand, im not sure 

Finally I grabbed its tail and pulled out what appeared to be a rat. It jumped out of my hands, scuttled around the bathroom floor, in the shower and jumped on my legs.

The path becomes steep. Soon I am crawling on my hands and knees and the path becomes almost vertical. …They are in a narrow box made out of white cloth. I can see their feet. There must be at least three of them. The box has holes at different heights through which they put their hands. The box stumbles around. It must be hard to coordinate their movements. I hear high-pitched nasal chanting (a sermon?). Occasionally, one of the hands, which pokes out of the box, rings a bell. 

I feel guilty, anxious, and relieved at the same time, smiling back at them, gesturing animatedly with my hands, trying to keep our pseudo-chatter going…  I feel abandoned, but continue to sort through the cartridges that are in the palm of one of my hands.  

I stand up and am swept into a crowd of young people in suits who circulate the building in a slow traffic jam. I have a number in my hand, a blond woman says follow me we’re going to the same place but I keep losing her. I’m looking for G32, but start chatting to the people I’m squished against and keep missing it. It occurs to me that we shouldn’t be in such close proximity because of COVID19. I say this and the people around me nod. Eventually people filter out. I am really late. I follow a man as he runs out of the building to an adjoining building site. There is a huge quarry and two men on a tiny dangling platform suspended by a crane. The man I’m with reaches out to them to receive a slip of paper that tells him where to go. I reach out too but they just touch my hand and say Go four floors down.

The man claps in his hands twice, and I think the horse might accelerate but he lowers his front legs to let me off. 

It was an evening of chaos and I was desperate due to the economic crisis. I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep our doors open for much longer  and this would be our last show . I was running around telling people to put their masks on and not touch the items and  I would be able to assist them if they pointed at the objects. One by one people in a line were coming into the store hesitant but reaching for objects and then stopping themselves and looking at them. “ Don’t touch”, I would scream!  “please point, hands in pockets” as I described the textured 1970’s studio ceramic and corrugated cardboard chairs, I felt the space had become a chaotic auction. I announced the gallery would have to be closed and this would be our last exhibition, with tears rolling down there was no way to save the gallery. There I was in the gallery running  around installing the last show and Louise Bourgeois handed me a painting. It felt unreal but she insisted, the unwrapped painting sat on my lap as we looked for each wall to place it . I was hesitant to take it, but  she insisted. Masks on our faces and gloves on our hands , six feet apart there we were me and LB, we hung the painting and sat on the bench, I was smiling but she would never know, it was the end of the show. 

We do not talk, she smiles, S. opens the exercise book without saying much, I see my hand-writing which, however, is not my handwriting. I have left all the left pages of it empty, perhaps expecting that S. will write down answers on them, comments – suddenly they are filled with his handwriting (?).

I am unable to tell whether what I hold in my hands is the book, its representation as a box containing a powder puff, or the book review in the form of a powder puff, or that the book was about a powder puff…I’m eating, a school trip comes in and a young boy kisses me on my mouth and eye. He is Raphael, the first boy I ever kissed. Oh no! I say, reprimanding him but you have just touched my eyelash and my mouth with your wet mouth I have to wash my hands now, etc etc. He is dewy and beautiful, but way too young - maybe 14. He is very gêné, so am I. It is painful, awkward and intimate. 

I think my hangnail on my pinkie woke me up - it’s very painful. In any case that or my allergies (pollen). I woke up and sneezed 18 times in a row.]

It’s the kind of moment in which even to raise a hand following a gust of wind is a superfluous act.

Suddenly there is a woman from an ice cream parlour on the pavement, offering me the scoop of ice-cream she is holding in her hand. I like the flavours (but cannot remember what they were) and pay for the ice cream with the exact amount in small coins.

[dreamsunderconfinement]

Bulletin 1: Animals in confinement dreams

The rewilding of COVID-19 dreams. Animals/non human life in the confinement dreams in light of this video from Bergamo :

"a bird of uncertain petrol coloured plumage" "jock boys were slinging foxes off the city limits" "dead squirrels that became leaves" "dirty, ugly, sick fishes" "a giant squid and her human parent. she had just won a contest for best looking squid in the ocean" "like a crustacean" "horses" "Boris Johnson riding a wild boar" "floating letters which changed to fish" "a bird. First I thought it was a pigeon but when I get closer to the window I realize it is actually a big, beautiful tropical bird, like a Macaw with a long blue tail. " "There are also big fish floating around. Many of them. I think they’re dead. I’m not afraid at all, even though they are big. Suddenly one fish starts looking at me, its eyes suddenly bright with life and intent. I realise they’re not dead. One fish starts chasing me." "I took with me the things that truly contain life, the right things, and I installed them in a perfect constellation for them to come alive." "watching a dog chase after it" "There are wolves on the neoclassical patio" "I get closer and I realise it’s a cat lying there, with fifteen or so little heads of cats in the hollow of its belly, like a bunch of grapes. They’re in a kind of transparent pouch, as if they have just been born, and at the same time seem to be suckling. " "the birth of the kittens" "I call them so that they’ll come and see the cat" "she had finally been diagnosed with itchy-mice" "Madison is inserting small clams into the crevices between rocks" "I had an immortal dog" "My ghost dog had issues interacting with live ones" "everyone has died, the world is empty, I walk the dog." "I dreamt I was measuring the distance between a dinosaur’s thumb and index finger" "Some teenagers with a donkey visit the shop" "a dead cat was stretched out, its eyes open but as is the way of dreams, I knew it to be dead. It was not the cat that was lying beside me in my wakeful darkness. " "I have a new pet lizard, having killed accidentally my first one. It’s mostly bright green, with red flanks and a bright yellow head where the scales widen and spread out into full cheeks. Its eyes are jet black but warm and have the shape of shields. My first lizard was drab, unaffectionate and died of starvation," "The lizard becomes a butterfly with red, white and blue flashes and flutters down to him. At the bottom of the staircase, the dog is with my brother." "I’m downstairs trying to catch the butterfly and my brother is a step ahead of me. The dog is in front of him, trying to catch it too. The dog wins and eats the butterfly" " the difference between humans and angels" "It is not safe from the virus - the whole chicken and rice has been cut in half down the middle in the plastic wrapping it is in, and so one side of it is exposed to the air." " two small rodents, mice or hamsters, wrestle with one another." "Suddenly, another pair of mice are fighting much closer to me, on the edge of the counter. The first pair are in the corner near the oven, this pair on the edge of the sink. Unlike the first pair of evenly matched contenders, these two are unevenly matched, and I have the sense that the fighting is a vicious contest between a parent and their child. I look over to the oven, the two are still wrestling. I look back, and the larger mouse is tearing the smaller mouse into pieces in a cruel assault." "There must have been something about a cat in it because I started looking for cats to buy on the internet. " "I got the doorman, an imposing man in a long robe, to open the apartment and found cats inside. They had been locked in by the owner of the apartment, who had left them to die. They were mangy and scabby." "JBR dreamt he was a macrophage." "a large black cat that I know appeared like a solidifying mirage, marched up to the cops, and spat on their helmets" "Second part of the dream was seeing a tail coming out of my bathroom sink. I panicked and thought it was my friends dog Imani and so ran to rescue it. A lot of wriggling and fishing went on. The water was going too and I was worried it would disappear down the hole forever. Finally I grabbed its tail and pulled out what appeared to be a rat" "He puts me on the horse and makes me walk down and up the alley once, the way children at the park might. The horse has got two metal rods like tusks that I’m meant to hold onto." "It is a strange horse I say, something is off with its mouth, its shorter" "they are worried that the weasel might attack the injured white horse" "I think it may be where injured, dead and dangerous animals end up. Some sort of underworld. " "Mohammed Salem takes our horse in his two arms, carries him like a big dog and jumps the ditch. He puts him down and leaves. All of the other animals, also scared of the weasel, hurry behind the healthy horse which, like Mohammed had foreseen, creates a very majestic standoff. The weasel leaves." "in this parallel I’m Shevek, the anarchist alien" "The third person is obsessed with dogs, particularly her own dog, and she walks it every day on the heath - the land next to our little cabin. She is very pretty but I’ve never seen her face. She has long shiny hair and her dog has long shiny hair, and the grass is long and shiny, and all of these things are rippling in the wind. Her hair reminds me of Kate Nash’s hair. There are drawings of racing dogs - mid leap - which i recognise as my mother’s drawings. They detach themselves from the metal sculpture of a racing dog which is attached to the tall Soviet tower block in front of our cabin and float over my third flatmate" "I hear on the news there’s a snake on the loose. (I don’t remember which species, but it was specified in the news broadcast.)" "a snake, a very little one, very blue" " I see another, which is immense. I see its giant blue body on the ceiling, but not its head"

[dreamsunderconfinement]

The latest Tweets from dreamsunderconfinement (@dreamdiarygang). Collective googledoc of dreams had under #covid19 confinement in various places. Est. 18th March 2020, Marseille

Our new twitter <3 

[dreamsunderconfinement]

dreams under confinement

A collection of dreams under confinement set up on the 18th of March 2020 in Marseille, France. We have a collective document where you can record the dreams you have under whatever level of confinement. So far we have 88 pages of dreams, written by dreamers in Marseille, Paris, Copenhagen, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Oakland, Los Angeles, Michigan, New York, Atlanta, and many other places. We have over 70 dreamers contributing in varying degrees of anonymity. We are interested in: 1) whether conditions of confinement under #covid-19 work their way into your dreams and 2) whether we dream things in common. To participate in this document you can send an email to [email protected] with any/all of the following: 

- your dream

- your initials (or a pseudonym)

- the date of the dream

- conditions and place of your confinement: self isolation, social distancing, quarantine, state imposed house confinement, and how many days you’ve been there

- any other detail you consider important - your dream Once you have sent us your dream you may have access to the document. We do it this way in order to preserve the intimacy of the document: send a dream, read dreams.