Here is a collective document where you can record the dreams you have under whatever level of confinement. Please write your initials (or pseudo) and the date. Please specify the conditions and place of your confinement: self isolation, social distancing, quarantine, state imposed house confinement. Just put your dreams at the end of the document, after the last written dream, don’t worry about date order. Obviously do not edit or delete anyone else’s dreams. I will be saving the document regularly in case of any disasters. Kiss

Interpretation:

At this point it doesn’t seem possible or desirable to interpret the dreams, and I (RL) wouldn’t want to impose any readings on anyone’s dreams as it would seem an infraction on the intimacy of this document. I have however made some lists -- one of animals in the dreams, and one of hands -- which simply make an assemblage of quotes on particular subjects. That way, juxtaposing passages, the document makes its own analysis of itself.  Anyone is welcome to do this, or to suggest themes, or make any objections.

If, however you would like to be part of a ‘dream diary gang’ and analyse your own dreams with us, write to me at eyeliverkidney@protonmail.com. We thought of making bulletins of themes coming up in the dreams, and CC, Edinburgh suggested even making analyses of our dreams with one other person and making interviews.

Useful links:

-- Our twitter https://twitter.com/dreamdiarygang

-- Our Tumblr https://dreamsunderconfinement.tumblr.com

-- Email: eyeliverkidney@protonmail.com 

-- Droplet radio in Copenhagen have made a few episodes with dream recordings! Check them out: https://www.spreaker.com/user/12162371/drbrd-1a

-- You can also send a contribution (audio) to Droplet radio at draaben@pm.me or ask to get involved

RL Sunday March 15 2020 (anticipating: a border closing in Berlin, and total lockdown in France)

I dreamt that someone I’ve never met, O., but who is a friend of the person whose bed I was sharing when I was dreaming, was walking

 along with me and my friend Madison, next to the Sorbonne Paris 3. Something terrible was happening in the Sorbonne, they were killing people in hospital beds. The dream was very grey. Madison said “O. is from Ljubljana, so she eats raw birds” and O. reached up, grabbed a bird of uncertain petrol coloured plumage and ripped out its entrails with her beautiful mouth. The whole dream was grey, and then the red, also traces of what was inside the Sorbonne - it was so sensual, genital and bloody.

MLK Thursday 19 March 2020 (fifth night of social distancing)

Dreamt that I arrived in Santiago de Chile by bus, except it was in southern Spain. Waiting for a friend at the bus station I ate a sticky pastry and looked out over the city. It was divided by a large river. Hot and dusty. The woman at the ticket counter told me of a nice path of alleyways that would lead to the river. Then A. I. and P. came up to meet me. I was surprised to see them here and disconcerted at the thought that I must have forgotten this was the plan all along. We all attended a seminar wherein Antonella Romano lectured on Jesuit missionary practices in South America. Midway through, I wondered why all this was taking place in a building sponsored by Carlsberg. As we left the building, the sun blinded me a little and was reflected off the hair of the person walking in front of me, in a bleach lock nestled among darker ones.        

RL Friday 14th February 2020 (Paris, the first day I wore a mask in the street)

I had dreamt, predictably perhaps, of a zombie epidemic, fighting with them in a kind of dark frontier town that I lived in with the French appelistes and my parents. There was a long standoff with zombies in a supermarket. My mum fled? After, jock boys, “protecting the town” (I mean, they were, but it was also an image of fascism), were slinging foxes off the city limits (a kind of Edinburgh like hill). My dad said he wouldn’t wait for Julien Coupat, what had he ever done for him, but LR, however, she was the leader of the fighting dogs I guess. I walked past X’s dad, looking happy on the steps of a pub. It was day, and I had a bath with T who ought not to stay long, but got carried away and submerged himself in the bath with all his clothes. People were coming in, in front of whom I’d feel ashamed.

RL Friday 13th March (2 days after the pandemic is announced, anticipating serious measures in France)

I dreamt something about Y. There were 3 specific points for the quarantine she was involved in. I can’t remember any of this now but I remember dead squirrels that became leaves at the gates of Brunswick square. I was very scathing of this procedure because it involved friends of mine, ones I didn’t care much for, toffs and the like. The form of their quarantine was an ambulatory drift - the opposite of confinement- around London bowling halls and it was autumn-like, they were going to see Dora, and I couldn’t approve because I felt left out. So I insulted them for being posh, which is what Y would have done had it been the other way around. Then there was a scene in a tiled bathroom that terrified me because it was like being rounded up. Something about pollen, a plant.

JS Wednesday 18th March (Day 4, confinement, Normandy)

I’m sleeping very well here. I have a large bed at the back of the house and it’s quiet and the air feels very clean, especially at night. I dream about getting a job in a shop on the Champs Elysees after the quarantine, I think. I remember the bone-aching dread of the anticipation of work. The shop was huge and sprawling, like the big M&S that I used to go to with my nanny, my mum’s mum Phyllis, where I’d feel embarrassed trawling around the ground floor lingerie section. Megan was my manager, we had to pretend not to know one another, and I don’t remember exactly the sequence of events but somehow we were on the run, we’d stolen all the stock and we were halfway up the Champs Elysee, sun in our hair.

HW Thursday 19 March

I'm on a bicycle descending a very steep, very dark downwardly spiralling road, so steep that I have to apply the brakes constantly to avoid careening out of control. I know if can concentrate and keep my hands on the brakes I will be safe. I'm not afraid. I'm wearing a t-shirt with the likeness of Imam Hussain ibn Ali on the front - like a Che t-shirt. (I've always considered Hussain a symbol of revolutionary steadfastness in the face of overwhelming odds). There's something on the back of the t-shirt too, almost like tour dates as if Hussain is a touring band.

JH Thursday 19 March

i had a dream that i was trying to download the ‘dust to digital’ compilation ‘goodbye babylon’ and couldn’t find it in any of the usual channels. computer screen first person. third person panoramic view of frustration, bonding of an entire internet community whose intentions are unclear (do they love and crave the history of black music in the USA, or are they simply hoarders?!) all of us against this cheese loaf looking white man who has control of the compilation and won’t release it for less than the sum of $400 (dollars). collective rage, collective promise, a guerilla community forms and plots to hack the fucker’s files so we can listen, for free, to the spirituals-blues-god fearing sounds of the fall of babylon.

ATZ Thursday 19th March

Only bribes left, already more than would be if it hadn’t been interrupted by a phone call from Free about setting up something. I went to the theatre with a russian friend, she took me. It was an italian theatre. We sat, my parents were there. Then I remembered about the pandemic. I thought “shit, we shouldn’t be here!” and we left.

I passed the theatre’s café where they sold a green pastry that I was into but didn’t get. Something like matcha jalebi but in the shape of a flower. Somebody called “anonymous fox” started editing this.

CGE Thursday 19th March (Los Angeles. 6th day of social distancing.)

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. He’s eating. I have a strong premonition that he’s going to be arrested again for not paying the bill. He doesn’t have money on him, neither do I. We leave and walk home in the rain. I haven’t seen him for a long time and it’s great. I’m figuring out how I’ll come back to get that bill paid so he won’t get arrested. I know that he will anyway.

We get to the house I grew up in. I go to bed and sleep and my dreams are of bringing cashier’s cheques to the bar. Also about Hari Nef. A few times I wake up to my childhood room for a few moments and there are about twenty very thin snakes with little protruding faces all over and under the lower half of my body. It’s frightening and disgusting but vaguely erotic and the pleasure of that sends me back to sleep each time. Morning comes, I wake up, the snakes are there, my disgust increases. I get out of bed and they disappear – a dream. My divorced parents call me from downstairs. They are together. There is a sense of occasion. I go into the bathroom and register several individually wrapped rolls of toilet paper in the laundry basket. I piss.

LC Thursday 19th March

I was taking part in a reality tv show about tattoos, and the producers were pushing to get one on my face. I gave in to pressure but couldn’t think of anything. The cameras were rolling, I thought of the Stooges song “Gimme Danger” and agreed to get it on the side of my head. The needle got stuck in my skull and my whole head started to vibrate with the tattoo machine, I woke up screaming with pain.

RL Friday 20th March 2020, (3rd day of confinement in Marseille)

I was making my way over to a conservatory or greenhouse in Edinburgh in the rain in a taxi, it was full of tropical plants. I was dressed in grey woolen ribbed tights and a school uniform: the meeting was with a headmistress to see if I could attend her school. Despite my excellent grades and musical record as a concert pianist, she had discovered that I was simultaneously serving a jail sentence, a fact of which I was not yet aware.

I was in jail with L in a farmyard for at least the next six months. We had maybe not done what we were accused of, in any case we didn’t remember. Our jail cell was a large barn, painted black on the inside, but we could see people passing by and there was straw on the ground outside.

We had taken the sentence on behalf of L’s sister, Louna. We were accused of having participated in a riot of people we didn’t know. We didn’t know if we had done this, in any case we had no recollection of it. From our cell, we looked them up on the internet, they were a tall group of people in hoodies (sometimes all red, sometimes all blue), and they reminded me of Slipknot. They were on a bridge in Peckham with hammers and knives raised. It looked sort of white supremacist, and I was annoyed with Louna for having got caught up in this without doing her research. They were not cute like a black bloc.

AK Friday 20 March 2020 (Social Distancing, Moderate Isolation)

On the top floor of an apartment building, in a studio space just under the roof. A man I desire but also feel repulsed by wants me to give him a blowjob. He asks that I wear a very specific shade of lipstick but I can only find a different and much more pink one in my bag which mainly is full of all kinds of useless scraps of paper. So, no blowjob. Instead we head down to the streets, it looks like Paris. We meet up with his friends and when I reach out to say hi my shoe slips on the cobblestones and I fall on my ass. Then we all sit an exam that I haven’t prepared for and I leave the room early, knowing I wouldn’t have passed anyway.

IK Friday 20 March 2020
The confinement is over, but it was so unexpected that I wasn’t prepared for that. It’s late at night and i’m heading home, but then, suddenly, i remember that i lent my apartment to a stranger through an association. So i decide to go back but i don’t know where to go.

IX Friday 20 march (confined for 7 days, strictly for 4)

I have been dreaming a lot of small, dirty falling apart places. Last night it was a place by the beach, with a fisherwoman who only caught dirty, ugly, sick fishes. We were a group of women trying to get to some deserted place in Northeast Brazil, but the googlemaps app kept giving no results. We get to my aunt’s apartment building in the suburbs of Recife and then we split up in two different cars, my girlfriend goes in a different car. We stop by the beach with the fisherwoman. The seafront is made of ruined walls, or walls from recent ruins. I don’t know why, but my girlfriend and I sleep over in separate villages, and next day she joins me to say she hooked up with a girl last night, and I tell her, “You don’t have to tell me everything”, but then she answers, “I feel this is going to be important”. The girl’s name is Jen-Jen (I feel like she might have dreadlocks, even though I never see her). We split up again, I’m trying to not feel abandoned or jealous. Then I’m in bed with my girlfriend again and ask her why she’s so distant and then she answers “je fais une branlette virtuelle avec Jen-Jen”. I wake up.

HP 19 March

All I remember was that I was on a Eurostar concerned about having forgotten my bra and I saw two old school friends and asked them to sit with me. “I haven’t seen you for a very long time”. One of them had been living in New Zealand and talked about the bunkers for the rich there and we all remarked how noone had really changed.

GCD 20th March
I was with my goddaughter Zoe (4) and my friend, her mum, and Zoe couldn’t sleep - kept coming in to us in distress talking about this new transnational nation we’d just found out about, called something like ‘Newton International’ - kind of like the Vatican, an institutional state, but spread all over the world. We had only been saying bad things about it and she was having nightmares. I kept going in to try to get her to sleep. In the end I promised that I would come in and tell her a nice, a good story about this nation, and then wait with her while she fell asleep. But I forgot, and carried on talking to my friend, then later went in to look at a large mirror in the bedroom and I saw in the mirror that Zoe was lying on the top bunk, waiting for me, her eyes open, then closed, and I felt ashamed.

[I am ‘social distancing’ in Glasgow for last 5 days. I woke at 3.49am, the exact point Nowruz is marked (I learned this morning), then dreamt this between 5.30 -8]

I dreamt a few nights ago that I was introducing an Australian friend of mine to a different Australian friend of mine. One friend has recently become a mother. In real life, I know her partner, and he is South Asian. In the dream, her partner was a white man who I didn’t know.

Before this dream, I had several nightmares, which I don’t remember. This is the last dream that I remember. I’ve been staying in for just over a week. Last night I didn’t dream. I hope to stop dreaming.

CC, 17/3/20, self-isolation

Sparse memories. I have a bright blue chocolate egg and the police are raiding my house. They are dismayed I have recently travelled. All of my friends and the social world are contained in these shady figures who are telling me off, because the egg is a sign of contamination. (In real life my mum had brought a pack of them with her as a present from my stepmum from Edinburgh to Paris last week, and I brought them back to Edinburgh with me when I returned here.) I protest saying that they were a present, and I’m upset like a child who can’t have her chocolate. The figures won’t believe me and start to shout things incomprehensibly. They tell me Easter is cancelled and that I’m a selfish person. I think the egg is something like money, because it’s shiny.

AR 20 March 2020 (self-isolation, after expecting lockdown, London)

Strangely deep sleeps since this reality set in. 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. I am sharing with an old high school friend A__, who returns to the house from a party. They have lost their keys but there is a table in the hall with a hole that seems to contain many sets. She has brought a man with her who gets increasingly amused the more upset I get that I can’t sleep if he is in the house. More and more people turn up at the door. They enter a party that is in the front room of my flat from 2008. The tenement stairway is a deep orange. I try to pack to leave but my suitcase is full of grass.

Dream 09.03.2020 [Prelude to social distancing]

Dreamed pasolini made a film about plague (coronavirus) and Andy Warhol was stalking people on the tube. [DG]

MB, Friday 20 March. Day 5 in Marseille, self isolation

(I never remember my dreams - they depart very quickly, so to participate I tried to write notes when I woke up in the night)

Liquid Brains. Replacing heads.

Replacing heads again.

Inflatable: Burstable.

Lying in long grasses as army storms past. Follow the track by staying off the track.

(Who are they? Orc-ified white boyz - mad max giant machinic vibe) heavy footsteps - stampede.

Remember this exact spot.

Now Hiding from the curator he’s on the telephone. Behind large trunk step on a twig. He shines his iphone light on my face and then we accompany one another out of the forest.

Dream 20.03.20 [Social distancing in South London]

Caught the virus inside a castle: people weren't taking it seriously and someone quite casually said that he had it, while sitting at a table with us in a huge converted room downstairs, the old dining hall, in which were several pianos and a harpsichord that were being used for live streaming transmissions (that word now has such a weird double sense). There was a secret poem inside the words of another poem that two poets / academics had uncovered -- I think a Renaissance poem, the words appearing inside the existent text, highlighted in red, but somehow inscribed on the dark and dingy walls of a precarious castle tower, the two academics pointing out these words as we ascended a rickety staircase. This secret poem was so impossibly complexly interwoven and apparently inextricable from the original poem that I had no idea how they'd discovered it, and was sceptical as to its veracity: could it just be a conspiracy theory? (Like the structure of coronavirus transmission anxiety itself, the structure of paranoia but the content of actual fact). [DG]

JS 20/03/20 (Day 6 confinement, Normandy)

Just a small vignette of a dream, in a large light conference hall, in London, I think. I am with D&G, we’d spoken that day (in real life) about having a conference call. D was annoyed at me, they were going to read a poem at the conference. The poem read: love, love, love, love, love, love, love. G had provided all the catering and was sat surrounded by pies and salads in an apron.

DN March 16th, 2020 ( The night before departing Budapest to Berlin)

A woman of around 102 years appeared to me in a café in Budapest. The café was empty. Only the danube dwellers surrounded it and looked through the windows. She sat closed to me and I could see all the lines and creases of her face which looked like a map of the world. She was mute, but communicated to me that she lived through two revolutions and two battles. Then she said in telepathic form -- my face bears the pattern of the Danube, and the route of the migration of birds -- before turning her face away.  

JH March 20 2020

there were some other battles that faded after i woke up but most vividly a fight against a giant squid and her human parent. she had just won a contest for best looking squid in the ocean, very beautiful indeed, and she was all ready to soak up her glories. i traveled through the cavernous ocean-rock landscape like a crustacean, which could have led me to many objectives but i somehow ended up in front of the squid, staying underwater so I couldn’t be detected. i had been watching resident evil videos online so in typical fashion of that game i found a rocket launcher and blew up the squid. someone who i can’t remember received a phone call, he seemed villainous, was shocked that the squid was blown up. a homie was in the water, teasing me that i could open this electrical box. then we swam away.

GR (21/3 second night of confinement in Tel Aviv)

Im at S’s flat in jerusalem, it’s not the flat but it is. We’re speaking and im saying some anxious things. The TV is suddenly on, there’s the news there. Judith Butler is the broadcaster. She’s not her, but she is. S is gone, some ppl there were on the flight from london with me appear. They try to approach me but I tell them they have to step back because of quarantine and all.

We’re suddenly in a massive building, endless corridors, endless staircases, big glass windows, walking within a buzzing ambience of untraceable conversations. Im speaking to a person I’ve never met before about the person in charge of counterintelligence. They tell me that they’ve been really nice to them lately, that they’ve been making them think that if they’ll put just a bit more effort, they’ll take them. I’m telling them that I know our counterintelligence is not trustworthy, that they’re manipulative and demanding, that they’ll make them work for days and weeks and will never give them credit but only exhaustion. We’re going outside, maybe it’s lunch time. T, my younger brother, is standing by me. With worried eyes he’s asking if I’m certain about the counterintelligence. I’m nodding. He starts to cry and I hug him.

‘How long have u been working for them?’

‘Two weeks’

Behind us there’s the structure we’ve just left. From the outside it looks like a Frank Ghery adaptation on Kafka’s castle. It’s lights are constantly being switched on and off.

MH - Saturday 21st

Me and Huw Edwards (the BBC newsreader) sat in front of my dad in his living room trying to persuade him that Coronavirus was dangerous and he needed to stay indoors. He palmed us off and went out to the newsagents to buy a paper.  (FML)

LAG

21/03

(5th day of relative isolation - only going for walks with partner, had to go to the hospital in the week for non-coronavirus related issue)

I was on the top floor of an old Victorian school building, the kind with glazed red bricks. It was like a school gym. There were hundreds of us trapped there. The police/army arrived, on horses, and were trying to control an increasingly agitated crowd. They charged at us, as they started charging we all thought, oh my god they are really going to do it… it was like a tank flattening hundreds of people who all disintegrated into dust like in Buffy, when a vampire gets killed. I survived and formed an alliance, with two students, L and IS, who had been making a video work about confinement in Yarls Wood (IRL). We had a more tenuous alliance with one of the boys from one of the many trot sects who had been picketing during the recent strikes. He was foolhardy and went onto the balcony that formed the perimeter of the gym. He decided to try and scale down the side of the building. L + IS and I walked around trying to find a better escape route. I walked to the edge and saw that from the second floor there seemed to be a slanted wall that led down to a sandy, california beach. We decided to try and get there. Me and L went ahead and IS stayed on the top floor to keep watch, and see if our plan was successful. Arriving at the second floor, we came across a room where a secretary/gallery girl/posh front of house staff type cyborg woman welcomed us, thinking we were supposed to be there. There was a buffet, of ottolenghi type salads and shit like that. We were starving but tried to be chill about eating pumpkin w pomegranate and whipped goats cheese etc type food. Then L said, excuse me I have to go to the bathroom which was the plan to try and find the escape hatch to the slanted wall down to the beach. Obvs she took ages trying to find it so I went to check on her, making an excuse to the cyborg. We scaled down the slanted wall, arriving at something like a crazy golf course/adventure playground. As we arrived we saw a hologram (but really dangerous) version of Boris Johnson riding a wild boar, charging through the sand, destroying everything in his path. He charged towards us, that was it. Up until that moment I had a lot of hope we would really escape and the slanted wall to the beach was going to be OK.

DN, 20th March 2020 (fourth day of confinement in Berlin)

Bathing in the Lukacs Baths in Budapest. 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. We could see heads bobbing up and down the water. The heads had silvery hair and were the bath philosophers. C, K and I were the students. We had to dive down to the bottom and read the inscriptions at the bottom of the bath. But the bottom never arrived and there were floating letters which changed to fish. And I could feel that we had to shift our bodies into another direction.

RL 20th March 2020 (fourth day of confinement in Marseille).

I can’t remember my dreams, which is unusual for me. I wake several times in the night, I feel ill and achey, I think I have a fever but I lost my thermometer in an Uber. I know this: farmyard, ex boyfriend, blood. I don’t know anything else.

SNM March 18th 2020 (Self-isolation in Paris)

A recurring scene for uncomfortable dreams is my father’s house in Chicago; I am usually last-minute trying to solve a deep-seated psychological conflict with him before getting a flight to Paris. I usually never make my flight, even when I get to the airport on time. This time I was in my father’s and was having sex in a bed in one of the rooms (none that existed during my childhood, a bed unrecognizeable), and was having sex with two men without a condom. After we came I realized that I hadn’t taken PreP that day and asked them “No judgements, but are either of you HIV-Positive?” One of them—blond haired, blue eyed, looked at me and said yes. I remember thinking that I didn’t find him attractive at all and couldn’t figure out why I’d had sex with him in the first place—said yes. I asked him if he took his meds regularly. He said sometimes. I decided that I needed to go to the hospital to get a PeP but couldn’t figure out where I could go with the Coronavirus epidemic and also remembered I had a flight later that day back to Paris. I panicked, knowing that it would be impossible to both get to a hospital in Chicago then catch my flight to Paris, but also I doubted being able to get back to Paris and be within the 48 hour time limit to obtain PeP in Paris. The two men disappeared, seemingly evaporated, and I was suddenly drinking coffee with my father and step-mother in the morning trying to plan a hospital visit somewhere without telling them what I was up to the previous evening. I absentmindedly made conversation while smiling intermittently so as to avoid suspicion while descending into anxiety. As I was panicking I wondered why I hadn’t taken PrEP that day and realized within the dream that in real life I was already home in Paris, had been in self-isolation since Sunday which is why I stopped taking PrEP and could not have had sex with either of these men. I awoke.

LA 21 March 2020 (at home in Michigan, USA)

R and I are walking home from the "city." It's wintry and must have just snowed. To the right was a path up a hill, like the paths up Bernal Hill. The path was frozen ice, and we turned to the other path, which was an iron ladder, also icy. I don't know if it was attached to a building. I went first, R right behind me. I went up easily and arrived at windows of various sizes. It seemed that the largest one was still too small to get into. But R assured me it was okay. I went in head first and squeezed my shoulders through, then slid easily to the floor. R then just opened the series of windows as if it were a door and as if my getting in somehow unlocked something to make his entry possible.

The room was large, in greens and blues. There were sofas. I vaguely wondered if it were a department store. Through a door I saw into a room and someone in a uniform. I thought I was busted, and in trouble. As my angle changed, I saw the little room was full of males in uniform. But then I noticed they wore Boy Scout uniforms and the males couldn't have been more than seventeen years old. I relaxed. I had some exchange with the scout leader, and showed him, or wanted him to notice, that R was wearing a Boy Scout shirt. And I was wearing one too. I knew, when I saw our shirts, that we bought them at a vintage clothing store.

IX 21 March 2020 (7th day confinement in Paris)

I took a nap this afternoon and dreamt I was standing by the window with a balcony and saw 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. It is about to jump from the balcony to the room when I wake up

21 March 2020 (quarantine Day 5, Oakland)

SL:  crawling on my hands and knees thru a classroom of poets. I’m looking for my vinyl 7 inch of Jenny, Jenny from the band Tsunami. I can’t remember her last name, is it Jenny Wrench? someone is holding all of my vinyl 7 inches up front but that one is missing. looking between books and papers in little cubbies under people’s chairs. I feel slightly abject with my ass in the air, but am determined. This goes on for a very long time. I don’t find it. I find her new 7 inch, it’s robin’s egg blue has a xeroxed black and white picture of her smiling on it. it is a collaboration with her musician boyfriend, his name is andy, he was in ani difranco’s band. it says how happy they are in type on the front. I still want the old 7 inch.

RL 22 March 2020 (5th day of confinement) I still can’t remember my dreams. I’ve been watching the Matrix. I dreamt of a spaceship. My dream was intense but I can’t remember anything.

SNM March 22 2020 (Confinement day 7, Paris)

At a department store. Maybe a mall. Going in and out of elevators. Maybe a parking garage. I didn’t know we were going to an amusement park but when we got there I was elated. Eyeing the first roller coaster I wanted to go on and convincing the person I was with (I don’t remember whom) to come with me. They were scared but excited. I tried to hype them up. The roller coaster is a suspended-rider style where riders are suspended from a trapezoidal track. Restraints are drop-down harness style. My companion and I get to be in the front row of the train. My excitement heightens and I explain how special this is because not only will we have the best and only view, but we will be propelled by the momentum in the back of the train on loops. As we are seated I realize there is no safety belt connecting the harness restraint to the seat and as the train moves towards the first hill I notice that our restraints aren’t even locked. We cling to our restraints as we make the curve down to the first hill. Before we are inched up the hill I notice we are close enough to the ground to jump and roll and convince my companion to do so before we are locked into certain death. We jump and walk away from the ride. I don’t remember any more about this dream.

MB Marseille, day… 7?

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

I arrive. Unmarked 70’s building. Grey, pastel teal, tiles? Ground floor.

I go with Gabriel Grefier. He is a 75 year old actor I worked with for a previous film, and who I have been planning to cast as “Phillip” in the next film.

I don’t remember the occasion but I’m impressed at him having brought me to such a punk place. (it is).

The only dinner choice is 4 cupcakes though, they are displayed in a small glass fridge. We both choose the four cupcake option. We drink wine in plastic cups. Little white ones that might have come out of a cold water disposal unit. We dance mayb - not in a seductive way - like old friends.

I have a conversation with a short dark haired girl (Mel?) who works there about how great all this is. She says yes, the only disappointment is the green topped cupcake. “Jon” behind the bar made them, and whilst the cupcakes are “perfectly blended”, he added sparkling sugar pearls and ruined it. I go to the toilet to get changed, Gabriel has left, I pour my remaining wine into an empty beer can (1664) to drink on the way home. Mel and Jon  are screaming at each other. As I leave, I hear Mel asking another employee “what are we going to do?”

I walk home, deciding against the beer canned-wine halfway. But I end up back at Brussels Archive somehow and notice a new employment offer in the window. My partner IRL (And in-dream-life?) is looking for work, this would be perfect. I stand trying to photograph the advertisement but my camera won’t focus on the telephone number.

Mel inside: “Is that Madison still here?” (There is not a friendly tone to this statement)

She comes out and invites me back in. They’re preparing for an Australian artists performance (Lara Thor?)

I sneak a muffin into my sleeve. I’m outside. “This is the car you need to get rid of” Mel says.

John can’t be seen anywhere. I eat the muffin, realising the job advert must be for Jons position and he is dead in the trunk

2020-03-22. London.

Two armoured trucks land in a swimming pool and before they can get out more troops land on top of them and raise flags, causing the trucks to sink and tip over. All the sportspeople in their digital avatars walk into the sea as if home.

JFE March 22 2020 (Day 4 of social distancing in New York City)

I am at a picnic bench in what feels like an isolated town. There are others smoking further down at another bench and I cannot reach them. There seems to be an impossible distance below us. Agamben is in the town somewhere; as is Hegel, in a nursing home. This occurs to me and I cant’ believe that he’s still alive. Then an auditorium. Many of my friends are there. Many strangers. Among the faces in medical masks, there are undercover cops of some kind waiting to grab people. I spot one behind me and tell him to get fucked. Comically he shouts, “Did you hear that?! That’s a threat!”, and begins pointing me out. I tell him I’ll smash his head in. We know this guy, and somehow his becoming some kind of cop feels like he’s become some kind of scab. Barefoot in mexico city, I begin running. There are heroin needles left everywhere and I’m listening to two US tourists complain about them. I imagine stepping on one without shoes. I run past the last stop on a bus line, or maybe the busses are just empty, past a parking microbus, and down a flight of stairs into some building’s interior. I find some friends, one of whom is a professional swimming pool skimmer who tells me that things should be slowing up sometime soon, that the strike will be able to really dig in. They ask about X, the cop from before. I tell thim I said I’d kick his teeth in, fuck that guy, he’s a scab. I don’t think this surprises anybody.

MLK Sunday 22 March (Copenhagen, Social Distancing 8th night)

Two consecutive dreams of being late to a means of transport. First dream, a flight. I have to catch it to see my mum, she has bought me the ticket and reminded me not to lose it. I can’t see properly, everything is too bright and I have to squeeze my eyes tight together and squint constantly to make out what’s in front of me, impossible to navigate the airport like this. I get more and more stressed, aware that even though I’m at the airport with time to spare, chances are I won’t find the right gate with eyes like mine. I think I did make it, but I can’t remember how.

Second dream, a train. J and I are supposed to take the Eurostar from London, which is also Copenhagen. He has our tickets. We are moving through a large crowd of people, in a field of massive pylons that lead up to the train station. There are little houses nestled between them, friends with children playing. I turn to look at one of them and when I look back J is gone. I can’t see him anywhere and our train will depart in a few minutes. Suddenly it’s also very hard for me to move, I have to take massive steps and on top of that it’s like walking through thigh-high water. Even though the station is within my line of sight, I know I will be hard pressed to make it there before the train leaves. Somehow I get to the gates and with J nowhere in sight I decide to try and board without him, hoping that he will get on at the last minute and that we can find each other once the train has left. To get on, I try and convince the controllers who are also cops that J has my ticket and is on the train. I feel repulsed at myself for playing cute and flirting. It works. I’m allowed on the train through the wagons at the front where the cops live. I have to crawl on all fours through their living-quarters, to make it to the passenger-end of the train. In one wagon, someone has lit a bonfire and is reprimanded by the cop accompanying me. I wake up before I make it to the other passengers but after the train has departed.

CW, Jerusalem. Night of 22/03/20, after one week of state-imposed house confinement/general lockdown (in my flat and on my own), interrupted by a 10-minute walk through the deserted streets of Musrara each day.

The feeling of moving through a vast cityscape at night, lit by innumerable lights. I am on my way to some place – or am being followed by someone (a collective someone), using public transportation. I change trains (buses?) frequently. Cut to an indoor scene, in some apartment (only the sensation of its spatial makeup, without any clear sense of its exact composition of rooms and corridors): Encounters with various individuals who coalesce into a group, talking and gesturing to me with different levels of urgency. Raised voices, shouts – some grab me by the arms. I have done something or they want me to do something for them. Some overpowering menace is approaching either them or only me. Perhaps my father is among the apartment’s band of characters – connected to this is the strong impression of being a teenager, a school boy. Sudden cut to a huge lavatory, with others present as well. I wake up, but the sensation of the dream soaks through my entire morning. To dampen it, I start reading and annotating the first two chapters of Rancière’s „Les mots de l’histoire“. While writing this fragment now, the dream-sensation imposes itself again.

SK. Week 1 of lock down, rural France

I dream that I am dreaming. Then I dream that I have woken from my dream only to find that I am still asleep, and in sleeping, I am dreaming one of Freud’s dreams, at least  it is one from his dream book, where the dreamer is fixed on the stairs, unable to go up or to go down. And then of course I am on the stairs, the stairs of the house in north London in which I grew up, and which recurs in my dreams as the scene of events that did not take place there, and which in this dream does not resemble my memory of it at all. It is not vivid. There are no striking characters. There are no unusual acts that I am unable to explain. I continue only to dream that I sleep, and that while sleeping, I am dreaming -- a dream of a dream.

IK. Week 1 of lock down, somewhere in the French countryside
Was back in the main street of my hometown (which I don't enjoy visiting ). There were people everywhere, and lots of cops. Some youngsters were kind of parading in the streets. Lots of small groups of people, some of them in verbal conflict with the cops. At a crossroads, where the streetcar is turning right, one of them hops on the back of a cop. Then, I woke up.

CT 17/03 (under state imposed house confinement, Paris)

I’m at the beach with my colleague M., and T, my partner. M. has come naked, as a protest. As I agree with her, I take off my clothes and lie, naked, on the beach. It’s a shingle beach. Suddenly, out of nowhere, lots of cops, in uniforms, come running out of the water. They are still in the water, a few metres away but they come running towards the beach. I’m facing the water, cops come from my right but towards my left so I figure going right is the safest plan as right is opposite to where they’re going. I run into the water, rightward. I keep running but I’m a bit too early and I can’t help but cross path with some of the cops. I pretend not seeing them. When I think I’m out of trouble, the last cop of the group grabs my (still naked) ass and squeezes it. I look back with this wtf look on my face (but shy, he’s a cop), and he grins at me. I feel powerless and frustrated. (But I hold back the anger; he’s a cop). I keep going, swimming. I reach a spot where weeds kind of protect me from being too much exposed and where my feet can touch the bottom. 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’m terrified.

22 March 2020 (quarantine Day 6, Oakland)

SL:  I am in Berlin at his place tho everything looks very different than in “real life”. His room is in a basement. I am lying on his bed, a white crinkled comforter, in my underwear. He gets up, full of restless energy, leaves the room, goes somewhere else in the house. I find him pulling blankets and objects out of a small closet or cabinet and now there is a very big pile on the floor, half as tall as we are. He groans in frustration at the pile and the objects. I say, What are you doing – come back to bed – I’m only here for one night, and he’s like, Yeah, you’re right, OK. Comes back to bed, I look at my airline ticket, it says my flight leaves at 2:30 and I realize that means 2:30 AM, not the afternoon as I thought, not 14:30. I look at the clock and panic, it is already 2 AM. I say, There is no way I’ll make this flight, no way I can get to the airport so quick and he’s like, No, there’s not. I call the airline…then what happens? I wish I remember what happens next.

SC 22nd March 2020 (Social distancing, London)

I had a dream that I was in a little flat/house with a friend and my fiancé came over. I hadn’t seen him for ages and he’d caused me all this stress but I was like “oh he’s here now”. So this guy’s there and I just feel a strained sense of obliged connection towards him, he’s kind of a loser. and I’m thinking: why have I stressed and worried about him so much, look at him. Well, he says he has to go, he’s going to see his friend Karol G and he asks if I’ve heard of her. I’m like: well duh she made “Tusa”. I suppose he wants me to be jealous, but I don’t really care. He leaves and I hang out with my friend.

[context: Karol G is a nice but bit cringy latin pop star, she made a song called “tusa” (means heartbreak) with Nicki Minaj. It’s a weird song because KG is singing forlornly about a lost love and Nicki starts rapping about how the guy has to jack *himself* off now]

EK Saturday 21 March 2020 ( Mandatory Quarantine, Ljubljana)

I have just arrived to my quarantine in Ljubljana on a repatriation flight from London. I packed my leather trousers, three pairs of underwear and the rest were things of no use I knew I would miss. Framed pictures, posters, stones, some miniatures, dried plants, tiny chains, walnuts and an array of small boxes.  In the night I dreamt of an earthquake that suddenly animated all the items I installed around my new room. I was observing the moment with pride. 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. The whole room was buzzing- this was my reward. I woke up not thinking much about my dream and forgetting about it. Later today when I first checked the news I found out there was an earthquake not too far, in Zagreb, with a magnitude of 5.5.

IX 23 march, 8th day confinement

IRL I have to work on a project proposal which requires me to apply the concept of vulnerability to a certain phenomenon that I want to analyse. I dream of thinking about having to read texts on the sociological concept of vulnerability, but before I can start reading them, other texts, the ones I am reading in my dream, novels and stuff, all texts are about vulnerability, mentioning it, defining it. And then I think, oh, cool, I won’t have to read the boring academic stuff.

RL 23 march 2020 day 6 Marseille state imposed house confinement

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. this was necessary or obligatory for survival but my parents see me being taken away and want to extract me. wisteria. i don’t know if my parents display deep dismay or terror?.

anyway im in florida with jess and Natalie and we've been escorted to the elevator at the edge of this large wasteland. everything is a kind of faded powder blue. the man escorting us is doing so in some kind of forklift vehicle- but a small one, the kinds of pallet lifting things people have in train stations. he has lots of tattoos. we are trying to leave. Ivan my boss is there and is telling us we can leave but is also slowing us down. we can only go in the elevator one at a time. our stuff is all in there wrapped in cling film and has to go separately. i think jess has already gone, i was too late to drive with her. Natalie can drive but ultimately she wants to go to her parents, not a badlands road trip like with jess. i am impatient, hoping to catch up with jess. Ivan comes back and says they now need to clean the elevator, something of mine has spilt all over the floor and is smelly and dangerous. it is a glass capsule of bee propolis.

while i’m in the lift i notice a small package resting on top of a shelf. actually its a baby that Gab has left me. i don’t know why she has left me her baby, if she just needs childcare, or if she was in danger, if she doesn't want to look after it any more. i am really worried because since i noticed so late, i’ve done a very bad job. under his little beige hood, his face is wrinkled under his puckered beige hood like as if he’s been under water. he’s alive but unresponsive. i carry him all the way from florida to Belleville that night. it begins to feel comforting having him with me, also unnerving because i keep maybe damaging him, letting his head fall back. i don’t want to give him up. it occurs to me my friend might not want her baby anymore. he feels more like my baby now i had to do this difficult journey across the badlands alone with him. i have to give the baby back that evening. i realise that I have never fed him not once and that I don't know how long he hadn't been fed for before that. the baby is actually a 3 year old boy, he becomes heavy to carry and I deliver him to his mother. I ask if she didn't want her baby any more then realise that I shouldn't have asked it in front of her child. they both look at me, they are beautiful with the same eyes, haircut and red jumper, i tell them they are "strong Godard" and feel alone and wake up.

DN, 23rd March 2020 (6th day of confinement in Berlin)

I’m forced to go on a date with this guy. He’s handsome in a kind of tepid way. Quiet, young and has all the right politics. But I find him bland and remain unconvinced by the way he imitates radical left rhetoric. He is just not the real thing and he shrinks to the size of a coffee table and thinks that he is attractive. I am terrified about being stuck with him. But ofcourse, I remember that, not only is he bland and handsome in a tepid way and a pseudo militant; I am quite shure that I don’t date men. And I am forced to go out with him. Then I think of O in Buda. I left her there, I remember this with deep anguish. I left O, the wife of the Ukrainian poet in Buda, when I told her that I’d stay. I remember that she is too beautiful and was very gently falling for her but I had to leave. 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.

23/3/20 - AG - London, social distancing

Stress dream. I woke up with a clenched jaw. But this was a banal dream - I think about work emails.

Last week (the week beginning 16 march 2020) LGS. I am a hermit who lives in an Appalachian hollow w dogs and birds (isolation)

I dreamed of all the people in US clinics saying ‘I can’t breathe.’ Mike Brown’s ghost appeared, and I knew he had become the virus that haunts the world.

21/03/20 EJW - London - My flat is in a quarantined building containing symptomatic people.

Don’t often remember dreams but the first since I started to stay home (18th) was this night. Memory or feeling of a recurring apocalyptic dream I’ve had for years (usually in a couple of different settings and I’m driving a car, climbing over buildings or crawling in a confined space with the knowledge of imminent death), but there’s no ‘visual content’, I must have caught the tail end of it. When dreaming ‘starts’ I’m on the verge of a wet dream, but nothing’s happening, there’s only blackness. I masturbate (or rather, dream that I do), continually try to conjure something erotic, fail, then wake up needing a piss.

23/03/20 ND - London

I go down the stairs that have so many steps that you can't see the end.  I'm wearing a pretty weird, funny outfit-- a pink dress with a giant ornament bow like I've been dressed up by aliens to take part in some complicated and confusing action.  

I go down very slowly and gently and look around, but I keep walking and walking. I walk endlessly, and nothing happens. When I woke up, the first thing I thought was, "Why didn't it occur to me to pull off an idiotic outfit, turn around and run upstairs?

But the dream was over, and there was no answer.

23 March 2020 (quarantine Day 7, Oakland)

SL:  We are peeking out thru an orange plastic street divider at the protests and rioting that has broken out in Paris. I am looking up on my phone how do I say I don’t speak French. Then I am in a shiny pool floating on a float with my laptop on my lap. It is unseasonably warm. This is a hotel. The laptop is getting wet around the edges. The women in bikinis at the side of the pool are encouraging me to get out, they say, you will ruin your laptop. So I drift to the edge and I get out of the pool. I find a comfortable lounge chair. But I’m supposed to be upstairs in the nursing home with my friend. And then I am there. I am supposed to stay there and hang out for 5 days.

JH 23 March 2020

property managers knocked on my door for a long time until i opened. bearded man, I asked who he was and he got upset. my voice was hoarse. He mentioned something about halloween. then a skinny white woman entered my home and started taking measurements. she took my grandmother’s temperature. woke up, back to sleep. dad’s house, pool party. there is a woman with split personalities, i am trying to impress her. she reclines on a beach chair and talks about the popular guy at the party. i am self conscious about my body in front of her. she talks openly about her two persons. my dad is sad i have no time for him. sun is hot and going down. they are skipping stones on the water and watching a dog chase after it. i dive in the pool and sniff some water up, get out. there’s a girl putting makeup on, im staring at her. she catches wind and moves around the corner. my sister says she’s going to the store. i feel a cold sore coming on with my tongue, fleshy burn.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 22/04/20, after over a week of state-imposed house confinement/general lockdown (in my flat and on my own):

I am visiting what I suppose to be some kind of government office – a rather cramped space baking in sunlight (all shutters are open), corridors bustling with people in suits, everyone is talking to each other, most office doors are open, telephones ring (with ringtones reminiscent of American films of the 1950s/60s). Distinct feeling of have visited this office before, in fact of having dreamt this dream before, along with some of its personae. I am here to see someone – blurred image of the meeting itself, but after I leave the office and start walking towards the exit, I feel I have just betrayed someone, that I am an informer who is visiting the secret police. Suddenly I realise that I have been holding a square-shaped piece of soap all along. It is similar to the hand-made soap that I bought in Istanbul almost exactly two years ago while visiting M., and staging an après-coup break-up with her for myself. I am confused by the soap – I know it signifies something very important, but I cannot remember what. While I am standing in the corridor, a group of women walks by, N. is among them. She greets me in passing, turning her head back for a second. I hear her laughing and sense that she is acting completely indifferent towards me. Disappointment. 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.

GR (24/3 5th night of confinement in Tel Aviv):

Everything was covered in a swampy like material, water that stood for too long and gained some weight and thickness over time.  Maybe we were all naked, but it was impossible to distinguish one body from the other nor to tell how many bodies were actually there. Every movement required a lot of effort, like sinking into quicksand. Only there was no depth into it, and it just felt as if we were all turning into one neon green texture.

ATZ, 24th of March, 7th night, Paris

 On a spanish island with my friend Camille.  In contact with my ex who is on island in the far north -  but the feel of his territory is south american, south america up north near aurora borealis - maybe the magnetic pole inversion had occurred ! kingdom come ! - Him and I decided to meet so I took a little canoe and he came on an inflatable mattress, the sea was dark and sure with a purple horizon line. We floated back to my ends from mid-ocean and ended up on a lively little spanish island where he made fun of me for not having a driving license and said we’d share a bicycle instead. I called Camille, who was watching something on TV called Denfinils. She sang the theme song to me and it was the tune of Le Code by Myth Syzer. I was calling because I couldn’t remember which island I was meant to return to.

PP, 24th March, 7th night, Normandy, France

I am going to an indian restaurant. We have to wait for so long inside it. The walls are made of old white limestone, it’s like a big castle here. Quite dark, quite cold. We wait in a big room that looks like a big cinema room, with many rows of cinema red chairs. In front of us, there is a big christian stained glass. This is the only source of light inside the room, except a few small candles on the walls. I can’t remember the scene depicted on this stained glass, but it is really colorful, and we look at it for a long time, seated on the red cinema chairs.

RL 24th March, 8th day of state imposed house confinement, Marseille

I am quarantined in Daisy’s apartment in Bloomsbury with my Dad. The apartment is dusty and dark and takes the form of a corridor, with a large boiler imposing itself over our heads in the kitchen. Brown. Worry about how to get resources, toilet paper I think. I will have to go out. I think I’m allergic to the dust. I should mention that my Dad is asthmatic. I imagine I’m worried about my Dad. I have obviously made some rushed choice which has excluded others from being in this apartment. There are wolves on the neoclassical patio (which doesn’t exist IRL), and my mother outside. It is night. Incidentally Daisy’s apartment marks the stamping ground of the ambulatory quarantine I had about Y (written up earlier). My dreams are shifting between the familial members and people close to me that I am confined with in my head: it has gone from friends, to lovers and ex lovers, to babies that are not mine, and now my father.

JS 24th March, Day 9 confinement Normandy

I had so many dreams last night

My students in a big lecture hall, people looking through the roof of a prefab, listening in on me as I tell them tentatively that I’m cancelling all their exams even if I’m not officially allowed to yet, I don’t explicitly tell them there will be no exam because I want them to keep coming to my class.

I end up in the staff room with one of my colleagues and the head of the department. The head is in trouble for something. I’m in school uniform which is unfortunate because I’m not a student and everyone always mistakes me for a student anyway. My colleague is telling the head not to make the same mistakes he did, he was once falsely accused of something, I’m not sure what. It has something to do with a calendar and a woman in a ski suit.

My PhD gets refused funding, plants, not such a hot topic right now, says the feedback. Convoluted, reads another comment.

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, I’m with a big group of people, we’re milling about and hanging out, some cute kids hop around our legs

Something apocalyptic is announced and people scatter

I’m hiking around the winding roads towards my grandparents house and see no one, I pick flowers as I go and then remember the apocalypse and try and steal cabbages from people’s empty gardens. The only people I see are in their cars, driving in the opposite direction. Why are they going into the city I wonder? One car is laden down, it has three trailers attached to the back of it

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

It’s ok, I have comfy shoes

I realise I don’t have a key to my grandparents’ house, but it’s ok because I arrive and my mum and my dad and my aunt are all there sat around the table, here take a key they say.

I ask my mum what I cooked Jenny for dinner last night, Arancini she says, I’m upset that I can’t remember something as simple and recent as what we had last night for dinner.

I text someone who I’d been on a date with the night before, I don’t really care for him so much but I’m bored so I’ve decided he will be my lover. He’s really cool but he invites me to a really lame bar in my hometown, I wonder if its ironic and feel offended that my youth is ironic.  (I think this is a relic from a previous dream that has infiltrated into this dream)

My mum is about to leave, I know what will cheer you up she says, here, X’s baby, she passes me the baby as I begin cooking pasta, which I’ve put in water far too early, and they’re ricotta ravioli and I’ve forgotten that I’m cooking dinner for Laurie, who is vegan.

[Translation in English directly below] AO, France, nuit 5 (vendredi 20 mars 2020)

Confinement à mon domicile, avec mon petit-ami et mon chat

Je suis au rez-de-chaussée d’un hôtel particulier, un grand salon un peu triste, un peu gris, un peu vide et très haut de plafond. Un des murs donne sur le salon d’un autre hôtel particulier, chez les voisins. Entre les deux salons, il y a comme un portail ancien en bois sombre, avec un peu d’espace entre chaque barreau. Je vois un animal appuyé sur ce portail. Je m’approche et me rends compte que c’est une chatte allongée là, avec au creux de son ventre une quinzaine de petites têtes de chats, comme une grappe de raisin. Ils sont dans une sorte de poche transparente, comme s’ils venaient de naître, et en même temps semblent être en train de téter.

Plus loin, toujours derrière le portail, je vois le couple qui vit ici. Ils sont environ quarante-cinq ans. Ils ne se sont pas rendu compte de la naissance des chatons. Leur intérieur semble très luxueux, très coloré, et je les vois prendre le petit déjeuner, ils ont l’air très beaux, très heureux. J’ai l’impression que le soleil entre dans ce salon. Je les appelle pour qu’ils viennent voir la chatte. Ils s’approchent, ils s’occupent d’elle, nous discutons un peu à travers le portail. J’espère qu’ils vont l’ouvrir et les voir de plus près. Ils finissent par l’ouvrir et je suis heureuse et apaisée d’être près d’eux. Ils sont très doux, très calmes et souriants, tout de suite j’ai envie de les aimer et qu’ils m’aiment, de leur parler pour toujours. Ils sont en habits d’intérieur, légèrement découverts. J’ai envie de leur faire l’amour aussi, mais je pense qu’ils ne s’intéresseront jamais à une fille comme moi - plus jeune, moins raffinée.

Plus tard dans le rêve, la femme me contacte. Je suis si heureuse. Sa voix est toujours aussi enveloppante, apaisante. Elle me laisse entendre qu’elle organise une soirée avec ses amies, une soirée érotique. Elle m’y invite. Je suis très impressionnée, je ne sais pas comment m’habiller ni me comporter, mais je meurs d’envie d’y aller. J’y vais. Je rentre enfin dans ce salon. Il y a beaucoup de tissu ; de la soie, du velours, les couleurs sont vives, les canapés sont profonds, il y a des lustres et du champagne. Les femmes sont toutes magnifiques, leur chair blanche et épaisse, les seins sont serrés dans des corsets et de très beaux soutien-gorges en dentelle. Elles ont une confiance que j’imagine propre à la bourgeoisie, elles n’ont qu’à être elles, qu’à être belles, le doute de soi n’existe pas. Je suis impressionnée et totalement séduite à la fois.

Je suis emmenée dans un canapé, où je retrouve la femme rencontrée au début du rêve et une de ses amies. Je m’enfonce dans le canapé et dans leurs seins, j’ai plus de sensations que de réels souvenirs, le moelleux, la chaleur. Mon visage dans des dentelles, une main derrière ma nuque. Et ma dernière sensation, la meilleure. Je suis agenouillée sur un canapé en velours, et je sens un pied de femme glisser entre mes cuisses, contre mon sexe puis entre mes fesses, et l’orteil de ce pied qui fait quelques pressions sur mon anus. Et je me suis réveillée avec cette sensation agréable, sans réussir à sortir de mon lit avant un long moment, replongeant encore et encore sous ma couette qui était devenue de la peau et du velours.

[translation from the French, directly above] AO, France, 5th night (Friday 20 March 2020)

Confinement at my home, with my boyfriend and my cat.

I’m on the ground floor of a hôtel particulier [mansion/stately home], in a big salon [sitting room]: a bit sad, a bit grey, a bit empty and with a very high ceiling. One of the walls gives onto the salon of another mansion, the neighbours’ house. Between these two sitting rooms, there’s something like an ancient gate in dark wood, with a bit of space between each bar. I see an animal pressed into the gate. 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.

Further off, still behind the gate, I see a couple who live here. They are about 45 years old. They haven’t noticed the birth of the kittens. The interior of their house seems luxurious, very colourful, and I see them eating breakfast, they seem very handsome, very happy. I have the impression of sunlight entering the salon. I call them so that they’ll come and see the cat. They come closer, they look after her, we talk a bit through the gate. I hope they’ll open it and that I’ll see them from a bit closer. They end up opening it and I’m happy and relieved to be near them. They’re very sweet, very calm and smiley, straight away I want to like them and for them to like me, to speak to them for ever. They’re dressed in house clothes, lightly covered. I want to make love with them too, but I think they’ll never be interested in a girl like me - younger, less refined.

Later in the dream, the woman contacts me. I’m so happy. Her voice is still just as enveloping, reassuring. She lets me know she’s organising a soirée with her friends, an erotic soirée. She invites me. I’m very intimidated, I don’t know how to dress or to behave, but I’m dying of desire to go [to the soirée]. I go there. At last I enter this salon. There’s a lot of fabric; silk, velvet, the colours are alive, the sofas are deep, there are chandeliers and champagne. The women are all magnifiques [stunning, magnificent], their skin white and thick, their breasts squeezed into corsets and in very beautiful lace bras. They have a confidence which I imagine belongs to the bourgeoisie, they only have to be themselves, to be beautiful, self doubt doesn’t exist. I’m intimidated and completely seduced at the same time.

I’m brought to a sofa, where I find the woman I met at the beginning of the dream, and her friends. I sink into the sofa and into their breasts, I have sensations more than I have real memories, softness, heat. 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. And I wake up with this pleasant sensation, unable to leave my bed for quite some time, plunging again and again into my quilt which had become made of skin and velvet.

23 March 2020, Pipo, confined in a holiday house in France next to the sea, day 6.

I was in the middle of stealing in a Biocoop [organic/wholefoods shop in France], and what was weird was that the shop was switched off, as if there had been a power cut. So I was half way through putting something in my coat or my jacket, pasta or something, and the cashier was the box office worker from an independent cinema in Rennes, a guy with grey hair and glasses, and I was trying to avoid his gaze, so I put the pasta back down, which was a strange reaction seeing as there was no light in the shop.

JFE 24 March 2020 (post-lockdown, 6th day of social distancing in NYC)

Something in the bathroom is clogged, I’m told, by a coworker, in a restaurant that feels like a gigantic hotel. I go to the basement – a mysterious door. Opening it I hear voices and begin to relax. It feels forbidden for some reason, and not unlike my other dreams where the presence haunting my brother lives in an attic. I begin to search for cleaning supplies. A spray bottle full of cleaner, a device for unclogging a sink, a small handle with a circular skirt of stiff long plastic strands to shove down a drain. There are many people now, in the basement. It feels quite social really. Then I feel a pressure in my backpack and suspect that the blonde kid behind me just pickpocketed me. I check the pocket and see that it’s open. “Hey motherfucker!”, I yell, as he speedwalks away. I tell him I won’t hold it against him. I’m a thief too, how could I? He stops, looking defeated, and gives me two half-used yellow pencils. Maybe I’m alone now, and this basement feels unsafe. An unfriendly presence gathering in the dark. I run out the door and into the staircase. Once at the top, I look back at the door and there is something waiting for me there. I run to the bathroom in question up the hall, narrowly making it without being overcome. The sink is fucking filthy. Who did this? But it’s not the sort of sink I expect: it’s got a big basin, but behind it a porcelain passage goes back indefinitely into the wall, the water slowly sliding back, like a small river. I begin spraying it hopelessly. And suddenly I’m in a river – with thousands of people – some of my friends are with me. But the river is the sink. Either it’s grown or we’ve all shrunk and fallen inside – tho now it’s open air, a sink where a river should be, passing through or aside a sunny town. I feel like captain Ahab. We’re all flying down this river, us and the whole town. I mutter something about civil war, the vaguely metaphysical kind. My friends are my audience and I direct them in our sailing... By the window, with Erika and Pierre (the latter now working for the gov’t spying on people who get food stamps), I sit rolling a cigarette in another restaurant. Pierre suddenly seems very excited to smoke. Erika tells him we haven’t even eaten yet. “Then we’ll smoke before we eat, like regular food-service workers”, he replies. Pleased, I have no idea at all what this might mean.

RS 22 March 2020 (Los Angeles, “safer at home order”, day 7 of quarantine)

I was in class with my fellow cohort at the university. the class was taught by a loathed professor who had shown no solidarity in the face of the strikes, and had punished my classmate L for withholding grades. I had comforted L during these moments the professor punished her, I had cursed the professor’s name alongside her. But in class, I liked the professor’s syllabus - it offered radical texts on gender, race, labor. Betraying L, I sought the professor’s affirmation and approval. I wanted her to like me and support my work. After class, the professor left and L was angry with me - how could I betray her knowing what the professor had done to her? She collapsed on the floor and sobbed, and asked me to kill her. She was suddenly naked, and expressed her rage and humiliation. I stood above her, I too was humiliated for betraying her. Why had I done that? I was angry with myself. Because I betrayed her, she felt that I should be the one who killed her. I said I wouldn’t kill her - and she continued to sob, even more angry that I would betray her but not kill her when she asked me to. At first I thought her request was a joke, so I laughed, until I realized it was serious, and I stopped laughing, but continued to refuse to kill her, I said I couldn’t do it, I was so sorry, I was unable to do it…

RS. 23 March 2020 (Los Angeles, “safer at home order”, day 8 of quarantine)

My dreams are getting more and more vivd the longer the quarantine goes on.

I lived in a house at the bottom of a canyon bounded by a sheer cliff face. Sand and rock surrounded the house. The house was exquisite, anyone would be lucky to live there. The only road down to the house was etched into the cliff face, with a small railing to ensure the car wouldn’t fly off the cliff if the driver made a mistake. There was one turn in the road where the cliff face turned. C and I were driving down, whoever was driving was driving too fast, and as we hit the turn, I flew out the window, and fell, hundreds of feet to the bottom of the canyon. As I fell my rings flew off my fingers - they were all glass rings of different colors. I was unhurt when I hit the bottom, but scrambled to find the glass rings, all scattered in the sand. C came to see if I was alright. We decided we had to ask the landlord to make a safer road to the house or we would withhold rent. But what if we were evicted for not paying rent? It was just the two of us, what power did we have? And if he refused to make the road safer? Was it better to ask the landlord to make it safer to live there, or manage the risk ourselves and avoid the possibility of eviction?

RS 24 March 2020 (Los Angeles, “safer at home order”, day 9 of quarantine)

C and I were boarding a plane - at the last moment one of his family friends handed him 5 packages - objects wrapped hastily in brown paper and packaging tape - and asked him to bring them on the plane. We didn’t know the friend, but the friend said they knew C’s family. We were in a rush and said okay. On the plane, someone in a position of authority sensed the packages. The plane took off. We were in coach class, in regular seats. We were asked to get the bag and unwrap the packages to show what they were. I was nervous, assuming they were drugs. The flight attendent opened them - revealing they were the plane’s break pads. They had been disassembled by this stranger/ friend and given to C as an act of sabotage and revenge - now the plane would not be able to land - we would have to make an emergency landing in the water. We were moved into first class, a large round room, in order to be confined and interrogated. The plane landed in the sea, and we managed to escape. The sea had roses of different color blocks floating in it. C & I swam away and escaped, and the water became shallow  enough to wade in, but the roses made it so the water was invisible, the sea seemed to be made of roses...

[the dog woke me up … and I fell back asleep to a new dreamscene] …. I was at a wedding (my wedding?) but snuck away to attend a lecture by Robin Kelley on Freedon Dreams. I sat in a small schoolchild’s desk in a large classroom listening, wearing a dress that spilled out of desk, there were many people there, mostly students, I felt ashamed of my fancy dress, it was ostentatious, so I began to rip the frills and cloth in order to make the dress smaller, less noticable…

AG 24/3/20 London, first day of lockdown

yesterday had a travel nightmare

i dreamt i was in brussels but i needed to get a plane from vienna the next day

i thought i would need to find a coach and worried about how much this would cost

i thought i had stopped having this category of dream

CZ nuit du 17 au 18 mars, Verfeil-sur-Seye [translated in English directly below]

La nuit précédant le début du confinement, qui venait d’être annoncé mais n’avait pas encore commencé, j’ai fait un rêve magnifique qui m’a émue et ravie, un rêve comme je n’en avait pas fait depuis longtemps, un rêve dont l’impression reste calfeutrée, indescriptible, mais présente pour toute la vie. Certaines images restent en moi et leur charge émotionnelle et atmosphérique peut exploser en moi à tout instant, dès que je les imagine à nouveau.

Au début ma vision était pareille à celle d’un oiseau. Je voyais large et de haut. En bas, le champ qui s’étendait sous moi paraissait bizarrement incliné, probablement du fait de l’étrange perspective ouverte par mon regard. En bas, donc, je voyais une femme courir dans de hautes herbes. Comme la terre était incliné, l’horizon remonté vers le haut, je ne voyais pas où elle allait ; et comme je désirais le voir ! Cette femme frayait sa course dans les herbes voltigeantes. Probablement parce que j’étais cette femme, je reconnaissais ce paysage très particulier, c’était le paysage des bords du Nil, et tout mon être, depuis l’oiseau ou depuis la femme qui courait, attendait de déboucher sur le Nil, de voir enfin le Nil, de voir l’étendue vaste et plane qui repose mon coeur, que je trouve splendide, majestueuse, triomphale, définitive, ancestrale et si calme.

Voilà que la femme est dans l’eau. Elle nage, nage d’une drôle de façon, sa tête s’enfonce sous l’eau et ses fesses remontent, puis ses fesses s’enfoncent et sa tête remonte, et cette femme nage seule au milieu du Nil tout comme elle courait seule au milieu des hautes herbes, et voilà qu’après un peu de temps une autre femme suit cette femme, une autre femme qui lui est en tout point semblable et nage de la même façon, élégante et étrange, et d’autres femmes, partout, tout le Nil est rempli de ces femmes qui nagent en se noyant et en survivant à la fois, et mon coeur se remplit de la même joie qu’à celle que j’éprouvais en voyant le Nil, mon coeur se remplit de joie de voir ces femmes constituer l’eau du Nil, et ses femmes sont toutes moi peut-être, ou avec moi. Je sens que leur démultiplication m’emplit de bonheur : désir réalisé à peine éclos, et sans aucune nostalgie pour le désir lui-même. Je suis satisfaite de tant de beauté.

Suit une discussion avec ma mère. Je suis allongée sur la berge, à plat ventre près d’une de ces femmes, qui se trouve dans la même position. Et ma mère, debout, place chacun de ses deux pieds au niveau de nos entrejambes. Elle ne faisait pas mal à ma voisine mais moi, sa chaussure piétinait, un tout petit peu, les lèvres de mon sexe.

Je ne me souviens plus de la suite.

Rien à voir avec le confinement, semble-t-il. Ou en serait-ce l’exact symétrique ?

CZ, the night of the 17/18, Verfeil sur seye [translation of the French, directly above]

The night before the beginning of lockdown, which had been announced but had not begun, I had a wonderful dream that moved and pleased me, a dream like I hadn't had in a long time, one that will remain caulked, indescribable, but present for all of life. Certain images remain within me and their emotional and atmospheric charge can explode in me at any time, just as soon as I bring them back up.

At the start my vision was like that of a bird. I saw wide and high. Below, the field extended and seemed strangled inclined (at an angle), probably from this strange new perspective that opened to my eyes. Below I saw a woman run through high grass. Because the earth was titled, the horizon was drawn back upwards. and I could not see where she ran to - but how badly I wanted to ! This woman cleared herself a path through the fluttering grass. Probably because I was this woman, I recognized the very particular scenery, it was the banks of the Nile and all of my being, whether the birth or the running woman, awaited to see the water, to see the Nile at last, to see the vast and plane area that rests my heart, splendid, majestic, triumphant, definitive, ancestral and so calm.

Now the woman is in the water. She swims, swims in a funny way, her head is submerged underwater and her butt cheeks float up, then her butt cheeks are submerged and her head floats up, all alone in the middle of the Nile in the same way she had been alone in the middle of the grass, until another woman comes to follow her, one that is like her in every way and swims in the same manner, elegant and strange, and other women, everywhere, the Nile is filled with these women that swim as they drown and survive in the same time. My heart fills with the same joy it felt when I saw the Nile, my heart fills with joy to see this women become the Nile's waters, and these women are all myself perhaps, or with me. I feel that their demultiplication fills me with happiness: the fulfilled desire barely sprung, and without nostalgia, for desire itself. I am satisfied with this much beauty.

Follows a conversation with my mother. I am lying on the banks, on my stomach next to one of them who is in the same position. And my mother, standing, puts each of her feet between our thighs. This didn't hurt my neighbour but her shoe slightly stamped my sex’s lips.

I don't remember the rest.

Nothing to do with confinement it seems. Or is it its exact symmetry?

MLK 25 March (A week and a half in the house)

Barely remember my dreams from the last few days. Last night, a glimpse of trying to get hold of alcohol and E. writing to tell me that she had finally been diagnosed with itchy-mice.

RL 25 March, 8th night of confinement in Marseille.

I am in a castle on top of a tall hill. There is a deep-blue rooftop swimming pool at the top, by which you can sit in large deck chairs like shells (or, the shape of a prawn cracker) and my colleague E is sitting there. The space is sheltered by dark green waxy leaved plants. I suspect what happens is that all work is cancelled because I think I discuss this with E, but I am not sure. I’m with my mum as well, something about her birthday party so I know it is April. Three dangerous, murderous boys come into the cocktail bar trying to kill me. They don’t see me before I see them. They have nasty, sharp faces like rats, and one has a red baseball cap and a black Harrington jacket. I have to escape through the flume - the cylindrical slide - on the side of the castle hill. They do not know about it, it is a perfect escape. I should have mentioned that the windows of the cocktail bar adjoining to the swimming pool part give on to the sea, and some kind of invasion can be seen far off. It is sunset like a Turner painting. Someone else is escaping with me - L - and tells me to go ahead. Hector is there too and tells me the same. It’s going well my escape, I am going at breakneck speed and there are angles. I don’t know whether to wait for L and H here, at an angle. I’m vexed, it is stupid to be in danger of your life and to leave at different times. I call them trying to get them to hurry up but they tell me to go ahead. I cross a canyon and end up at the foot of the rock upon which the castle rests. It is a low tide and I pick my way across it in the direction I’ve come, back round to the front of the rock. I find Madison there, they are putting up an installation in the rocks. I tell them they should stop working in this moment, it isn’t safe, and they agree but say it has to be done. I want to paint too, I am painting, and Madison is inserting small clams into the crevices between rocks and talking about their curator, and tying up the rocks with string. I am really happy and safe: I feel like I used to hanging out in my Mum’s studio when I was three.

I am off again, seeing F  in Berlin. He lives with B and C, like in real life. But before I see him I go to some kind of party or meeting and pick up a man from there, one with a reputation within his small revolutionary cell, one of two recommended people I could have picked, and insists that I come to a tent with him. He’s quite charming and I’m curious but I’m not that into it and really want to see F, even though the guy in my tent is very handsome. He’s kind of showing off inside our tent and I’m complaining of being cold. I also have to leave, I know that. My companion goes to ask for a blanket from C who I am happy to see - but it weirds me out because the blanket belongs to L who I have left in Paris. I haven’t seen C since he stayed in my apartment in Paris and got sent to jail. He has just tested positive for Covid19. Visibly what happened was he was cold, and on the way back he picked up a red plaid fleece blanket which belongs to L. Everyone begins explaining the virtues of fleece to me which is getting on my nerves, I am fixated on the blanket which is really going to mess up the sex I’m going to have with the man in my tent who is also called C. My green satin quilt is there from Paris too, and the sheets underneath it are intact - that is, exactly as they must have been when C took them from Paris- my blood from my period is all over them. I start looking at F, who is sitting on a chair with his legs spread wide. I have so much desire for him, he gets more and more handsome every time I see him, he has the same glasses and hat on that he had on when I saw him last in Berlin IRL at the beginning of the social distancing period. I notice that he has a different look from when I knew him first in London. His girlfriend crawls out of the kitchen, she is in a really bad mood about confinement and saying something about someone she has caught on twitter and who goes to LSE.

GCD, 25/03/2020, 2nd day of ‘lockdown’ in Glasgow

I dream in fragments, all intense, all differently city-flavoured. My mind is trying to convince itself there are still places to go? I don’t know. I think I had about 4 dreams but can only remember these two. First I dream of organising a poetry reading in a sort of one-room flat I’m sharing with people. I realise I haven’t discussed it with my housemates and it’s really soon, so I take the beautiful large cream riso poster that says ‘POETRY FESTIVAL - venue TBC - 21st March’ and I ask the only available housemate if that’s ok. She says yes but seems unsure. Also I am bothered by whether we are going to be able to get ice-cream there for the poets [my favourite ice-cream shop in Glasgow closed yesterday]. So we have this big bare room but no ice-cream. I drift outside or am carried somehow to a closed conference centre. All low-rise, very 90s, blue flashings on the roof and windows. Could we have it here? Or is that too big for poetry?

In the next dream I am reminding someone that when we were in 6th form we went to this terrible club called Eden Tavern, or Elm Tavern, somewhere in deep Kentish South London, like Foots Cray or West Wickham. As I described it, it came into view, then we were getting off a bus to visit it - a sort of bland cream hotel, with 80s decor, and different rooms you could go into for drinking. The kind of place you’d only go drinking if you were 16 and desperate. When I awoke I had this phrase in my head: ‘Dropping like flame’.

Near Dijon. Collective quarantine. This dream occurred to me in the night from the 24 to the 25 of march, 2020.

I was in Santiago, the capital of Chile. It was September and I was hanging out with some friends in a neighborhood called "mapocho", near the central market, a historically working class part of the city. We went into a shopería, because we needed to sit down and discuss. The place looked very ragged and small from the outside, it was painted in red. This is sort of typical in some chilean houses, they tend to "hide" themselves, you can not guess what is behind the walls.

The thing is that inside this small fonda there was a huge park, or rather a hill with plenty of grass, and trees. With my group we were not surprised as it seemed we had been in this place before plenty of times. We sat down in the grass of this hill to drink chicha (a sort of apple liquor). It was very sunny and nice (september is the beginning of spring in the south cone). We started discussing what was happening.

The thing is, the coronavirus was already there. It was in the city and we suddenly had to leave all public spaces because they had been banned. Everyone started panicking and started running towards the door to leave the restaurant. Some people had time to leave, but the group I was in arrived at the door just when it got locked. The military were outside, they were using the special n95 masks. They were the only ones allowed to use these. There was a curfew declared and we could not leave. But we could not stay in this place either. So we went into a sort of tunnel, trying to find a way out. The tunnel lead into a building, but the building was falling into pieces, we started going up lots of staircases as we looked for a way out. It was also a very tall building, like a sort of sky scratcher, but made of adobe. I remember I was kind of surprised because although the building was falling into pieces it was decorated in a very bourgeois way. There were huge TV sets, barroque paintings, carpets, sofas . While we went up this building it started being shaken by gusts of wind that hit it. The wind hit the building so hard that we were thrown one on top of the other. In a moment we decided this building had no way out, so we decided to return into the tunnels.

OE. 25th of March. London. 7th day of working from home (teaching online)

I’m at a crowded club which is also a theatre and an airport. Everyone else is getting on with having fun, but I’ve decided that I have to leave. I go to the cloakroom to fetch my bag. I thought it would be easy to retrieve because I had been the only one to check in my big blue travel suitcase. But when I give my cloakroom ticket to the man he has trouble finding it because the cloakroom is stacked FULL of the same big blue travel suitcases. I hop over the counter to help look for it, but there’s no way of finding out which one is mine. I’m amazed at how many there are, stacked up on each other to the ceiling. Before I wake up I am struck by the thought that maybe these aren’t suitcases anymore but empty coffins.

ATZ 25th of March. Paris. 8th night

In no particular order. I had an immortal dog and an immortal candle, and although i’d loved them both, I wish they’d cross over into another realm by now. We were going through a museum, intimate sized, overlooking a garden that was almost regal. My ghost dog had issues interacting with live ones. I walked some of the way with a homeless girl with very long fingers and long legs. I think she let me use her cellphone to call my dad. We were going to meet in Paris to protest, I was anxious about the police beating up my parents. Also, I lost my right dogtooth and the hole it left in my gum was impressive but it wasn’t too obvious when I smiled.

AB March 21st. Le Negral, Aveyron, France. Exode J +4

A free rolling, free roaming dance. Throwing my arms downwards and my back back up. Us joining for the sake of expression. Us three, using plastics objects, props – among them the infamous swimming pool floating fries – as if in a circus. Genuine pleasure : here is M., my philosophising companion ; on her own she can hold the whole room together ; the both of us – me and my gentle roommate H.– we rely on the light cast by her moves and figures to shyly express the embodied feelings our limbs had kept cased in. Mathilde is a real life professional dancer ; we can feel the pleasure she feels to have us fool around – there is no need to direct us. The music beeps, beeps faster and slows down. Turns electro. Minimal. 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. Soon a show will take place and it’s time for us to leave. At the door, stands a cashier. A slender young man. Attractive. The way he looks at me : no doubt he wants me bad. He says he’s glad we’ve just moved in. He says he remembers me – I do remember him too. He adds that our new apartment used to belong to an older person, H., who just passed away.

I know of H.– though I have never met him. He’s the 75 year old lover of my other roommate (and beautiful friend) P. P. is not even 30. For the past 10 years he’s been in love with Hugues – a story he’s kept a secret even to his most intimate friends – and now H. is fighting with a brain tumor, chemo and all.

So much at risk these days he is, back in my dream, I think. Fucking virus. That explains why the door guy says he’s dead. To this realisation, I wake up

Italy, 15th day of confinement. Roberto.

My dreams are full of tiny transgressions. A recurring dream: I am in a supermarket, the aisles are full of products, it’s the local one but filmed front on, central shot like in horror films, there’s a Martin Parr kind of lighting (note: I discovered Martin Parr when I was around 14/15; my music tastes in these days are similarly regressive: Count Basie, Ella). In the supermarket is a girl I flirt with, by now only by whatsapp messages in a collegial manner. She is dressed in an absurdly sexual way, all black shiny tight things: again, regressive tastes. She is shopping, she looks at me.

Another recurring dream: everyone has died, the world is empty, I walk the dog. There is little different between living through the virus and living after it.

JFE 25 March 2020 (7th day distancing & some isolation NYC)

We talk for ages on the bus. Strangers. Yr coat. Not much of a world outside, maybe, but this is normal. The hills of my hometown (flat in reality) now dried out and covered in huge ominous houses. Windows like sightless eyes. I fight with my brother. Search the pantry in my grandmother’s house. In another dream I walked here, in the hills, for a very long time, setting out for home. In the diner you tell me of your various loves. We toast one another, clinking our chopsticks on the bowls of ramen. I hug you. Kiss the top of your head. You wait for me to kiss you again, so I do.

FU March 23 2020 (3rd day self-isolating w/partner in Peckham, London)

My grandma had alzheimers. She had short reddy brown pixie hair cut, she looked young. I was trying to get her out of the flat but she flailed and screamed and said things that didn’t make sense. Something was aggravating her, not knowing where or when I guessed. Friends of mine were in the flat, watched me patiently battle with her. I wondered if they were moved by what was going on, watching my patience, watching me desperately trying to gather her and her things as she kicked and screamed like a child. I felt pride and ageing happen to me, because they were watching. I’m glad people saw. Saw how special my grandma is.

*

I had to go, somehow I’d been cast in a film - a disney film - something like The Little Mermaid. I wasn’t the main part but I was important. I was named as up and coming on the poster but they spelt my name wrong - Florence Unianke. I didn’t mind (tho I did). I had barely any memory of filming - I have no idea what I would have done or said. I was pretty sure I couldn’t act and that this all was a strange game that had become real - creating shapes of film posters on the underground with my name on them. I did hope I was good though, I’d like to, at least, happen to be good enough that they’d cast me in another film - I don’t know why I wanted this because I don’t like acting but I did want to play Mabel Longhetti and that wouldn’t be much of a push.

My mum and stepdad were coming with me to see the film - they had already seen it and hadn’t mentioned anything about my performance so I guessed it must be pretty bad.

*

I was trying to get lunch from the canteen - I wanted this one particular dish that was meant to be served on Saturday’s but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was confused. I didn’t know where to be.

*

I bumped into Joe on the street outside my studio - we re-confirmed that the Artist Studio Company had bought all the studios from the council when the Aylesbury estate was going under. We walked on the pavement on the left of the road over a brick bridge that overlooked the old city, factory buildings, chimneys smoking. Up ahead to our right black smoke billowed as if there was a fire. Joe asked what are they burning in those chimneys. I looked to the fire smoke and said, I think that’s a fire Joe, and he said no not that smoke, the smoke coming out of the chimneys at your school. Oh I said proudly, they have all sorts of machines there for making things, metalwork, engineering, science, art, it could be anything. And you should see the art room - it’s so huge (I began to feel embarrassed), it’s raggedy but got everything you need. I remembered during the dream that I always dream of this room. I tend to hang around by the drying rack at the front of the room and the male art teacher who I like and encourages me a lot comes in and out of focus, as if he hasn’t been there for years. I’m constantly worried that I’m missing class or an exam but no one bothers me so I carry on confused and anyway I can hardly ever find my way to the classroom, it’s never behind the door I think it’s behind). Joe listened to me as we walked to meet our friends down the road, I guessed he thought I was spoilt.

FU - 25th March 2020 (2nd day under state lockdown, w/partner in Peckham, London)

At a party with my girlfriend. I saw her ex and his new gf, I had never met the new gf but as soon I saw her I knew it was her. The ex wore a floor length worn yellow hooded roaincoat, looked good, quite Nirvana. We didn’t really say Hello. I went to look for my gf. I couldn’t find her. I was nervous. I went to the upstairs room, the only other room - lots of people were in there sitting on the floor holding cymbals and tambourines over their heads. She wasn’t there. I really wanted to find her - for her to be thinking about me. She was also wearing yellow - a yellow dress. She had been excited - (over) excited - so it’s possible she wasn’t thinking about me. She might have left, I felt desperate. But she can’t have left because we are self isolating together, I felt relieved.

*

I went to meet my teenage ex. We wanted to see how things were with us. We wanted to go to the beach. I had forgotten I had a gf. I quickly remembered. I didn’t know if it was OK. of course it was OK. but was it really?

Did I just ‘want an ex’, like she had. Maybe I wanted to understand.

As I was leaving he suggested we try and kiss - just touch lips. Should I? I did it, reticent, I don’t feel anything I said, let’s stop. He said wait and you will. I thought he might be right but either way I wanted nothing to do with this person. The temptation wasn’t enough. I wanted to love her, for her to feel good, for us to explore together. He was stood in black and red sports clothes against a brick wall. I pulled away. Friends of ours were standing nearby, watching this strange history. I didn’t like the feeling but I felt part of the people around us.

I saw my gf later, I agonised whether to tell her. Not telling her was encouraging little secrets and that seemed unbearable, not least because mine would precipitate hers. But telling her… how could i convey the absurdity of the situation so that she would feel with me. She told me once before that she doesn’t care if I get with someone when I’m out, I can do what I want she said just preferably not our friends. If i do  tell her she might just say, why the fuck did you tell me that, it’s confusing for me and I don’t need to know.

I told her. I failed to convey the lightness - probably coz there was none. It was muddy, I regretted it but I had no choice. I had to admit that I had done it so that I could tell her - I was trying to have a conversation. It was OK.

LA 20 March 2020 (Michigan, USA. Mandatory “shelter-in-place”)

3 Dream Fragments

1)     It was Temmi Novak's birthday (I haven't seen her since high school. But enjoy her Facebook posts.) I was calling her to wish her Happy Birthday. She was having a party. On the line, there were several voices. I said, "Temmi?" And she was there. But not warmly, like, "Oh! It's been so long," more like "yes, it's me." I asked her if it was a big party. She said yes. I asked how many people. She said hundreds. I couldn't believe someone could have the friends to make a party of hundreds. Then I said, or she said, "it's a company party." Like her party was within this larger corporate party. Then I was at the party. 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.

2)     I was 'hearing" about a story that I was seeing visually. It was about how a nice guy got seduced by a guy who can only be described as a snake. I only remember the party or club where the snake — and he had a reputation — made a move. Maybe the decent guy was aware of his reputation.

3)     I was in an office telling someone they could now recover their files. By files I meant phone files. By that I meant that there was a coil of wire full of data and phone calls presumably. Grey coils were data; blue were phone. They were rolled up. A man asked what I needed. I said I wanted my phone records, but that they were a different type of wire from the current blue standard. My records were from the 1960s. He asked what I had done so that there would be a wire for it. I said simply and truthfully, "I killed Kennedy." Not much of a reaction, not surprise, or recognition, just another bit of information.

LA 23 March 2020 (Michigan, USA, mandatory “shelter-in-place”)

I am standing in a terminal, or maybe the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I am talking to a male colleague—handsome, brown hair—about where to go to visit. I assume it is the weekend and he is new to the Bay Area. As he indicated he didn't have a car, I said, "Oh, that's ok. You can take BART to the end of the lines and there are nice towns near there." Into my head popped Port Costa, near Crockett, which is at least in direction beyond the Concord station, though miles away. I thought of the other direction, and couldn't imagine what was nice near the Fremont station. Then I said how nice Mendocino is, but it's touristy, and how there was some coastal town (in my dream) that was nice and had a youth hostel. This large couple to my left was listening to me. Large, like Michigan-large. I asked them, "Do you have a car?" They did. "Then, use it."

Then I'm in my childhood home in Los Angeles and it is the exact layout. I go through the living room, which has the gold carpet of the 1960s that we once had. I looked into the kitchen: the kitchen table was missing and the counters were full of plants, in a cluttered sort of way. The curtains were drawn in the dining room/living room, and it seemed they hadn't been opened in a long time. I wondered if I'd catch hell from my stepmother if I opened them. I pulled one open and looked at the balcony, which looked forlorn: no furniture, no artificial turf, only pools of water. I turned back to the living room and my colleague's boyfriend, also young, handsome and brown-haired, started to put his finger on my forehead. I thought he was going to make a cross with ash and I said, "No, I'm Jewish" I think he made a circle on my forehead with oil. Then he anointed the people next to me. One might have been my ex-sister-in-law, who asked if the prayer included a particular word. I can't remember now, maybe, 'miracle.' The man starts reciting the prayer under his breathe, in Spanish, to see if 'miracle' is part of it.

I walk toward the entry, which still has the same cabinet we had when I was a kid. But the mirror above is missing, only a nail sticking out of the wall, and next to it, off center from the cabinet, was a mirror frame, but not the same mirror that once was there. The entry had two kinds of ornate wallpaper: one was in blue with images of a Chinese teacup. Peonies? The other was similar in browns and reds. In regular spacing going up the wall were metal strips, screwed in to the walls. My stepmother and nurse’s aide were there and I said, "Is this wall buckling?" The aide said, "No, the mirrors are off." And against the lower part of the wall leaned mirrors which once had fully covered the walls.

I go outside, and it looks exactly like my childhood street. Except my vantage point looking down the street was higher, as if the house was on its own hill. I looked to the right, to the Davidson's driveway next door, where an open-bed truck was moving furniture. There was an upholstered chair hat had a similar pattern and color as our sofa on in Michigan. I said "Jeff! Jeff! Look at the pattern. It's the same pattern." Jeff was by or on the truck  and once he heard it, I realized it was similar, but, different. He shook his head, meaning, "Not the same." I looked across the street and south to our old neighbors, the Cummings and the King's houses. In the street was an enormous wooden bedframe that spanned the length of the two houses. No mattress, jus frame and headboard. As if it were being assembled in the street, presumably to go in a house.

KL 23.03.20 day 2 of 100% self iso, Brechin, Scotland.

I dreamt I was measuring the distance between a dinosaur’s thumb and index finger. It only had 3 fingers. I was supposed to be using a new gadget / measuring device designed by scientists, for that particular purpose, but I couldn’t reach the device in time. Then I woke up.

JS 25/03/20 Day 10 of confinement, Normandy, France

My mother (who seems to appear in most of my dreams in some form or the other) is working as a gardener for some rich people who have left their house during the pandemic and told her she must tend to the garden while they are away. I have a packet of seeds in my back pocket that I brought from Paris. I want to plant them at the bottom of the big empty garden but my mum won’t let me, it’s not your house she tells me. I swing boredly at the bottom of the garden, at some point I get entangled in a bush and my dad has to help me out.

I return to the quarantine house (distinctly absent from the first part of the dream) and speak to F on the phone. I wish you could post me the first chapter of your next novel I tell her (apparently we don’t have email). Better yet she responds, we’re bringing it to you. I ask her what she means. She and J are driving from Paris out to the quarantine house to surprise N for her birthday. They haven’t understood, they aren’t taking the quarantine seriously and I know the others will be angry, it will ruin N’s birthday. I feel queasy at having to mediate and plan to hide them in the garage for 72 hours like we’ve been doing with the groceries we’ve been buying from the supermarket.

24 March 2020 (quarantine Day 8, Oakland)

SL: In a bookstore at a poetry reading. R buys me Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems as a present. K also tries to buy this same book for me. R says, I saw D who keeps asking about you and bringing you up – it’s all S this and S that – he asked if you and I will remain friends and I said no”. I’m listening to R but don’t understand this, as we are clearly friends.

25 March 2020 (quarantine Day 9, Oakland)

SL:  I’m moving my stuff upstairs. My new room is beautiful with a beautiful view but teeny tiny. It is a balcony, open air with screen walls. I wonder how will I fit my bed, how will I be warm with screens for walls. Same time, I’m enchanted. Those thoughts of the bed and warmth seem secondary, workable somehow. My new roommate is in the living room with her laptop open on the coffee table. She is eating chips and watching TV.

19 March Marseille home confinement day no idea

STL: 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,

The colors were more cote-d-azzurey, and more angular shadows, and it was a wedding. A queer wedding, people's genders were quite fluid changey, and then there were also alot of veils, turquoises and pinks,

a person I met recently but am not at all close with was the main one person getting married.

A week of lockdown now, in the French countryside, where little has changed. I dream every night, wake up panicking, then cannot sleep for several hours. I do not remember the details of the dreams, only the sentiment of deep anguish they produce. They take place in some of the houses in which I have lived, but not the one I live in now, and I meet those dead comrades of the past. We are unable to act, and this provides the dream content.

BS London  Day 12 of my self/family isolation 25th March

It starts in a kind of escape room set up by one of our PhD students- one I don’t know well at all. It is a rather frightening escape room in a proper dungeon/ bottom of a warehouse, with lots of silver, red and yellow graffiti. The walls seem wet. In hindsight I realise it is very much like the buildings in a particular episode of Sherlock Holmes where there is a kind of martial arts/Yakuza gang theme. The student is aggressive, shooting at me with some kind of fake gun. Then me and my partner (who is now in it too) decide that we will call the student's bluff and just leave. We are then in a battered minibus driven by the student and we get into an altercation with a band of 1990s-style crusties and the student drives over one- in that kind of matter of fact way. This happens in the drive of a primary school I do research in. The student drives us to a hotel (we are now in a modern Japanese town) and we are talking about how the lockdown will affect his progress and how worried he is. Then he is naked and suggests we go to bed- and I’m aware in my dream that this is ‘inappropriate for a supervisor-student relationship’, so it is refused. Then the student tells us he has some slightly embarrassing medical problem and says that I have to go and get him some ‘bottom cream’ from a shopping mall called 'Horizon'. He points out the window and explains it is 4 blocks away. But it now looks like Calgary and he is pointing me towards a building that I know is the big Staples. I don't understand why I am the person who has to get it and not him or my partner. I tell him that my daughter has to come with me and that is too far for her to walk. The student won't accept this and the dream ends with me and Violet trudging along the road.

CC, Edinburgh. Day 9 of self-isolation (23rd March)

I am in a corridor that is a house, the corridor is vertical. The ground floor is a type of spa, and at the beginning of the dream I come down to the ground floor of this house running away between the pale (Swedish style) wooden banisters from a group of businessmen who are breaking quarantine to do business deals together in the spa, secretly. I am with my mum who seems to be curious about the house and I keep moving in and out of banisters and columns which are everywhere. In some parts of the ground floor there are bits of fake greenery and some of the greenery is real. Sometimes if you go up to them you can smell them and see if they are real, but this is forbidden, so I have to do it sneakily. I am trying to move in such a way as I will not be seen. It is unclear whether I don’t want to be seen because I am with other people or because then I will know the secret of the men breaking quarantine. I am also with a group of friends and we are trying to put our things in lockers which are also made out of wood. Everything is a bit wet, and I think to myself “this must be good for keeping the virus at bay”. I keep worrying because the grey slippers that I have on me are slipping off, and my dirty feet might touch the floor. I keep putting my feet back into my slippers while no one is looking. In the front of the house near some kind of muted windows there are big luxurious velvet sofas, and I think this might be a nice place to live, if things were different. There are some people with prams making noise in some part of the house. I start to get more and more agitated moving between rooms and the businessmen, who are all dressed in suits in the spa, start coming towards the room I am in so I start having to go downstairs. It turns out that the corridor of the house (i.e. it has no outside, just an endless series of floors) is infinite, and you can go down it extremely far. It is a bit like when I went to the catacombs in Paris with my mum recently, where she wanted to go as a memento mori during the time of the virus, and because of its link to the Resistance - there you have to walk down a very long series of stairs to get to where the bones are. One thing to note is that I have an extreme fear of basements, so the existence of un-frightening basements is a novel part of this dream. Anyway, in the dream I keep going downstairs and on every floor everything is made out of wood and everything is beautiful like in an instagram story or a furniture catalogue. Progressively things start to look more and more badly maintained, although on each floor there is still light coming in from basement windows - and I marvel at the fact that the architects have managed to design the buildings so that they can let the light in even this far below the ground. I wonder if it is artificial or real - artificial like a SAD lamp or like in that French Subway film from 1985 - and I conclude it is real. On one floor the businessmen are coming closer to me and I have to speed up. This floor is kind of red wood, and lacquer, a bit like the stairs in Scottish tenement housing. It is extremely dusty, there are wisps of dust everywhere, but it is a kind of benign dust and I’m not afraid of being so beneath the ground. When I get to this floor I realise they’re too close and there’s nowhere to hide, so I go behind the stairs where there’s a sort of fog of dust out of which emerges a figure of a woman whose hair is completely made out of dust. I can’t quite recognise her, and I think my eyes are deceiving me and her hair is blonde, or she is very old, rather than made of dust, but when I get closer she says hi, how are you, so nice to see you, and I recognise her as a woman I know with brown hair. This is like what happened when I met my friend for a walk the other day - I couldn’t see the colour of her hair from far away, because my eyesight has worsened recently.

CC, Edinburgh. Day 11 of self-isolation - day 3 of state quarantine (25th March)

Very few memories of this dream. Sex dream. I keep thinking about how the state wants us to use sex toys and how this would be “good” and I think about how to be resourceful. It is my second date with my girlfriend (of the dream...things move very fast in dreamland) and she decides she wants me to use a strap-on, but I don’t have a harness. I can’t order one from the internet because we’re now on total lockdown and nothing is being delivered and anyway there are none left. We consider what we could do to make underwear into a DIY harness.

London 2020-03-25

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. The two books look almost identical (new big heavy badly-designed tomes), but one is much cheaper than the other. I think it was the Bacon. Some teenagers with a donkey visit the shop and seem amused at how ramshackle it is.

GCD, 26/03/2020, Third day of ‘lockdown’ in Glasgow
I keep having dreams where I sort of have to move into another house but it’s not clear for how long and I don’t have any of my stuff. I feel like this scenario has been popping up quite a lot the last few nights. This night it was a small 60s detached house on a little cul-de-sac, and while I was there I realised that someone I know slightly through political organising is stalking me - or, ‘behaving inappropriately’ because he just sent me TWO bouquets (lilies and stiff roses in each) and also sent me a book recently in the post, no explanation. At another point in the dream, maybe also in some relation to this new house, I see some old friends who have a kid (it is their IRL kid) only she’s younger than in reality, still a baby, and E has run out of milk so I say I’ll give it a go, I know almost everyone has the capacity to lactate, and I put her to my left breast and milk starts to flow - I can feel it gathering in my breast and flowing out of me, she’s enjoying it. Then she finishes and I hand her back.

Eighth day, no, the tenth, so ten nights of half dreams. I woke at the edge of an image. In the boot of  a car, one that was not mine,  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.

RPI: 26/3, day 10 of confinement Normandy

I am back in Denmark in a room full of old and very dear friends whom i haven’t seen for a long time. We were all talking about the music festival, Roskilde, and for the first time in years we were all going. Even Though i lived in Paris, the lineup was so good I just decided to buy a ticket. Talking to my old friends I realized that they had all made new friends they were gonna camp with, so only my friend A and I were left.
All of a sudden we get a message that the festival was moved from the first week of june, to the first week of April, so already next week. And they moved it from Roskilde to Århus. In the beginning we were quite scared, cause Corona was still a thing, but we just all wanted to see Jamiroquai live on stage. Then all 6 of us walked down the street, and all of a sudden we saw the new and updated poster for the festival. The headliner was called something like “farmer boys rock” and the rest of the bands were completely unknown, besides Bjork. I asked the posterguy why they had put Bjork so far down on the poster, because she is quite a big name, and then he told me that this Bjork was an icelandic guy on the flute...

RG 25th -26th  March dream, Paris, 10 or 11th day of confinement.

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, but my brother reckons this one is more fun. 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.

My brother is at the bottom of the staircase with his arms outstretched. 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. My brother tries but is too clumsy and slow to catch it at first.

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. I try to punch my brother for not holding the dog and getting out of the way, but I can’t hit or hurt him.

DN, 25th March 2020 (8th day of  confinement in Berlin)

There was else lasker-schüler playing a rhapsodic melody on the flute.  I felt that I could have been her. The way she donned the masculine off white suit and her unkempt curly hair atypical of the 1920s. This was all happening in Berlin, probs Weimar berlin. Else was my lover but actually no, she was an extension of me who was also in deep intimacy with these two other women, both scholars and visionary painters. It was beyond longing. I had the feeling O was with me here too. And given that IRL O is a philosopher of Plato and poet and translator and yes, we were working on that novella together, translating the story of a girl who escapes to the carpathians and forms a community with bears and birds. But the language wasn’t Ukrainian, it was another language, much more guttural, could have been related to Turkish. C was laughing about how I pronounced desire in Turkish. I felt my way back up the hills, approaching the tomb of Ilona Elek, the fencing champion. She had won another award and I was letting her know. O touched me on the nape of my neck and flicked the skin above my lips. This was connected to the first story I was told as a child about the difference between humans and angels. I was annoyed about this because I was trying to get away from angels and they keep coming back in the form of intimate acts with these women and the sequences of fencing moves that I inherited from Elek.

RL Thursday March 26 2020 (9th night of confinement, 10th day of confinement in Marseille, state imposed)

I am walking through downtown Oakland. I go to some kind of cafe, or a bookshop. I see JB’s family - I feel very warm towards them- who tell me my friend Diego is looking for me. We go for a walk by a lake, everything is cold colours and sunshine, not unpleasant. Glass finance buildings. We go to his house and make quesadillas.

I am in the suburbs at my friend’s house. She has asked me there to paint her house. I have brought half a chicken curry from the East bay. 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. The colours are livid like paint on a swimming pool changing room in the 90s: red blues and greens that would be fitting in a stoner apartment I was once in in Kassel, Germany in 2012.

I set about looking at the painting job. I am good at it because it’s what my Mum used to do as a job, but I’m slightly faking my expertise as well. 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. There is a long corridor in her house that leads to the neighbours’ parts of the apartment complex, and leaves her apartment exposed. There is something anal about this tunnel. However when I ask her, it becomes clear that it is her property, it is just that at the moment the neighbours do not understand it is her property. I suggest painting it a different colour or adding a curtain which would stop infected neighbours coming through.

She sweeps on her coat and says she is going out to the theatre. I am dismayed, and tell her I do not want to paint her house if we are not going to do it together. I had thought we would do it together. If she goes out, it reduces my friendly help to a service, an unpaid job.

SD Thursday March 26 (self-isolating in Stamford Hill, London)

I dreamt that two friends died. After I found out, I went on facebook to look at what they last posted. I hadn’t seen one of the posts; the other I could only retrospectively understand as a farewell message, even though it was over two years old. Unreconcilable guilt.

JFE March 26 (8th day social distancing NYC)

There’s going to be a party. Everybody is buying liquor, cigarettes. We’re getting ready in a dark room. I’m gathering my clothes as if leaving home for some time. Delyn shows me what he’s bringing. He says, “I got you some coke”, and pulls out a huge bag of cocaine from his backpack. I hug him half-ironically. Then I remember Kate will be there too – this worries me because I know she’s an addict. I think about the lives of my friends from Illinois – how endlessly tragic poverty is. Never a release of pressure. And it can just destroy you. Ruin your life if it makes you alone. We pile into a small bus, the front wheels of which are too far back to keep it from tipping forward if I brake too fast. A purple sunset. Again, crossing this strange version of the nation I somehow do not know.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 26/03/2020, after more than a week of (solitary) confinement, and after stricter lockdown rules have come into force the day before, for at least the entire next week.

I am walking through the vaguely lit streets of a nocturnal city populated by men in their 40s/50s/60s only. Their sunburnt faces tell of hard physical work in past and present, they are talking animatedly with each other and smile at me in passing. Uneasy impression of a post-war situation. Suddenly scraps of a conversation invade this scene which I acutely feel to come from a spatio-temporal frame beyond that of my dream, from some past outside of its present. I hear only the answering part, delivered with a raised voice full of protest, a theatrically scripted answer: “I very well know that this is an excerpt from the work of a fêted operetta composer!“ Sensation of tuning in to a film/radio dialogue of British Imperialism tropes between a master and his male servant. Now their faces flash up, their bodies are locked into a gestural tableau reminiscent of Mannerist painting, prominent beards, uniforms. Cut. I am roaming the early night streets and squares of yet another city, all lined by trees in bloom which are simultaneously shedding their green leaves. I know that I am in possession of a time machine, and I also know that there is a second time machine owned by my antagonist, my arch enemy. No sense whatsoever to what past or future destinations I have travelled to or want to travel to. 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. Sudden feeling of a showdown. My antagonist is here, too, and we are circling each other, he is grinning at me, neither of us speak. I am terribly afraid of him, anticipating an act of sheer brutality. I realize he is my Doppelgänger. Shocked and desperate, yet with a feeling of triumph, I drop all the parts of my time machine through the grating of a subterranean dark shaft, insulting him in my thoughts. I wake up.

26 March 2020 (quarantine Day 10, Oakland - I haven’t left my place at all except to go out on my deck)

SL:  I am working in an office that has a view onto the beach. Definitely Northern California, with big rocks and rough waves. At some point I am down on the beach, lots of people are there. Back in the office, someone has put two new suits for the new person on my desk. Women’s suits and kind of frilly, with ruffles and tulle. I am editing an outline, I say “this is so boring”. Later, I meet A in her messy professor’s office. She is stunned I am there. I am wearing half an outfit – a shirt and jacket and my underwear. I feel fine about it, although I am aware of my bare legs and that I look weird.

26 March (Marseille, no idea about what day because I was in pre-quarantine before official quarantine started for 8-10 days)
STL: 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. The pub was no good so we went to the Academy Awards. She had to present the Coca Cola prize, which meant she turned into Ivanka Trump in a Coca Cola themed gown that made her body shaped exactly like the glass bottle of Mexican Coke. 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.

AS, London, 27th March, lockdown with trips to the park, have returned to my family home

I was lying in my bed, on the floor where I was asleep, and everyone thought I had a fever and was asleep, but I just couldn't move. My mum and boyfriend came into the room, they were worried about me and they put the cardboard inside of a toilet roll on my mouth, thinking it would help me breath. I couldn't speak to tell them it didn't. They spoke amongst themselves, murmuring, left. My brother came in later, he wanted to apologise, he offered me plums. I couldn't answer and he left.

SNM (Confinement, Paris 12th day of confinement alone)

I was traveling back to the US for a short time, a quick trip. I was on my way to the airport and realized I had forgotten my passports. I imagined that I could convince the US that I was a US citizen easily enough (there must be some database) but then understood that without my French passport I might have trouble getting back to France. Why did I organize a quick trip to the US when I’ll have to spend 14 days in quarantine anyway ? I thought. I woke up

MC, Atlanta, GA USA, March 24, (Day 2 of “shelter in place”, self-quarantine is voluntary)

A dear friend of mine is dying sick in the bathtub. She has been afflicted by an illness of a completely different kind in the past, which she had overcome, impossibly, just in time for the pandemic to take her. I am holding her in the bath crying out for help from others, who do not take me seriously. My teeth are crumbling in my mouth. My father glances at me but looks away, an act of neglect he has never shown me. I can’t speak because my broken teeth are filling my mouth as I sob. The bathroom is a sick yellow, over-illuminated by bright white lightbulbs and other infantilizing decor.

MC, Atlanta, GA USA, March 27, 4:03am (Day 4 of “shelter in place”, self-quarantine is voluntary, hospital beds are full)

I am sitting on my semi-unfinished kitchen floor observing, with a bit of humor, two small rodents, mice or hamsters, wrestle with one another. They are fighting but it is clearly an even match and they seem as if they are having a bit of fun. 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. She asks me what music is playing. It occurs to me that a song is playing that I can’t quite recognize but which could be good or bad. The song appears to be a mash-up of At the Drive-In (good) and Imagine Dragons (bad). 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. I wake up screaming.

RS 27 March 2020 (Los Angeles, “safer at home order”, self-isolation)

In the dream the town was shut down, but we were out wandering, looking for people who lived outside. there was one women, upset and filthy, with bright red hair. The cops were coming for her, so we stood in a line. I stood right next to her, she began to speak a language I couldn’t understand, but I knew she was hexing the cops. They began to beat us so we had to run. I ran into a bar, and found my sister’s boyfriend there. He began to come onto me, and when I refused to kiss him he threatened to choke me. I wiggled away and thought of a different tactic besides refusal - if I could stave off his advances by flirting and making him feel like he was getting what he wanted, I would be safe. There was a stripper pole in the bar - so I began to dance for him. I did a few spins and flips, before realizing the pole was beginning to disintegrate, it wasn’t a solid material anymore, it became springy and liquid - I wouldn’t be able to continue dancing for him, I needed another plan. I ran back into the street with him chasing me. I found my sister, C and E and they took me into our apartment. I didn’t tell them what happened, I didn’t want my sister to be upset. E told me a package had arrived for me while I was gone. It was from my analyst, a birthday present, he had sent a small bathtub caddy and a bar of soap.

CC, Edinburgh, Day 13 of self-isolation, March 27.

I’m being fed orange juice by my lover who is lying next to me in bed. The duvets are light green and pulled up almost to my ears, and I put my mouth out of the covers so he can feed me some crushed pills and tip orange juice into my mouth. He leans over my body very tenderly. I try not to let it spill on the covers. He is trying to make sure I will get over my hangover, and we are thinking about food that will make us feel better. We have slept over at another person’s house and near us there are frames with tiny paintings on the walls, and people sleeping in other beds, where they seem to be doing private things together, though not necessarily just sex. Some are writing to each other on their phones. I is there, and she is giggling with her lover, yesterday it was her birthday. Tonight in the dream I’m trying to organise a party at a bar which I can only picture as a sort of swipe in a panorama – the bar is dim and brown with many empty glasses on the bar – moving left to right as when you have 180 degree views on your phone, which you have to tilt. It’s a mixture between a very chic 60s lowly-lit cocktail bar in New York and the Relais in Belleville. It’s also weirdly transparent, at the same time. It’s my leaving party, and I don’t know when I’ll return, I’m leaving for months. I am trying to pull the ceiling of the bar along and expand it using my fingers, and convince people to come there, saying that since it is in my phone it is safe (as though since it’s covered by a screen we wouldn’t “really” touch it). Everyone is trying to get there, and arguing with each other, I and A are making fun of me, saying I’m being paranoid, and laughing at the fact I want to sleep with someone who I’m going to meet at the bar. At the bar many people are flirting and I’m moving through the crowds. Then, the bar is also an airplane. The airplane is going to take me home but there are contradictory reports about whether the plane can leave, which means that it has to keep blowing up and deflating these huge airbags connected to its wings. Every time we try to fly we have to come back down again, I’m falling asleep in the plane, and it is like I am flying in a glider – all I can see is fields below. Then we land again and become an empty mobile bar sitting on the tarmac of an airport. The flight reminds me of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which I was watching when I fell asleep.

RL. 27th March 2020, it was my 10th night of state imposed confinement in Marseille.

When I woke up I remembered my dream with such a dazzling and brutal clarity - it was ugly like the wide expanse of an imperial boulevard. My first thought was: I want to repress that dream. I woke feeling heavy and like there was something exposed and evident about it that I wanted to push away, and that was changing the way I wake up - which before had been gradually, somewhere between forgetting and remembering. Here I woke up immediately and remembered. I also remarked that the chicken from my last dream was in this one too. I deliberately forgot it, and now regret that decision. However I remember some things: a gladiator-esque amphitheatre at Stratford-Upon-Avon. Red, chinese lanterns. I am then in my Mum’s (my) friend Lucie’s kitchen in Highbury, we are waiting for her son (my friend) Luca, to arrive. We are washing up and making chicken. I have done something wrong. There must have been something about a cat in it because I started looking for cats to buy on the internet.

XL 13 march - Social distancing day 2

At B – all seemed to take place in M’s bedroom.  At least the house ‘compressed’ into that space, which is differently configured in the dream.  – M, pre-stroke and pre-dementia, had made new friend who had brought her back after church.  She was large, inert and spreading in her body, like a mass of grey lard – apparently benign but very needy. There was a backstory: two builders I suspected were unscrupulous and a problem.  I think M knew all of this but because of a ‘stance’ she took on that kind of thing, felt she would not be taken in by this and besides she was lonely and happy to have a new friend.

R took extreme exception and reacted badly. (Scene was now at the kitchen table – yellow oilcloth). She acted out and flooded things with her rage. A portrait of myself at an earlier stage?

Woke up with nagging nervous feeling.

27 March, Ridley Toad in the London lockdown.

Last night I dreamt about ghosts. Albert Ayler's ghosts. Someone was learning to play them. They must have been in confinement. I just remember the notes all faltering.

PG. 27 March. Cairo, end of second week of self-isolation

I dreamt that I was on a bed with the father of my children, or someone of whom I thought the way I think of him. There was something furtive and wrong about us being there together. Then I realised there was a baby on the bed behind me and I had to move her (somehow it was clear to me it was a girl) out of the way, towards the wall, to make room for myself. When I went to do so, I realised that all her back, down to the knees and up to the shoulder blades, was covered in a rash that had turned into bedsores. The next scene took place in a building, vast and shabby with a grand staircase, all cracked dirty marble, once white but not greyish. I was in the foyer and could hear pitiful meowing behind one of the apartment doors, which was padlocked from the outside. 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. I wanted to take them with me but the doorman refused, saying the owner would be very angry. Then I realised the cats were actually women, and one of them was the mother of the baby in the first part of the dream. The owner was the father and had locked them away to hide their and the child’s existence.

2020-03-27 London

Floor-based dance entitled 'Troilus and Cymbeline' | Reassuring words from my great aunt (d. 2019)

LH March 27 2020 / some species of lockdown called “new york P.A.U.S.E.”, NYC / assorted dreams from the past 13 days, exact dates i don’t remember

• Sometime shortly before they shut the city down, i had a dream that i was in a cafe and ordered a bagel and coffee at the counter. The coffee arrived promptly, the bagel didn’t. I waited. A group of teenage boys came in, ordered, got their food and drinks, left. My bagel still wasn’t forthcoming. It was sunny outside. The cafe walls were dull yellow and there was a painting of the ocean hung behind me. I asked about the bagel and was told it would be out soon. I waited days. Finally i asked if there was someone i could see about getting my money back. The manager, who happened to be a supervisor from my job in the waking world, came out to talk to me - i asked him for a refund so i could go home, and he sat down and excitedly pulled out a laptop, put it on the table in front of him. A few seconds later, he said, check your email. I did. He had sent me an article on the history of my old neighborhood in london.
• I don’t remember this one well - there was some man who was bad for some reason, and i felt strongly that he was bad. I saw that he had begun dating a friend of mine in london whose judgment i always questioned, and i tried half-heartedly to warn her, but she is very into vibes and spirits and deflected to something like that when i wrote to her about it. A lingering image from the dream is my friend and this man appearing on my computer screen, presumably via video chat; the wall behind her is some muted color and she is wearing a purple sweater and her hair is in a ponytail.
• I dreamed that i had sex with a person who, in the conscious universe, is a friend of friends who i’ve spoken to at length but never actually met. We were on a mattress on the floor, it was carpeted. The room we were in turned out to be somehow in the same building, or possibly even an offshoot of the same office, as my real life job - an office
• which (here, in the material world) has now been shut down, but which they are threatening to reopen soon and demand that workers come back in, despite health risks and the governor telling them they can’t. So in my dream i had sex with this person in this room either in or near the office, for a full day, which turned out to be a day i was supposed to be at work - i hadn’t called in, i just didn’t show up. Either my bosses found us at the end of the day or i left the room myself and went to them. I told them i quit.

27 March 2020 (quarantine Day 11, Oakland)

SL:  Supposed to interview for a job but wore baggy, ripped jeans. G says, I have nicer jeans you can borrow, gives me a pair that are also ripped. I tell him and he digs out a nicer pair. I order a book on the phone, I give my new address, conscious the person on the other end of the line doesn’t know that I moved and my life has changed a lot.

Then I am at a gala in a large hotel. The hotel is varying shades of light green. It is in a foreign country. I am wearing a shimmering kelly green dress with a hem to my ankles. Very princess-y. I look for the restroom, can only see two men’s rooms with urinals. I find the women’s room, somehow spill green marbles. In the open downstairs gala space where the restrooms are, the green marbles roll out all over the marble floor. Not too many people are around and I try to pick them up. Some are misshapen. The party is upstairs, it is very posh. Some of those green marbles are bracelets but misshapen also. They may have been given out to the guests of the gala and that’s why I have them.

JFE 3/28 (9th day NYC)

Some kind of meeting in the rubble at night, on a street corner in Kankakee, IL where, in another dream, we briefly lived in those dark apartments. Are there drugs hidden here? I talk with my family.

A large hotel again. I am traveling with a group of people, not all very close. As if this were some kind of conference, and we’ve all been put up together. Sharing shampoo, though there doesn’t seem to be any. Yesterday I used a man’s bag of shampoo which, today, was stuffed full of leafy carrots. This is especially confusing to me as I realize I can’t remember if this was the case yesterday or not. The soap is all gradually replaced with bottles of liquor?

I think me and my family find out my brother’s been using heroin or something. Some kind of intervention thing in a hotel room.  For some reason it seems reasonable for him to call and apologize to W, who is a heroin addict. Instead he waits in silence then says, “Well, are you going to apologize to me?” Everybody freaks out. We get in a fight.

28 March, Wriggly Toad getting deeper into the London lockdown.

I see two cars following each other at speed, swerving through traffic, hugging the tarmac. A few minutes later I see a group of 40 teenage boys on bikes cycling hurriedly after them. A moment later still I see police cars streaming down the road in pursuit. I follow to see what's going on. I am on Albion Road next to Stoke Newington secondary school. A whole procession of them is coming back up the road towards me: flashing police cars seem to be escorting a gang of young men waving guns and hooting, on foot and in cars. It's definitely a procession. There is a minibus coming along behind them: it is oozing blood out of bullet holes and the blood has the rough consistency of harissa. The cops have no choice but to escort them. Presumably they have too many guns. The boys on bikes I saw earlier are cycling along mingling with the morbid procession. Somehow I learn this was a sort of annual revenge killing jackpot, some kind of high stakes bet involving a mass drive-by. Then I see the teenage boys--now on foot and numbering in the hundreds--swarming towards the front door of a house, clambering over walls, over each other and up the front steps. One of them seems to be taking notes and loses his shoe but carries on regardless. An older woman answers the door and they all pile into the house pushing her back. I follow them into the house (I am with someone vague). The corridor is barely big enough to squeeze a body through. No sign of the boys. I push forwards, rounding ever tighter claustrophobic corners, explaining to my vague companion that it surely opens up into something a bit wider further in. It is a bright white tunnel of painted breeze block walls no more than a foot and a half in width and five foot in height. Hell. I follow it round corners and up small flights of stairs all in this same tight space. Eventually I arrive at a door expecting to find a more spacious room behind it. I open it and go inside and it is a room no bigger than a cupboard. A dead end. I wake up in a panic.

28 March 2020 (quarantine Day 12, Oakland)

SL: I am visiting Japan with my Mom and Grandmom.  We are in a crowded auditorium for some kind of show. I take out a pen to write in my notebook and it is a shorn off finger, with fingernail and a pen tip at the end. A stranger notices and I revolve the pen slightly so the fingernail won’t show. I try to buy ice cream soup with whip cream with a dollar bill. I forgot to change my money. My Mom says, there’s an ATM, I’ll give you yen. It comes out in popcorn. Blue popcorn is yen. I go to the counter with my blue popcorn and pay.

dreams by R, sent 28 march from lockdown in London. Conditions of confinement - keeping a low profile -  staying in a non-residential building - bit rough and ready. Also crossed a border to get there. Here since Tuesday the 24th of March.

Dream from Wednesday night 25th March

• I am in a basement flat with what I realise are a group of Francophone men. I ask them in French where they’re from. They respond “cote d'ivoire”. We talk a bit more but then I apologize for my French and we return to English.
• Something else happens/we’re hanging out? At some point I open the basement door and go on to the street. We’re in Brooklyn I think. Opposite there is some new development which has transformed an old brick apartment building. White people are doing nice middle-class white people things on the balcony and steps of the building (I think perhaps there is a whole foods on the ground floor). I begin to shout really loud across the street at the white people “HEY! I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING, I’VE SEEN IT BEFORE. I GREW UP IN EAST LONDON. YOU’LL COME AND ALL YOU PEOPLE WILL COME AND CHANGE EVERYTHING AND MAKE THE POCS GO AWAY”.
• Initially smiling faces and gentle conversations quickly change to frozen masks of confusion and upset. “why are you saying this?” This say. “Why are you shouting at us? Everything was so nice.”
• Something else happens ..

Dream from Thursday night 26th of March

Dream 2

• I am someone else. A white woman having a side affair with a young black man while her husband is away. I think he is her personal trainer.
• The infidelity becomes increasingly flagrant – I feel the woman’s inner conflict of invincibility and power in the flagrancy and at the same time witness her quotidian manoeuvres and attempts to juggling these lives.
• Stuff happens … at some point there is perhaps a young South Korean or Japanese man? It seems like there is a gulf between us. But then I notice his shirt. It is a very unusual soft beige suede shirt with a decorative and elabrate collar/cravat feature. I ask across a large empty room “Is that Vivienne Westwood?” And he replies “Darling all my shirts are Vivienne”. Suddenly, I see this person who I hadn’t really seen properly before in a different light and we share a mischievous smile of mutual complicity and understanding.

JBR, March 25th, London lockdown, isolation with parents.

JBR dreamt he was a macrophage. When pressed he says “it’s a white blood cell with long arms that clears away/eats viruses”, but refuses to write this up himself on the google doc. [written up by RL, secretary of dreams]

RAG, Vienna, Quarantine day 17. March 27.  I had a dream I was back at Leeds Uni for some kind of celebration but it was now. All the professors from all over the world were having a cuddle party, like a panel but they were all lying together on cushions as if all on mdma, they were also swapping things between each other via their mouths. I sat at the front in the audience and then realized how close I was to so many people. Then woke up.

LX (extreme social distancing, soon-to-be public shutdown. Dreamt during the night of 25-26.03.20)

last night I dreamt that I was at the Platz when two police officers approached me and demanded... something. I don't fully remember, and I don't want to say 'papers' because it was a dream and that is too obvious. But it’s true that I don’t have the right papers. What I do remember is the way they were dressed, fully in riot gear, impersonal and intimidating. I was scared in the same way I've often felt before of these riot cops, which of course is what their uniform is designed for. But I also feel this fear in airports and any fearful, trustless, majorly controlled and controlling space. So I suppose in the end I do know what they wanted from me, which was to feel afraid. Then suddenly a large black cat that I know appeared like a solidifying mirage, marched up to the cops, and spat on their helmets, which made me feel very reassured. I felt that somebody strong and uncompromising had placed themselves between the force and my fear of them. Then I woke up inside the shadow of this relieved fear..

JH 28 March 2020

there are boys color coded outside my window, clearly gangs. but all adolescents, aged 10-17. clearly in my own age in the dream because i am looking down on them from the second story. 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. soon the girl comes upstairs. shows me the facebook page of the gangs. leaves the room to go cook downstairs. i try to log onto facebook but i can’t get to the page and give up. i go downstairs and the gangs outside have dispersed save for their leader, an older man named Sammy. he is looking sketchy and talking to another sketchy looking white man. the girl is cooking wheat broth with apples and wheat bran. i tell her thats so much fiber, i’ve been having trouble shitting lately. her sister is in the kitchen. hands me a sweatshirt that says something i forget on the front and ‘scheherazade’ on the back. i try and mirror the masculinity of the boys and in an effort to impress her i say that i love one thousand and one nights. she smirks and doesn’t reply.

AB march 28th, le Negral, Lugan, Aveyron, France

From last night a lasting image :

As I run through this one page of a comic book, I notice that of all the speech bubbles only one of this square panel is not left blank. At the foot of the skinny character that fills up the right part of the panel, is a little hill, a little knob. It looks as if that some sort of animal or thing is trying to make their way under the floor toward the man. He says : “ The walls are crawling underground”.

[end of the image]

O.S

Dream on Day 11 of confinement, West London

March 27th 2020

FREEDOM, GUILT and COMPASSION

First part of the dream was rather hazy but I do remember it involved my friend Jamila

and I deciding to go to hers for the night. There was something about not having the right shoes or clothes and it was miserable outside. Upon arriving back to my house Rosanna had prepared a lunch and was upset Rosanna about my plans to leave. Rosanna then apologised to me (a first) and explained her upset. I understood her and we were at peace

HORROR, PANIC and DISGUST

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. It jumped out of my hands, scuttled around the bathroom floor, in the shower and jumped on my legs. My reaction was delayed but I started screaming and feeling repulsed, and pretty stupid for not seeing the difference between a rat and a dog

BB 29th March 2020 (living alone in self-isolation in London, not sure how many days)

This is actually just the middle part of a dream, wedged in between a beginning and an end, which feel too mundane or graphic to talk about here. (I’ve been dreaming about sex a lot since the lockdown began.) I’m with four close female friends, who live far away in France (in real life). 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. The path becomes steep. Soon I am crawling on my hands and knees and the path becomes almost vertical. I ask someone to help me to stand up, but their knees bend also. Steps start to form on the path. The steps are made out of cardboard, which collapses underneath my weight. The path passes through a cave that has a hole in the top, leading onto a ridge. I realise that my friends have disappeared and I become worried that they will lose their way, they don’t know the paths. I try to find the route on my phone so that I can show them when I find them. A narrow wooden walkway clings to the side of the ridge, leading down to a monastery. I let some people pass me in the opposite direction and quickly walk (leap?) down. I’m worried about my friends. The monastery is familiar. I have been here in another dream, but I’m not sure when. It has a gatehouse in front of it. A small white building with three wooden doors of different sizes. I can see the monks behind the fence. Or really I cannot see them. 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 would like to stay longer but I need to find my friends. I run down the mountain, away from the monastery and towards the river, which is familiar. I have been to the river in dreams before (but in a boat) and know that it leads to the village, or at least to villages. The river banks are beautiful. I would like to share this place with my friends.

SNM (Confined alone, Paris, March 29)

Another dream, another missed flight—maybe. This time I was somewhere in Europe. Two clients of mine had given me tickets to the opera. A group of people I knew were also attending. When I got to the opera house the clients greeted me to give me the tickets, and presented me with a clear plastic duffle bag with a neon-green zipper to put my things in for the flight after, back to Paris. Maybe most of the audience had to catch a flight back to Paris. At the end of the opera half of the audience disappeared suddenly, People got up to leave calmly but quickly. I looked at the time and realized that daylight savings had occurred and we now had one hour less to get to the airport. It was still possible to get there and be only one hour early for the flight, instead of two. I might have been with a group of people because I called to them to go ahead and I would meet them at the bus stop. When I got there I couldn’t find anyone. I checked all 3 outdoor vestibules and couldn’t find them or the right bus to the airport. I was torn between continuing to look for my group or just going ahead and ordering a taxi. I must’ve woken up because I don’t remember anymore.

RL/ Saturday 28 March, Marseille, state imposed house confinement

I can’t remember my dream again. I remember it very clearly when I wake up, then forget. There is a girl in it who I don’t like but who I am very attracted to. She has black, curly hair.

RL. Sunday 29 March, Marseille, state imposed house confinement

Again, I can’t remember my dream. I think I dreamt of IX who is in my Marx reading group.

CW, Jerusalem, nights of 27/03/2020 and 28/03/2020, after ten days of (solitary) confinement under a stricter ‘lockdown’ regime:

I have left my flat in order to buy chocolate. I am vaguely conscious that I might be violating the confinement rules I have been placed under. The streets are a blur of emptiness. In a sun-lit parking lot (dark blue tarmac, no cars anywhere) I suddenly encounter three elderly men who ask me where I am headed to. I tell them I want to buy chocolate, but nothing else, in a supermarket nearby. With smiling faces, they inform me that the supermarket is closed. I ask them about another supermarket I know of – it is closed, too, they tell me. While talking with them (which feels like desultory chatting), the impression grows in me that they are three  plainclothes police officers.  I know that they know that I know that I am out here in violation of the confinement rules they are meant to enforce. 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.

Together with my father, I am in what is either a huge apartment room or a huge corridor. It is completely open to the outside on all of its sides thanks to a ribbon of glass windows or rather a ribbon of a single rectangular piece of glass. The space is evenly bathed in the translucent light of an early summer morning or of the dusk of a summer’s day, and it is empty – no furniture, there is only the fleeting sensation of something like a single seating tier made out of stone which surrounds us on all sides. We are sitting on the carpeted floor. Whenever I look at my father I feel he is very young. Any minute now an anonymous group of people is going to attack us which is why we are checking and preparing our arsenal of weapons. I cannot see, and I do not know what kinds of weapons are at our disposal. My father instructs me to sort gun cartridges according to their sizes, and leaves the apartment/corridor. Or rather, he is simply gone, I do neither see him exit a door nor something similar. I feel abandoned, but continue to sort through the cartridges that are in the palm of one of my hands. Looking down at them, I find them to be rounded bullets of varying shapes, but uniform in their reddish-golden colour. I am confused and fear that they are useless.

I am trying to get onto an airplane - no boarding, rather checking in at the counter, etc. A least this seems to be my real intention, but it feels as if the act of trying to do this already equals exiting or entering a country. I am about to begin or to end a very important journey – I do not know my exact destination, only that it is far away, overseas. I feel sharply that I am trapped in what looks like a very narrow lounge of some kind, with blue comfy chairs, in fact its entire interior is blue. I am being referred from one person to another, everybody is all smiles and kindness, listening patiently and sympathetically to me. But I know that they are only acting, that their faces are but the polished surface of an implacable institution that has already ruled against me. I will never leave this lounge. In a prior, disconnected part of this dream, I have been exploring the recently opened subterranean parts of what seems to be a communal sports centre or a school. I am looking for someone, walking down vast corridors lit by artificial lighting. A sense of massive volumes of brickwork, arches, long vistas.

JS-  30 March Day 15 of confinement Normandy

I’ve been very lazy about writing my dreams down the last few days, I’ve also been writing my diary less. All the days and nights have since begun to merge into one and it’s not a pleasant feeling. All this to say the dream wasn’t particularly interesting to me, I was in Ibiza, except it was clearly Bournemouth seafront. I was due to be meeting two friends from school, one of whom I keep dreaming about. I was running a couple of days late however, and Theo, who I’m in IRL confinement with, had to go and take care of them and show them around ibiza. The dream took a strange form where the two friends were sending me letters in anticipation of my arrival, telling me what a great host Theo was.  The letters were the visual content of the dream. Now in Ibiza, I ran into a fourth friend while on my way to meet the others (the latter with whom I was still exchanging texts and letters which appeared in the dream like speech bubbles or talking heads in the top right corner of my field of vision). I found the fourth friend hooked up to a system of invisible wires and pulleys, like a puppet. She was wearing a bikini and walking alongside a big lake which looked something like the Tegernsee but with swimming pool edges. She had to finish a modelling job before she joined me. I found the whole thing very sinister, her movement being manipulated by what I imagined to be a group of invisible people pulling on the strings. I wanted to dip my toes in the lake but the water’s edge is blocked by these invisible cords. I call the two friends to ask them how I might get in the water. You can’t, they tell me, it’s too cold. Well what the hell are we going to do here then? I asked them, don’t tell me you haven’t even googled things to do in Ibiza!

RL. 30 March 2020 Marseille state imposed house confinement, day 13? 12? I think it is the 13th night.

I had a dream that was circular - the tunnel I was in, a kind of tubular, steel chrome highway tunnel, led me into the dream and at the end, back to the beginning, so that I would find it impossible to tell you what order things happened in. First I go through the tunnel (it is the Blackwall tunnel, I think) and emerge in my childhood bedroom. My bed is by the window and it is a summer night, there is the wisteria vine which got brutally cut down by Camden council when I was a child, falling down the frame of the window, the light is orange from sodium lamps outside. (This window was the former site of worry for me: a dream diary from when I was younger has a dream in it of a fox that climbed in, grinned and wiggled Marylin style eyebrows at me, sleazily. I know this was a fear of rape or rape fantasy dream). I am on my bed with a poet I follow on Instagram, who goes by a handle beginning with a “Cu” sound, which is the sound of ass in French, I guess. In the dream we are fucking, we have already fucked before in the dream which is a memory I have but I’m not sure if it actually happened in the dream or if I am just dreaming that I remembered. The first time it went well. This time he has come to visit me and it is not going well. I am torn between family obligations and their judgement that this person is not my boyfriend, although that is allowed. My mum reproaches me for bringing this complicated situation of my relationship into the family house “It’s just too much”, she says, “too much distraction”. This person is obviously a bit hurt and disappointed that I don’t have time for him, and is lying on my bed with the hospital style white sheet draped around him. I have strong feelings but I’m unable to say so because I’m trying to control the situation. We start fucking again, in the form of the wisteria branches twisting around each other.

I have to set off fast in a car in the underground tunnel, and I am at my family friend’s house which I was in in an earlier dream. It is Christmas. They usually have a huge Christmas celebration, but this year something is wrong. There has been an infidelity in the family, or something, and there are fewer people than usual. My family are nonetheless flattered to have been invited. We haven’t brought presents, which is an anxiety, because this family is very generous. However in the current situation of their despair it doesn’t seem to matter as much. The room is like a large classroom and I am low down on the floor by the french doors, and I want to sit next to my childhood friend. It is dark. We are sitting around a conference style square of school tables, but we only fill up one and two halves of the edges, making a U shape. I suggest that we should sit closer together, and try and make the space beautiful, even though it is a terrible situation we are all in. Various family members are coming back, as if from a war. One has been treating patients with the virus. I get told off for something, I have done something wrong, although I am trying hard to be generous and make sure everyone will be okay. I am trying to get them to put ruptures of the family and infidelities in perspective alongside the scale of the situation. Then a lynching scene next to the British library. I am back in the tunnel, I come back into my childhood bedroom where O still is. The dream may have happened the other way around: in any case the tunnel at the end leads to a repetition of one or the other scene. I don’t know. My feeling when I wake up is sadness.

Tl:dr I dreamt I was in love with someone who I didn’t have time for.

JD. March 24. Quite confined in Paris by the state etc.

But someone is Homer Simpson

And something about Doug (Funny)

LGS. End of second week of isolation in Appalachia. I had a nightmare that the pandemic ended but supermarkets didn’t bring back bulk sections, and no one made pesto anymore because they couldn’t afford pine nuts once they weren’t able to label them as oats.

KS. March 29th. England. Day 7 of UK ‘lockdown’. Have moved in permanently with my boyfriend - day 14 of this, 1 bed flat, very comfy bed. My sister is pregnant and a friend just gave birth.

I dreamt that

[translated into English directly below] VL. 30 Mars, Paris, Jour 15 de confinement quasi total. Je me souviens d’avaler des couteaux. Je ne me sens pas obligé. Je ne suis pas obligé. Je les engloutit rapidement l’un après l’autre. Au troisième je me réveille brusquement, car trois c’est trop, un peu comme le verre de trop, la sucrerie de trop je ne sais pas… j’ai le sentiment d’avoir quelque chose dans la gorge lorsque je me rend aux toilettes. Je me recouche avec la peur de garder ces objets dans la gorge, mais je suis fatigué...

[translated from the French directly above] VL 30 March, Paris, day 15 of almost total confinement. I remember that I swallowed knives. I didn’t feel I had to. I don’t have to. I gulp them down quickly, one after the other. At the third one I wake up abruptly, because three is too much, a bit like one glass too many, one sweet too many I don’t know… I feel like I have something in my throat as I go to the toilet. I go back to sleep scared of keeping these objects in the throat, but I’m tired…

30 March 2020 (quarantine Day 14, Oakland)

SL: Clearing out my storage space. When I go back to it later, it belongs to an old boyfriend, who seems to stand in generally in some dreams as “boyfriend”. It’s OK because I don’t want it back. I’m on my way somewhere else. There is a machine that keeps punching people in the face and they fall off a bridge from the force and die. There was so much more to this dream. It was very long. Upon waking, I forgot almost all of it.

CGE - Monday, March 30th, Los Angeles (17th day of self-isolation)

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. Everyone speaks English with a British accent. There is a job I have to do to be allowed to stay in the country. I don’t know what it is but I show up to a corporate looking building. I enter and there is a table in the lobby, with Caucasian women in suits sitting at it. I sit down, glad that I wore dark trousers, a white shirt and a black sweater. They talk to me- a socialised kind of ‘testing’. I try to seem like I know why I’m there. I notice huge holes in the elbows of my sweater, I must have got dressed in the dark. One woman keeps asking me questions, another says stop, look at her face, she’s fine. 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.

STL - Marseille, 29 mars (i think this the starting day the 3rd week of quarentine )

Night time black sky its a nicaraguan port

i have to escape and tell them i have the good papers, i am a foriegner. Its raining so hard and its overhead marina boatyard lighting, and i keep falling off the docks that are actually a ramp an descending angle straight into black water, where I am following a woman dressed like a nun from the back. We keep circling off the docks and up the docks and then around and around and people are getting hysterical. I decide to follow another prson who is a 22 year old beautiful man with  enormous wingspan. He makes me follow him to swim very deep and far down with crystal blue waters to find an underwater ruin.  

GR March 30th(12th night of confinement in tel aviv)

I was in new york city in areas i didnt really know, and decided that if im already there and no one’s around me i should break my quarantine. So i went to the subway and it was packed w faces i recognized but couldn’t tell from where. I went on the train and started getting anxious about being around so many ppl. As i was realizing that i have had no idea where im headed and that it might be better to get off at the next station, the train slowly rose above the ground and i was positioned at its far front. My point of view was almost like the famous titanic scene where they’re hugging at the front of the ship, only i was by myself, the sea was the city and the body I was seeing was not mine.

When we reached the next station I went off the train, it was night time and all of the places around me were pizza huts in changing architectures with lego ppl inside them, each one sat by themselves according to social distancing. I tried to look at the maps on my phone and theyve turned into some sort of strategy game maps and I could see that im on an island but everywhere around me was clouded as if my character hasn’t ‘discovered’ these bits yet.

This is when i received a video from G saying I should come to this kid’s house whom she’s babysitting. So I appeared there, went down the stairs and woke up some elderly ppl, prob the kid’s grandparents, grumpily they told me to go to the balcony. G was there along with the kid and his mother and we started dancing and the space was shifting between many different places I could recognize from when I was younger, and the sum of my adolescence closeted crushes, ppl i haven’t seen for years, joined us and disappeared as we were dancing.

ATZ 30th March (13th night), Paris

The dream begins in Brussels and in university housing but there isn’t so much to say about that. Visions of girls living together kissing, me in a room texting my friend Nemo who wants to see me but I know we shouldn’t.

I meet my parents in a park, looks like the Bois de Vincennes, or something. G a h i miss trees. They are there with someone who looks like Mohammed Salem in his djellabah. He wants to teach me horseback riding. 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. The man claps in his hands twice, and I think the horse might accelerate but he lowers his front legs to let me off. The way camels do? I slide on his neck to reach the ground. It is a strange horse I say, something is off with its mouth, its shorter and Mohammed Salem says that is the way these are. Now we are in a space that feels like  river banks in Paris, closed in between a ditch and a high wall, except it is all earth and dirt. It is night. It is pleasant. My dad is a little younger than he is now. It is clear to me that we are in Lebanon. Suddenly there is commotion and people point to the other bank. I don’t catch what they say immediately but I think they are talking about a little blond boy that is standing straight opposite looking very grave. I am mistaken, he is an onlooker too, they are worried that the weasel might attack the injured white horse at the bottom of the ditch, about 15 meters below. The ditch bottom is a little like a river bed with algae and depressions but with little water left. I think it may be where injured, dead and dangerous animals end up. Some sort of underworld. The prospect of the weasel attacking is alarming everyone. 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. Everybody cheers like an evil spirit has left town. In joy, one animal makes a huge wave that lands on us like abundant fire sprinklers. My dad and I are with our backs to the ditch, he is wearing blue and laughing. I am too but I am nervous about so many people being around. I’m scared of the virus. I don’t want to ruin it for him but I think it is best if we return to lock down. It is a terrible feeling.

IX, Paris, March 31st, 15th day of lockdown

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, she didn’t use the word “patriarchs” in my dream, something like “senhores” or lords. I don’t understand what she means and ask her to explain, and then she says there’s one kind of bean for the lords and another kind for the regular people. I am shocked by this information and ask her to repeat it again and if she realizes what she’s saying (I think this is based on a scene from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, it’s funny because in this parallel I’m Shevek, the anarchist alien, and Brazil is the planet Urras).

Then I’m back outside the airport with my highschool friends and my mom, who’s doing what she always does, which is hanging out with my friends without being invited. There’s also a group of men sitting in a circle, I am not sure if they’re workers, but I guess, they are eating or drinking, maybe the latter because one of them suddenly throws up. Then a rooster passes by running.

My friend’s dad is there at the airport with his car to pick us up - me, my mom, and this group of friends (I don’t know who is in this group). The car is huge, and I’m impressed we can all fit in. My mom and my friend’s dad start talking and they seem to get along, I’m glad she has another “grown up” to hang out with. We are driving and the road has tall walls on both sides, with graffiti on them. We eventually get to another wall that cuts up the road and it’s the end of the road. While we were driving we were talking about the law or something, and my friend’s dad says something about knowing such and such law. He says “when you’ve been in lockup, you get to know the law”. We keep on talking and then my mom says something about him knowing the law pretty well because he went to law school. Everyone is embarrassed because she didn’t listen to him and no one wants to correct her telling her that he’s actually been in jail (not properly listening to what people say is one of the features I most dislike about my mom IRL and this moment gives me the exact same feeling of exasperation I fell when I realize she has not been listening to a person talking to her -- usually me).

We finally get to a place that initially seems to be a parking garage, I think we are going to get to an elevator or something, but it turns out to be a nice room, with a library and a rug and a nice table. We are about to sit down to eat, this is not the party I come to attend yet, but I think of it and then I realize this is madness, we have not respected the confinement at all -- the luncheon was full of people, we have been hanging out in a huge group. I also realize that I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch my plane back to France and start to ask myself what happened, why did I say yes to this trip and coming to this party, it makes no sense, especially considering I have been in confinement for two weeks now and all that effort has gone to waste.

RL, Marseille, March 31st, 14th night of lockdown. I have only gone out on the street twice since this started on Tuesday 17th.

I dreamt I lived at the P--- family house in Cambridge. With my boyfriend, which was something unprecedented in terms of the IRL past. Something about my friend Zully Adler. Me and my boyfriend have been living at the top of the house first (pink), then had to move downstairs to the messy basement garden facing bedroom. I realise, from the bed, that I haven’t yet said hello or even acknowledged the mother of the P--- family once since I got here, despite the fact we’ve been in the same room. Now it’s too late. 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. It is not expensive, £551pcm for two rooms, one of them with a large bath in it. The underside of the bath is painted a kind of duck egg green and the floorboards and skirting board is black. On the other hand it is owned by a witch. But she’s very tidy and particular. Actually she even has a YouTube tutorial attached to her advert which shows you how to clean the apartment, as though it were a special product that needed specific measures. I send the video on to my Mum so she can practise her French at breakfast whilst eating boiled eggs, but the trouble is I don’t watch it before doing so- or else it becomes a different video- the video is really weird (I was watching that disappearance of Elisa Lam video the other day and now realise it’s worked its way into my dream) - as if possessed, the woman crawls around on all fours and there is no sound, and then she crouches on her heels against the wall and scrubs her yoga-legginged groin with the sponge, as though her stomach and front is literally a washboard. I apologise to my mum about her breakfast. I can see the cracked shell of the boiled egg on the table. I was scared that I had accidentally sent her an ASMR video. Something about cleaning and then one of my girlfriends who I’ve dreamt of in the last few nights tells me “oh no, this is not okay, you have to move out” (I was watching LouLou (1980) by Maurice Pialat last night and was thinking about how American relationship advice about “what’s okay” and “what’s not okay” “what’s love” “what isn’t love” always asserts itself as universal and I wrote about this before going to bed). So, I move in with JS (a dreamer on this doc) and one other girl who I don’t know into a cute little witchy shack on the outskirts somewhere, by a railway track and long, overgrown weeds and grass and all that. Me and JS are excited, sweeping, discussing carpets, making things beautiful and putting them in order. 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 - the back of her long-brown-hair-ed head - like double exposures on a photograph, or, actually, like the heart photo application on Instagram.

BC, Geneva, March 24th (approximately 10 days into confinement).

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.)

I then walk into my old room at my parent’s place (in this dream I still live there) and find a snake, a very little one, very blue. I’m terrified and scream for help. My father and my brother come into my room. One of them (I think my father) catches the snake and kills it by breaking its neck.

But that snake was actually a baby (or a lure), not the one the news were talking about.

Coming into my room a little while later, I see another, which is immense. I see its giant blue body on the ceiling, but not its head (it is so big that I see it disappear in the next room). I go out of the room and call for help. When my father comes in, the snake is not there anymore. It’s really distressing to not see it, to not know where it is.

Then (later), I’m getting dressed. I’m putting my socks on, and in my left sock, I feel something. I turn my sock inside out and I discover a small heap of dust, and some broken objects (among which pieces of a light bulb). I suddenly remember that my (IRL dead) grandmother had warned me about snakes leaving things behind. I’m disgusted. My father doesn’t think that stuff was left behind by the snake. According to him my sock was just dirty. I’m not sure what to believe.

I try to put on a second pair of socks, but the same thing happens. This time I’m sure, it’s a snake’s nest. I still don’t know where the snake is, I’m not feeling well.

And then I wake up.

31 March 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 15, Oakland)

SL: I wrote some poems in my notebook but hadn’t yet transcribed them. I think the notebook was yellow, spiral bound. I had written them, not about him, but while looking at him, very intently at his face. At some point I realized I had them and that they were interesting and different than some of my other work, a new direction for what I was working on. I was excited to share them, but I hadn’t transcribed them onto my computer.

31 March,  2020 Copenhagen (social distancing/living in collective and going for quarantine walks)

K: First a nightmare. I dreamed that I had Corona without knowing it and that I was a carrying it infecting other. That I could infect others in the volunteer night shift I had taken to support a homeless shelter. Later, a nightmare about  a fire, or was it a nightmare? Me and a friend was with her family. They were rich, lived in a large house, including an oval library, filled with old book collections. A very beautiful room where you walked down some steps and you could glance up at all the books. For a reason that I don't remember, maybe there wasn't a reason, we decided to set fire to the house, in several places. We didn’t want to harm anyone, and we didn’t want to burn the house down. We lit up, but then we started to save some items. We suddenly realised that we wanted to keep some of the objects in the house safe from the fire. One room had huge, huge toy figures (lego) and we tried to carry them out without destroying them. It was really difficult as they were huge. The fire increased, and reached the beautiful library, we were coughing because of the smoke. More people came by, and we attempted to carry the old books out. It was chaotic, and all along we tried to conceal the fact that we had started the fire. It ended there in the chaos and the ambigious feelings of having a desire of the fire, not knowing the reason and a desire to stop it as well.

JM Marseille, 15th night of lockdown, state imposed house confinement. Detail: I have just discovered the Instagram page: Bunker_sluts.

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 don’t know what I’ve been doing but I’m failing A Level maths, I haven’t been to class all year. But do I really need to take my A Level again? I already have a degree from a high ranking university, I say. I realise I’ve never done maths A level, and if I do A levels again, I might get worse grades than I already have for all of my A levels. I see people in red and white masks running along the seafront in a creek. Something about TS Eliot’s Waste Land in this part of the dream but I am ashamed (this makes sense next to my university degree in literature, and my sham-feeling that I’ve somehow surpassed ALevels) about this when I wake up and forget it.

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. The sea is in the same place. I think that I go right, down a metal tunnel, or on this lifted highway, knowing that I will need to come back to the airport (left/south).

I am in a family house with M’s auntie, who has just died. We are a large crowd standing at the bottom of a regal staircase, which splits off into two staircases, but rather than facing it, we are on the left side of it. The staircase is upholstered in a luxurious moss green. The dead aunt is sitting on a chair at the bottom of the staircase, as if she were in tableau form, she is like a painting. (I guess the colours are like the marriage of arnolfini) She is wearing contemporary, casual clothes and she is very tan with a leathery cleavage and rich looking, straight out of Monaco. She is dressed like my paternal grandmother who was always quite chic, in golf wear and polo shirts. The crowd is spilling out of an osteopath’s practise room which is all white, and finds itself underneath the staircase. The osteopath’s office is in a time before the revolution in Lebanon.

Two exiles from after that revolution are coming to my school. The aunt is also an exile, making three. I fancy one of them, P, who is younger. I also fancy the older one, who is a seasoned and exquisite looking revolutionary, with curly black hair that splits in the middle and diverges out in two peaks, rather like the staircase. I have a fling with P. We have great, deep, sensuous sex and I can feel him entering me from my left side, under many covers. It is very reassuring. We have to go, though, or I do, or he does. One of us has to go to the airport. In my role as lover I drop two times 25$ on ubers and begin to get worried about my cash flow.

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. The spaces between these places are like the inside and the outside of the Pompidou. There’s some kind of happening in the mall, everyone is in pink, and mingling close together. My friend LS descends from a white watchtower that finds itself slightly off centre in the right hand side (south) of the mall. She tells me that she is the chief, and that there has been an occupation. She is dressed, appropriately, in a headdress of white feathers and white, painted planks from the front of beach houses. Her outfit is like Ana Mendieta’s artwork ‘Feathers on a Woman, University of Iowa, 1972’.

It is not a positive atmosphere, it is hostile. The watch tower is in the middle of an empty white tiled foyer part of the mall, and on either side there are two curved tunnels of open air train station style offices/glass fronted booths leading off. So, again, like with the revolutionary’s hair and the green staircase, there is this motif of two, splitting avenues. On one side of the mall (the left side - north) the tunnel of glass fronted booths and offices leads to an abortion clinic. I realise the layout of the mall, when looked at from above, would be a pair of fallopian tubes, the door a cervix, the office where you can get an abortion the ovaries. I work my way through the queue of mingling people, who look like they are in Mean Girls. The girls are kind of Chola, really badass. I’m nearly at the clinic for my abortion but then realise I don’t want to miss saying goodbye to P. I’m worried about missing him, and worried about missing my abortion, which anyway I don’t need because I’m not pregnant, I just want to join in with all the cool girls in the line, in the end I choose to go and see him.

He’s still outside smoking. He says he wishes the other revolutionary had negotiated the taxi for us. The other one is suddenly there. In that split second I am confused about my choice of love, good sex and humour, over intrigue and intensity (the other revolutionary). Then I realise I can have them both. We are going to the airport. There is some very disturbing tournament going on with people on yoga mats on the floor. When I wake up I realise I actually fancy my friend’s dead aunt whose funeral we were at.

Dream 30.03.20

Can you give yourself the virus by touching your eye in public? [D.G.]

Dream 01.04.20

A long, uncollected essay poem by Amiri Baraka from 1964/5 explains that the Cannonball/Nat Adderley group was far more radical than they were given credit for. On a piece called 'For Harmony', their harmonies were like the gaps between teeth in flossing. At this time, a young Barrett Watten was Nat Adderley' s chauffeur, waiting for him by the car in a near deserted marketplace that was a cross between the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, St Mark's Place in New York, and St Peter's Square in Venice. Weather foul, damp with an imminent downpour, but we weren't allowed to shelter in the car and wandered off, disconsolately, incomplete.

By 9 o clock, Nat Adderley had fallen out of three pieces of paper. [D.G.]

JJ, Berlin, State Imposed Semi-Lockdown,

27.3.20 A hazy green, blue dream, like a Jonas Mekas film, except for interior shots that appeared like advertisements for an American restaurant reproducing a rural "European" church.  In the church, flirtation, its location ambiguous: a woman and my brother, another woman, teenagers, or a general atmosphere - the ominous, exciting stench of teenage life. We buy something mundane from the bourgeois food counter in the church from the advertisement. The main event: a film by a classic auteur like Bela Tarr, in the cinema-church-ad.

The church is in a childhood holiday village, in the countryside, Normandy or the middle of England, and when driving home with my parents, we passed a kind of a ramshackle house that acted as a crèche that I remembered as the place I had played in "before he was here," he, my brother. There was also a book, a book written by Jonas Mekas, a very romantic book, with a very romantic cover, and it was very large, like a building, with a hazy, nostalgic photograph on the front, pastel blues and whites and an anonymous, unidentifiable human body, almost floating.

All of this, being in the holiday village in the church watching the Bela Tarr film, was the film we were watching. The film was quite boring.

29.3.20  Trying to get through an exit in a school, but it was blocked by a guard who wouldn’t let me through, the only other option being the toilets, that also had guards. I had to reach an important meeting. My father had already got in, having taken a more sensible route. It was quite dark, everywhere, and my boss was trying to make me arrange hyperlinks so that things would happen. The meeting was part of the hyperlink organisation event. My father was dressed smartly for the meeting while I was being investigated for trying to enter the guarded doorway. It is possible the entrance was forbidden because it was being painted.

30.3.20 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. Ambiguous human figures are crossing the threshold of the house and my family are among the many distantly friendly people who live in it. Everyone in my family contracts the virus. It hits my parents particularly hard. No one knows quite what to do.

02.04.20, 9th night of ‘lockdown’ in UK
GCD: I seem to be having more and more dreams every night - I think I must be waking up a lot, so i don’t remember that. Also I had just got used to wearing a retainer all night, but now in my sleep I always remove it and place it by my pillow on my left side. Restless. I wish I was having some sex dreams. That’s what I feel most envious of when I’m reading other people’s dreams on this doc. At least you got laid.

Here’s the one I remember most vividly. I dreamt I was coming back to the UK from somewhere in Europe, via Paris, by plane or maybe train and I had to connect to the Eurostar. I thought I had a good chunk of time to do this, so I wandered the streets of Paris, in the evening, looking at shops and enjoying the breath of the city. When I got to the train terminal, which was more like a small airport (covered glass walkways, duty-free and lots of arrows on the floor), I was told by an official that I was over an hour late for my train, which had left at 8pm. For £100 I bought a train ticket to London for the following morning, then immediately went on Facebook to see if I could find someone to stay with in Paris. When I asked the train people about hotels, they laughed. This is Paris! A spring weekend! You won’t get a hotel room! I remember my mum stayed in a hotel here she really liked, should I call her? Then I noticed the bodies lying on the floor of the railway/transport space, wrapped in foil, blankets, plastic sheeting. There were many men, older and younger, all dark-skinned, and clearly very unwell. I overheard people complaining how they smelled bad, though I couldn’t smell anything. Sometimes someone got up to go through a dark door but generally they just lay there, hardly moving. I could see some of them had wounds. Leprosy? I could see that once I tuned my eyes in, the city was full of mainly young black men, sleeping under bridges, other covered spaces, even out in the street, wrapped in tarps. I think then I went out into those streets, alarmed by their suffering, sure I would find somewhere to stay, knowing they had nowhere.

02.04.2020. DH, London. I was sick & exhausted, outside a poetry reading in London. I tried to hug LR goodbye and he screamed at me to get away from him. I told him that I hadn’t touched anyone else but he didn’t care. Felt abject, despondent.

        Later went on holiday with MV to Japan. I arrived after her. Tokyo was a noir-space: just night and bars. We travelled to the outskirts of the city, where a rich gay couple, European, said that we could stay in their home. The house was exquisitely decorated, small, comfortable. It was full of live alligators, & a small child had been left in it. As soon as the owners had gone, the child slaughtered the alligators. They were like sacks of neon green blood. The blood came out of them in geysers, explosively. Later we sat down together for an exquisite meal of alligator innards. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and met one of the two women who owned the house (the more powerful of the two). She said that they had changed their mind; they were moving back in. I asked if we could have an hour to pack up, and she assented. Back in the house, the child tried to grope me. MV was laconic, with her feet up, didn’t want to leave. The house was revolting, destroyed, covered in lurid green alligator blood, the disemboweled corpses of alligators. I felt frantic, out of my mind, was throwing our things randomly into bags. We left and sat on a bench outside, smoked. Could hear the noises of shock and horror as the proprietors of the house discovered what had happened to their animals.

JS, France, State-imposed confinement, day 18

At M’s open-air birthday party in Marseille, I’m very relieved to be there. There is a large pine trestle table on the side of the road. It is cloudy and humid. A friend I don’t know so well, or don’t like so much invites herself along, saying, well this looks nice. I feel awkward that she has invited herself, she doesn’t know anyone else at the table but me. But then more people arrive, it turns into a large sprawling street party.

I wonder where R is, I don’t speak to anyone else, anxious to talk to her. At this point I remember that we’re still under quarantine, and we’re flagrantly flouting confinement rules. I realise R must still be at home and will not be happy about us being out. At this point I become very anxious, I’d felt very cosseted from the virus, having had almost no contact with the outside world in the past 18 days aside from a single supermarket trip (both IRL and in dreamland) and now I was feeling very stupid for ending up outside.

I don't want people to think I was being judgemental about the party, so I excuse myself by pretending to need the toilet. Once around the corner I start to run. I arrive in a high-walled square with weeds sprouting from between the grey brickwork and small shops lining the edges. Outside one shop there are hundreds of small glass figurines placed on the chequered tile floor of the square, like pawns on a chess board. As I run I try to avoid them, but end up crushing a few of these small objects. The shop owner chases after me, coughing.

I eventually end up on the beach, I feel very alone and very stupid. My parents appear, they have bikes and are dressed in cycling Lycra, we took the ferry over, they tell me, you forgot your swimsuit, and it’s only a short trip from the house to drop it to you. We sit on the beach for a while and read poems to each other. The sky is low and grey but silky smooth and the world feels very immediate.

My parents return to England to resume their cycle trip, and I, seemingly having forgotten my quarantine anxieties, head to a large, dilapidated ballroom. I’ve decided to participate in a televised talent competition, maybe the X factor. People are asking me what I will perform, and at the last minute, I decide I will dance. I know I won’t win, and maybe that people will think I’m delusional, I just want to perform my improvised dance in front of an audience. I roll my bones, swing my hips, bend my knees. In brief passages I feel like I’m flying and in other moments I feel clunky and slow. I dance until I’m out of breath.

MB Marseille, confinement day 18.

A monarch butterfly.

I woke up and told myself to remember it - so as to remember the dream. The name stays and everything else is gone.

RL Marseille, 2nd April, confinement night 17, state imposed house confinement

I am going to Essex, to my friend Pearl’s house. The train goes across a beautiful stretch of water (like a Marina I once visited near New Orleans). It is as if the train goes on the water, but also on a little wooden jetty. The light is twilight: lilac, with and black, yellow undertones like the inside of a crane’s feathers. Pearl’s mum is concerned I will not make it. I get there - it is a kind of farmhouse or trapper’s cabin/ I am still on my journey somewhere else: it is just a stop off point. I feel like a teenager, I want to brush off her concerns for me by showing I can do it. The feeling of when someone else’s mum tries to be your mum. I am also flattered and feel cared for. There’s something very dangerous about it and I don’t know what.

I get to a small town in Essex on my way. There are some red double decker buses, and bus stops that suggest journeys to somewhere magic, next to the bus stops there is a hollow/wasteland in the ground, kind of like a gravel pit with white debris and gravel in it. There is a vintage shop there. Maya has been there, she has beaten us to it. She has sent a note to my rapist, M.C, who wanted to visit her shop because they have the same leather jacket but it looks better on her. In any case I read her letter although she is gone, we can read her global movements through her letter. It is written in pencil. It basically says “eat a bag of dicks you rapist scum, we know what you’ve done”, which is a letter she once sent him in real life. Except it said, also in pencil, that she’d cut off his balls, and that if he still wanted to come to the shop, it was a “no”.

The person reading it with me, who is maybe even my rapist, M.C, is shocked but I’m pleased. Just then M.C disembarks from a bus.

Then I am at my family cabin. I arrive there as if like a soldier from the war, who has lived through a lot. The response is underwhelming. My sister, I, and her friend J are there: petulant, insolent, etc. We get in a huge fight where we’re criticising each other and it’s kind of about who has been suffering more. Mostly, though, it’s about that I express too much. For me it’s about that I’m suffering more. My sister wonders what she will do during quarantine. I offer to stay with her. “Ugh, no social life” she says, insulting me. I slap her.

..

⁃        Marlowe

⁃        April 2nd 2020

⁃        Accidental confinement on a boat in Northern California, painting.

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.

2 April 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 17, Oakland)

SL: I am at my apartment but it seems that my parents and brother also have a place there. They are away for a few days. I go to my parents bathroom to shower as they have a really big, clean, basin-like shower. Little One, our calico cat from when I was growing up, was there. I was showering and I thought that it was so weird that she would get in the shower with me so close to the water. At first she was just looking at me but then started biting me feet and scratching at me. She got more and more vicious and was getting wet under the shower head. I saw my parents’ current dog Bubba in the distance looking at me very seriously and expectantly. It was then I realized that my parents and brother have been gone two days and I completely forgot to feed Bubba and Little One in that time! They must be so hungry, and their water bowls were low and dirty. I quickly got out of the shower, opened cans of food and piled wet food on top of dry food for each of them. I cleaned their water bowls over a commercial sink with spray hose that hangs from the top (like restaurants use), and gave them water. Little One was so hungry and so happy to eat that she rolled on her back devouring the food that somehow piled on top of her. (note—I think I had a short dream a few days ago that I didn’t remember until now, also where I forgot to feed pets for a few days).

I was waiting for W to come over, and now dressing after my shower. 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. He sent me a text that probably said he was on his way, but my phone was on a darkened setting and I couldn’t read it. For some reason, J arrived in the meantime. He had taken up sewing and showed me a stuffed animal he made. I wasn’t sure if he was giving it to me as a present or not? I think it was a bear, made of different patterned cotton. He has alopecia and we hadn’t seen each other in a while, he looked different. We talked a while and I was uncomfortable about the bear – was it mine or not? Should I thank him? I took it into the bathroom for a closer look at it. It had a little sewn pouch that it fit into to keep it clean.

Then J wasn’t there anymore. I was getting ready to see W, was excited and dancing to a new empowering song by Lizzo. There was a video that went along with the song that showed her animated, her costume constantly changing. M&K came by to pick me up, I got in the backseat of their car. They had a whole afternoon planned for all of us. I said, I can come with you to help out with the (bat? iguana? some little animal) but I need to be back in an hour because W is on his way over. OK!, they said cheerily.

MLK Copenhagen 3 April

I was in a big family apartment in London. Heavily pregnant and about to give birth. L, who was the father of the child, was under lockdown in a different country. It felt like normal. My little sister was there cheering me on. I had the baby on the kitchen table and was very surprised at how smoothly it went, an entirely endurable pain. Then a boy. 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. I put the baby to my left breast to feed it and discovered it already had little teeth. It didn’t bite me though and I started to feel like I would care for this child. Then a big group of people entered the apartment. Something had happened on the street, something important. They were excited and happy. I wanted to go down with them, back to the streets, but I didn’t know if you’re supposed to take newborns outside that soon after they’ve come into the world. I hesitated and in the hesitation felt that I was incredibly tired. Sat down on the floor against the wall and decided to stay in. Tried to breastfeed from the other breast and got worried that he was just sucking and sucking with no milk coming out. How the fuck do you know if milk comes out? My mum and aunt who now were also there tried to reassure me but I felt frustrated and the baby was distracted by all the people, looking around and not even latching on at this point. I tried to cover us both with a big knitted shawl, to block out the view of others. It seemed to kind of work. The end of the dream was the blurry realisation that the boy I had given birth to would grow up to be my little sister.

Squiggly Toad, 03.04, day 11 of the lockdown in London:
This poem was written in a dream. It was the words of a teacher panicking about a music class that no longer made any sense because of the apocalyptic hail storm that was suddenly going on outside the classroom window:

Dream poem (rain)
There is a rhythm that the serpent's tail will seper (sunder?)
There is a rhythm, heavy rain, that will bring together

 L.T, 21.03 Paris lockdown day 6

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 open sky. A dolphin slid towards me slowly and smoothly. The floor was slimy, I remember looking at my bare toes to try to understand what that gooey material was, and thought it was algues or potato starch (?). The dolphin was huge. Face to face I felt the massive presence of the animal – my own being was mixed to the animal being, I was submerged by a feeling that felt like love.

MLK 4 April Copenhagen

In a city built next to the ruins of another city. This other city of ruins full of delicate old brik-work, catacombs and just visible underground water-cisterns. I was in the first city for a while, but cannot remember what happened there. When I walked into the city of ruins, a herd of goats were grazing among the piles of rubble. They were all keen to be scratched between their horns at first. Then a little hesitant, the older goats pulling away and calling at the younger ones for them to join.

GR 4th of April (amidst third week of confinement in tel aviv)

I’ve been having mainly fragments of dreams lately, the kind that makes you wake up with the bodily feeling of finishing a night journey without really remembering what it was about. But this morning I suddenly remembered that I had a stalker overnight, or at least I thought I did. It was all very hazy, 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) and this person kept appearing. He was walking too close to me on dimmed streets, but with a very childish body language. He came to where I was hanging out w some mates, supposedly not knowing that I was also there. Then he opened a whatsapp group just for the two of us and named it in a language I couldn’t understand. I didn’t really know what to do, as his causality was somehow as convincing as mine. Then I suddenly was outside of a train station somewhere in england, and I could see him getting off the train from afar. I ran across my tutor and I was explaining to her the situation. And while she was speaking, saying something that was meant to be reassuring without actually providing any assurances, I realized we’re standing inside the locker room of an old lido and my tutor is actually only wearing a white towel. The locker room was obviously gendered and the gender of the room we were at supposedly had no correlation with mine. As I was trying to figure out how I became a potential intruder whilst being intruded, a unidirectional stream of women wearing only white towels started hitting us in the very indifferent manner particles in particle accelerators greet each other. And I’m not sure if my tutor was still there by this point, but she was somehow able to provide me with the alienating comfort of the anonymity of the tube in rush hour.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 04/04/2020, after two weeks of (solitary) confinement under a stricter ‘lockdown’ regime, fragments of two dreams:

I am moving through a city in an uncertain light flickering between day and night, there is a huge fire somewhere or the alarm has been sounded for an imminent attack from the air. My companions and me (I have the feeling of being part of a group) hurry down long flights of steps (or a winding staircase) into the subterranean part of the city, our impulse is more that of fleeing than of actually taking shelter. The architectures of this part to which I have never been before resemble Piranesi’s Carceri, but his vast spaces have somehow contracted into narrow passages which have however retained the power of disorientation and coercion, making me feel insignificant and exposed. There is no shelter here. Cut. I am meeting S. whom I have not seen for over a year now. He has given a talk or is about to give one. I seem to have prepared an exercise book for the occasion, either summarising the past months of my life for him or with questions for him (or both?). When we meet, there is a woman with us, I cannot see her face, I do not know her – I am irritated. 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 its left pages empty, perhaps expecting that S. will write down answers on them, comments – suddenly they are filled with his handwriting (?).

CW, Jerusalem, night of 05/04/2020, after two weeks of (solitary) confinement under a stricter ‘lockdown’ regime:

The first dream somehow seems to be a topical mash-up of “Indiana Jones,” “(Alien) Predator,” and perhaps “Ad Astra”. Together with a group of others (yet without any sense of their identities), I am standing in what long ago must have been the interior of a huge edifice. The ground is made up of polished rectangular stones, and pylons are scattered across it, their slender forms reaching into the sky. I have the strong sensation of being at a very holy place, charged with some terrible transformative power that was once possessed and controlled by an ancient civilization. Suddenly the pylons emit pulses of reddish light into the air. This scene now morphs into the control deck of a crudely articulated spaceship – like a Lego licensed transposition of some SciFi film. Again, I am not alone, and we are not in space. Some gigantic creature is hunting our troupe of plunderers/explorers down, one by one. For a second, I glimpse its black, muscular, shimmering body – a gorilla? Stricken with fear, I try to hide, but the control deck is structured more like an amphitheatre, exposing anyone on it. Cut. I am now in what seems to be the street of an ordinary town. I am talking to a woman, we are academic colleagues (?), she is criticizing my approach in some matter – but I have the feeling we are in fact discussing my attitude towards life as such, something existential. We are/she is/I am about to go on a journey with a car – we are standing in front of the parked car, the encounter takes place in daylight, on the pavement. More than once, I am very close to her face, but I do not know it – or it is the composite of several people I know, and thus rendered unrecognizable –, and there is no erotic urgency to our closeness. The scene continues somewhere else, we enter a building, still arguing, trying to recover some documents (?).

STL, Marseille april 3 2020, we figured out it’s the 24th night of confinement, going into the 25 day

I’m at a dive bar in Greenpoint next to a Mexican punk rock guy. A giant rubber tire like from a monster truck, but 2-stories tall, bounces down the street. It bounces  3 or 4 times, crushing a car and a building on it’s last two bounces, causing a lot of damage. The guy says, that’s why we don’t play with metal. I woke up to a woman screaming on the street.

RL Marseille April 4th, 18th night of state imposed house confinement

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.

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. I think it’s quite ugly but they are pleased with it. It is somewhere far away, safe from the virus. It is not in a city but at the bottom of the garden there is a freeway. It has attic windows in the eaves and coming out of the roof, maybe a belltower, little kinds of sections that pull out, and a front porch. The house is not symmetrical from the front. However, it has two identical stretches of lawn - which I dream not as ‘lawn’ but as pelouse -  front and back, and both sides of the house are the same. Both sides of the house are the front, then.

It is my birthday and I’m disappointed that quarantine and confinement are not finished yet (maybe this is not a dream but a premonition of how unhappy I will be about it - my birthday is 22nd June). I have come to visit my parents here, my friend [R, on doc] has been here before me and left me a present. My mum is pleased and proud to share her new project with me, and is presenting this as my birthday treat, but it’s really about the house. My dad leaves on business, but makes a performance of saying what my mum should or shouldn’t forget to give or bring me. This is sweet and a way of showing me he cares, although I also know mum has organised everything herself well in advance anyway. However, this is fine, it doesn’t offend her.

We have coffee in an aluminium coffee pot which gets spilt all over the lawn, which is now lawn and not pelouse. We then climb up the left side of the modest facade of the ugly house - wearing sort of prairie-ish nighties or frilly aprons - and pull out a kind of collapsible stainless steel ledge from under the window. My mum is proud to show me how many hidden aspects and secret gadgets there are in her new project. She wants to show me what a good job her and my father have been doing of surviving. The ledge is clearly extremely dangerous and I’m kind of standing on it trying to find some way of standing and serving the coffee. I get irritated about being put in danger and being forced to examine a particular thing that doesn’t interest me (although might do on another occasion when I’m not panicking or in danger) and freak out. My mum is being very sweet but doing a slight control thing where she lowers her voice as if speaking to a cat, and says “now, look…” which will necessarily end up with “now now, I’m just sitting here quietly”.

Anyway, it is my birthday so we sit down on the front steps and she begins to give me presents. I’m bitterly disappointed that R didn’t stay, that my dad left and that my sister didn’t bother to come. I look at the black wrapping and tell my mum to slow down giving me presents, I want to go get dressed first. I can already feel the disappointment of having no presents left. I carry on opening the black wrapped package. It is from my sister: it resembles packaging containing a powder puff. More like, it resembles both the form of a Dior Talcum powder puff box that my paternal grandma had, and a ceramic black pot of Patum Peperium (gentleman’s relish) which is empty and washed out and holds my dead grandfather’s shaving soap at my (also dead, everyone is dead) maternal grandmother’s house. (where my mum is now, IRL). It has 20s ish lettering that says MUMM’s on it, and reminds me of both champagne and casinos.

I ask mum what it is, she says “oh, that’s very special”. My sister’s present to me is a book review that she is writing about an Ursula Le Guin book, which is a book of whirling desert sands. For my present, she offers that I can help her finish the review. She has lost confidence. 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. It was kind of a tiresome present, when you think about it. I wrote the review and signed it off under my own name, or cosigned it (don’t remember), although I didn’t change anything fundamental about her text. Feeling a little guilty, I told F on the phone that I was being very productive in quarantine. My review was going to be published next to his in some art review. I feel like a fraud, especially because F had worked so hard on his article, and I have simply taken revenge on my sister.

I saw a desert whirling when I opened the lid of the powder puff box.

Cut to a large canteen style restaurant. It is empty. I am there eating. Its large glass front faces on to a large place - -circular, layout of the Champs Elysees or of Nation -- with roads coming off. 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. Lime green like the 90s.

A huge number of colossally huge robocops come into the empty restaurant. They seem to like me. I’m scared they’ll rape me. I’m filming their arrival after they’ve arrived - the internet is slow so I can film them through Googlemaps street view using my macbook photobooth app, profiting from the time delay. As I do this, filming from the window, a sniper/army guy in beige camouflage points his rifle straight at me from outside.

So many nights now thatI have lost count. I do not sleep, or rather, I imagine I do not sleep, as there is a residue of dream content nonetheless. From the early hours of this morning: my son at ages that changed throughout, from now to very young, a small room in which a queue curled, baskets full of sweets and chocolate, a double-walled perimeter, a guichet for refunds, a man who calls my child an ungrateful little bitch, though he knows him to be a boy, and the same man follows me very closely, speaking under his breath, and when I ask three men at the doorway of an imposing entrance they do not believe me.

CS, April 3rd, Paris, god knows how many days of state imposed house arrest

I am in a huge hall or a classroom, soldiers in combat trousers turn up with machine guns, I can only see their legs, we have to buckle down under the state plywood desks and chairs for protection. I know I will be ok if I make it to the other end of the room. I crawl and limp across and just as I am wondering why I ever had that stupid idea, I notice that there is a toilet with a door handle. I turn the handle and it is open, so I quickly rush in and lock the door. Heave a sigh of relief. A voice in my head tells me to climb, so I begin to ease up the drab grey walls thanks to my spiderman imbs and suction cup extremities. I get to the top and rest there in suspension, staring out of a tiny window, listening to machine gunfire which has begun to break out. I think I am safe.

MB Marseille, April 4, day 20

There has been a jungling and Xavier Dolan is a ‘big fan of my work’.

dream 04.04.20 (DH)

1. We had organized communist Christmas in a school tennis court, with an acrobatics team, but very few people turned up.  

2. I had learned the details of a dangerous Crowleyesque ritual in which a person had died by throwing himself off a mountain. I needed to pass on information about this. I drove to my destination in my granddad's expensive car. For some reason the driver's seat was very elevated, so that my head was pressed against the car roof, my neck bent 90 degrees. I have no idea how to drive and it was impossible to see anything. The road was winding, steep. It was the middle of the night. The car seemed to drive itself, racing horribly and uncontrollably upwards towards I had no idea what.  

3. Some point later on. Lots of us together in a flat. We were making a film somehow related to the earlier ritual. It was in two parts. The first part we'd already made. Most of work had involved the violent SFX transmogrification of humans into grotesque animals; it turned out that this was the real purpose of Zoom, though only JC had mastered this element of the platform. I had been instructed to write the second part of the film, which explained the theological basis of the first. My source text was an enormous illuminated manuscript, a kind of hybrid of The Four Zoas and a seventeenth-century volume of religious sermons, like one of the outsized volumes of Donne's sermons that I read in Senate House years ago. I found the entire thing ridiculously kitschy and absurd - it annoyed me, it was like a young adult's novella, it wasn't serious at all, the manuscript was illustrated in nasty primary colours that I hated, if people knew that this was the sort of thing that I liked to read they would definitely laugh at me;-- other panicky adolescent-narcissistic thoughts like these. Everyone else in the room was having a loud conversation about their use of pornography during the lock-down. Simultaneously, AM was telling me a long story about Friends: how every main actor had been in a relationship with each of the others, and that the relationships had all ended at exactly the same time in a complicated cascading pattern so that when Matthew Perry broke up with David Schwimmer, David Schwimmer had broken up with Jennifer Anniston, who had broken up with Matthew Perry, and so on and so on and so on, and since there were four main actors, there were six simultaneous relationships, all of which had been covered up by means of sexist non-disclosure agreements. This story obviously designed to go on and on forever. Become more and more explosively distracted & irritated until I wake up.

LNT, conditions de confinement : une maison collective dans les Pyrenées...

31.3

Je marche seule et perdue sur la lande. Du gris à perte de vue. Je ne sais pas où je suis ni combien de temps s’est écoulé depuis le début de l’épidémie. Je regarde mon ventre, je me touche. Je vois que mon jeans est très sale et élimé. Je flotte dedans. Mon ventre est minuscule. Et je me rends compte aussi que mes cheveux ont poussé presque jusqu’à terre comme les cheveux de Sainte-Agnès pour recouvrir sa pudique nudité. Ils sont pleins de fourche. Et je me dis, ah, il a dû se passer vraiment beaucoup de temps.

I walk alone and lost on the lande. Grey as far as the eye can see. I know neither where I am nor how long has passed since the start of the pandemic. I look at my stomach, I touch myself. I see my jeans are dirty and worn out. I swim in them. My stomach is tiny. I realize also that my hair has grown nearly to the ground, like Saint Agnes' to cover her nudity. They have a lot of split ends. I think ah, it must have been a really long time.

19.3

Je suis avec Y. nous prenons la décision d'aller à Caen. il s'agit d'aller au cinéma mais aussi peut-être d'échapper au corona. Il faut partir vite. Nous sommes dans un petit appartement. Nous sommes tous les deux mais il y a aussi un double de Y., il s'appelle aussi Y., -- je me dis -- comme les deux princes dans l'Idiot, le bon et mauvais le mauvais ou la blonde et la brune dans Mulholland Drive. On part à Caen. Assez rapidement, alors que j'aimerais rester avec Y., je me retrouve avec son double maléfique. Nous traînons en ville, rejoignons des camarades. C'est plus ou moins confus et émeutier. Et ça se bagarre beaucoup en interne, des coups de couteau, des jets de pierre. Je me demande où est Y. le bon. Le bordel dure, dure. Finalement, je reçois un sms de Y. charmant et lapidaire : "Rejoins-moi à Hérouville-st-clair". Et je me dis, ohlala, il est vraiment à l'Ouest là…

I'm with Y. We decide to go to Caen. There is talk of going to the cinema but also perhaps to escape the corona. We have to leave fast. We are in a small apartment. It is just the two of us but there is also a double of Y., also called Y, - and I think - like the two princes in The Idiot, the good and bad the bad or the blond and the brunette in Mulholland Drive. We go to Caen. Quickly enough, although I'd like to stay with Y., I find myself with his maleficent double. We hang around town, meet up with comrades. It is more or less confused and rioty. There is a lot of internal fighting, stabbing, rock throwing. I wonder where Y. is, the good one. The mess goes on and on. Finally, I get an sms from Y., charming and concise: "Meet me at Hérouville-st-clair". And I think, oh la la, he is very far west...

(or) he is very spaced out...

4 April 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 19, Oakland)

SL: Janice from The Sopranos is squeezing her baby Nica out of a nitrene glove. The baby is inside the glove and Janice is very nervous. We don’t want the glove to turn inside out – then we can’t use it again. We are in the lobby of a Bob Dylan concert. He is playing with a band backing him, some famous band, and it’s a special thing (not named as The Band). I have a black and white poster I’ve laid out of them on a table. One nitrene glove is already on the table. Finally, Janice coos the baby out of the other and we lay the other glove carefully on the table too. I want to take a picture of this tableau.

I go to the library and they have glossy “books by women” on the floor, only two or three. The librarian says, take one they’re free. I look and see one is Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems. It’s a different cover but I have one at home. I consider taking it anyway, but don’t.

I go to the weed dispensary and order two cans of gummies and an indica joint. The indica joint is not already rolled and it will take the person there a while to do it. I say, sativa is fine then.

I wake up with Girl from North Country mixed with Tomorrow is a Long time intertwined in my head.

05/04/20 (13th day of ‘lockdown’ in UK)
GCD
I had a lot of dreams again, lots of waking up hot, moving around, frustrated. I think my first dream was that my friend Maria had organised me to play a gig with Neil Young. I was a bit daunted but didn’t want to say no. We seemed to be playing in a smallish room in an institution (so more like a poetry reading lol). I decided to read poetry over music, something I’ve never done before but often wanted to. Neil seemed friendly, said some kind of elliptical and stand-offish things (I can’t remember what) that is sort of what I expected. I remembered him being a bit of a womanizer or something - in my head I clearly saw the bit in the Last Waltz where he’s coked up and trying to get closer to Joni Mitchell and she’s visibly alarmed and moving away from him in this great group of singers on stage [weird connection in terms of this group of musicians to SL’s dream above] The actual performance didn’t happen in the dream, but there was a sort of after bit.

A later on dream was that I dreamt I woke up and got up to go to my window. It was sort of like the room I live in now but also like the room I spent my entire adolescence in (north facing, high up and overlooking trees and gardens). It had a dormer window like my old room. I hear birdsong very loud (louder even than I usually do in the mornings these spring days). I thought it was starlings because it sounded like car alarms, I went to the window and the top of the tree below the window was full of small birds - more like tits and sparrows, but maybe thrushes too. Then I notice a large bird with its back to me and something in its claws. It spreads its wings and flies away. I think it is probably a goshawk or buzzard (or a sort of hybrid of the two) with a dead or dying songbird in its claws.

02/04/20 - London Lockdown - E.

We tumbled down a hill in some woodland. By the time we got to the bottom, I remembered I had left my luggage at the top of the hill but it was dark by then and my friends had to hold me back from heading back through the woods to regain it.

I was in an arched space with grooved walls, it was cave-like. A dinner party was taking place, but I was not seated at the table with the other guests. I was on a low bench against one of the walls. I noticed a past lover and a celebrated poet sat next to each other at the table and I approached them. I squatted down and kept low to the floor in my movements. I crouched next to them and my ex lover noticed me - his eyes were so small and green and his skin was so dusty and pale.

JFE April 5 (18th day NYC) dreams fragmented and impossible to remember for days

the teacher accidentally plays “cut self not” by faraquet and it begins to drown out her lesson --- we are being outfitted for stretchers with built-in face masks --- it will actually be a restful experience, I’m told, and I begin to look forward to it --- I drop delyn off, he falls asleep on a bed in the kitchen --- left turn from the garage into the hall -- but some sort of ritual --- somebody (my brother?) with his legs in the washing machine --- hot water, and then he needs to flee from delyn who’s trying to shoot him with a gun --- all an act, a series of gestures we need to get right --- we try the steps but delyn has fallen asleep --- then an aerial view of some isolated mountains --- maybe it is snowing --- something happens down below I am witness to --- and an empty town --- me standing below --- now the airport going through security --- lots of us --- I’m helping smuggle drugs onto the plane with boxes of girl scout cookies --- it works --- in the end I almost miss the flight, not knowing which airplane to enter --- inside it is impossibly spacious --- not many people --- to the left a small cluster of seats, to the right a short hall leading to a room the size of both a gymnasium and a waiting room at a doctors office --- I find RL and somebody I don’t recognize sitting in seats along the wall --- she’s smoking inside, and I follow suite. Nobody bothers us. We are crossing over the Atlantic into a frontierlike Canada I’ve never seen before.

RL April 5th, 19th night state imposed house confinement, Marseille.

Extra information: on the phone two days ago a friend described quarantining cells (houses) as “constellations” (SB). SC also mentioned this word on the radio. I watched Millennium mambo yesterday (people surveilling each other’s movements), we read a part about alembics yesterday in Marx (Capital 1 part 1 ch3). There are things like alembics in millenium mambo for taking some kind of narcotic. Millenium Mambo is very sad and beautiful.

I dreamt I made it to Berlin by riding a gigantic cross breed of a camel and a giraffe. I’m certainly with a herd of similar animals but I might be the only human. When I got there I had to be quarantined and I stayed at SB’s apartment. 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.

At SB’s empty apartment we had a nice conversation, me sitting on the floor and him on a long, 2000s era couch, and then reversed, and then he suddenly dies. I felt like an intruder, sharply aware that I wasn’t the person who had known him the most, and now found myself in the position of imposter - some kind of sovereignty of being the person who had been there and had to make all the phone calls informing people (although in the dream I’m not sure I’m there, he just disappears. In fact that makes me wonder if he is really dead or not or has just disappeared) - sorting through his affairs.

Someone wants his archive and it is sent to her, but one book remains. It is a chemistry book, which has real bunsen burners, alembics and other vessels filled with chemicals inside. It is perhaps like one of those books with the pages cut out inside, used for smuggling things in and out of prisons. On the front of the book it said “I’M SORRY FOR WHAT I SAID WHEN I WAS HUNGRY”, in exactly the font used in the real life book. JBR arrived, and said the book was “really wonderful” “very important”, and that he would take it for Mayday rooms without asking anyone. I was really not sure about this and felt worried. Something about Jo Spence. Something about my daily life reading Marx and having meetings with JS, missing JS. She was there, briefly I think.

I re-live my journey on giraffe/camel. My mum arrives in Berlin to bring me home. But I want to go for a walk with F, and break quarantine, which is the reason I’ve come here. My mum has come earlier than expected and I haven’t managed to see F yet. I want to find him but I don’t wish to explain myself to any of the people who are worried about me. I gather that this will be my last chance to join my mum, and to leave, or at least that’s how she presents it. I wake up terribly terribly sad about SB.

LGS Appalachia 5 april 2020

Dreamed of Guy and Alice on a dim raft floating down the Styx. They were interrupting as poetry reading organized by the others, singing ‘Ashes 2 ashes, all fall down.’

[Translated in English directly below] JB, 5 Avril 2020, confiné dans notre petite maison à Drancy (93) avec mon amie. 19eme nuit de confinement.

À la surprise générale, la fin du confinement est annoncée, elle est à peine progressive, seule 5% de la population (on ne sait pas laquelle, je me doute que ce sont juste les personnes contaminées) doit rester confinée et avec des règles assouplies. Mélange de doute sur la véracité de l'annonce du gouvernement et de plaisir semblable à celui d'un cadeau qu'on nous offre sans qu'on s'y attende. J'hésite à y croire et à me projeter différemment, à m'envisager comme si le confinement était vraiment fini.

[Translated from the French, directly above] JB, 5 April 2020, confined in our little house in Drancy (in the 93 post code of Parisian suburbs) with my girlfriend. 19th night of confinement.

To general surprise, the end of confinement is announced, it’s almost progressive, only 5% of the population (we don’t know which 5%, I wonder if this is just infected people) must stay confined, with softened rules. [I experience a] combination of doubt about the veracity of the government announcement and the pleasure like that of a present given to someone who wasn’t expecting one. I hesitate to believe it and to see myself differently, to imagine myself as if the confinement was really finished.

[Translated directly below in English] C. Marseille. 22/03. Six jours après avoir quitté le Liban.

« On est dans un souvenir. Les cours d'arabe de l'institut de Beyrouth se terminent, une ambiance de fin de classe s'étend dans les couloirs. Mes camarades évoluent autour de moi échangeant des banalités pour laisser traîner le moment de se dire au revoir. Des rires étouffés et des cris joyeux viennent peupler la langueur du soir. Le bougainvillier nous boude du haut de sa sagesse : lui va rester là. Au milieu, bien droite, je respire, rien ne me satisfait plus que ce genre de moments répétitifs dont le script est déjà écrit. Il n'y a rien à faire, rien qu'à regarder les uns et les autres faire leur ronde jusqu'à ce que tous nous rentrions chez nous une bonne fois pour toutes, heureux d'avoir appartenu à la même histoire. C'est le genre de moment dans lequel même lever la main en suivant le mouvement du vent est un acte superflu. Nous n'avons qu'à suivre nos pentes, jouer nos personnages selon le plus bel art et récupérer le cash money. Et puis au loin, arrive la famille de ma coloc et camarade J. Je ne les vois pas vraiment mais je les sens comme un mauvais présage chargés de chagrin et de douleur.  La grand-mère de J. est morte. Peut-être du coronavirus, suppose un autre état de ma conscience. Elle et sa famille vont partir pour l'Allemagne le plus vite possible. Tout s'effondre en moi face à la certitude que mon amie ne va pas rentrer avec moi chez nous, qu'elle ne va plus être là, qu'elle va me laisser seule, toute seule. On est dans un autre souvenir. Je bloque, mon œil gauche déconnecte, ma bouche s'affaisse sans laisser passer aucun mot, je perds pied. Je n'arrive plus à rien, le flot de mes pensées est à côté de moi, qui continue sans moi. A la place, un brouillard épais et paralysant qui me laisse l’œil hagard et la bouche pendante. Dans ma tête, il y a comme un bouillonnement, un bourdonnement terrible qui balbutie avec difficulté l'envie de la retenir et la certitude que ce n'est pas ce qu'il faut faire. Il va me falloir la laisser partir – je n'y arrive pas. La culpabilité me gagne de ne sentir rien de la tristesse qui la touche. On apprend que sa grand-mère n'est pas seulement morte, elle s'est laissée mourir de sa misérable condition de petite vieille esseulée. Pauvre J. Je devrais compatir, purée ! Je la vois à son placard, en train d'en sortir des vêtements et je tente de prononcer quelque chose en rapport avec sa tristesse et un câlin. Je parle mais sais que je n'en sens rien de ce chagrin que j'évoque, tout ce que je veux c'est qu'elle me serre dans ses bras, elle, aux prises avec sa douleur, elle, qui ne peut plus rien donner. Distance entre nous. En moi, les émotions et les désirs se déchaînent, je ne suis plus qu'un champ de bataille que la réalité à quitté, elle est un point inaccessible.

Avec mon vide dans le cœur et dans la tête, je décide de partir aussi. Tant pis, adieu Beyrouth, je ne peux pas rester sans elle. J'aperçois de loin la solitude de mon appartement qu'elle aurait dépeuplé, les murs qui deviennent froids et gris, la misère du logement qui tout à coup se révèle. J'en tremble.  Elle conduit la voiture. Enfin, on a pris la route. Je ne sais pas si c'est pour l'aéroport ou bien les confins du Liban. Nous sommes encore en ville, l'horizon a le jaune et le rose des immeubles, les gens se pressent sur les trottoirs. Ça pullule d'agitation comme dans une bande-dessinée. La circulation est dense, des voitures partout ralentissent notre course. Immergée dans le flot, il me berce et je commence à comprendre que tout ceci est absurde, que je n'ai aucune raison de partir. Car partir ne veut pas dire accompagner J. mais rentrer en France. On s'arrête au bord de la route, près d'une boutique et j'aimerais bien que ce soit un café. En dessous, des voitures défilent. Comme si l'on était au plus beau des vacances, toutes portières dehors, on étend nos jambes au soleil (cela fait partie de la grâce de J d'avoir de langues jambes) comme deux jeunes filles en cavale. Je comprends qu'il faut je lâche, que je me pose et me repose. Je dois rentrer à la maison, la tête basse, douloureusement sans elle. J'y parviens. Au fond du couloir, mon autre coloc est là, je sens sa présence mais l'évite, je me demande ce qui va bien pouvoir me sortir de cette humeur terrible, de cette grisaille triste qui pèse et rend les murs de cette maison menaçants. J'ouvre le frigo, il y a un melon déjà ouvert et je contemple la simplicité de son orange et de son vert. Je me sers. »

[Translated from the French, directly above]. C. Marseille. 22/03. 6 days after leaving Lebanon.

“We are in a memory. The arabic classes at the Institute of Beirut finish, an end-of-school ambience spreads out in the corridors. My comrades transform around me exchanging banalities [small talk] to drag out the moment of goodbye. Suffocated laughter and joyous cries populate the languor of the evening. The bougainvillea sulks at us from the height of his [its] wisdom: he’s going to stay here. In the middle, upright, I breath, nothing would satisfy me more than these sorts of repetitive moments in which the script is already written. There’s nothing to do here, nothing but to look at each other do the rounds until all of us go home for good, happy to have been part of the same story. It’s the kind of moment in which even to raise a hand following a gust of wind is a superfluous act. We have only to follow our curves, play our parts according to the most beautiful art and to pick up the cash money. And then further off, the family of my roommate and comrade J arrive. I don’t really see them but I sense them like a bad omen, charged with discomfort and sadness. J’s grandmother is dead. Maybe of coronavirus, supposes another state of my conscience. Her and her family will go to Germany as soon as possible. Everything crumbles in me faced with the certitude that my friend won’t come home with me to our home, that she’ll no longer be there, that she’ll leave me alone, all alone. We’re in another memory. I freeze, my left eye disconnected, my mouth sinks without allowing a single word to pass, I lose weight. I can’t do anything anymore, the flow of my thoughts is beside me, it continues without me. In its place, a thick and paralysing fog which leaves my eye haggard and my mouth hanging. In my head, there’s a bubbling, a terrible buzzing that stammers, with difficulty, the desire to keep her and the certitude that it’s not the right thing to do. I will have to let her leave— I can’t do it. My feeling anything of the sadness touching her is won for me by guilt. We learn that her grandmother is not only dead, she let herself die of the miserable conditions of a little old and lonely women. Poor J. I should be compassionate, fuck! I see her at her wardrobe, sorting out her clothes and I try to pronounce something to do with her sadness and a hug. I speak but I know I don’t feel anything of the sadness I evoke, all I want is to grasp her in my arms, her, struggling with her pain, her, who has nothing left to give. Distance between us. In me, the emotions and desires unfold, I’m nothing but a battlefield that reality has left behind, she is an inaccessible peak.

With my emptiness in my heart and head, I decide to leave as well. Oh well, adieu Beyrouth, I can’t stay here without her. I perceive from afar the solitude of my apartment which she would have depopulated, the walls becoming cold and grey, the poverty of the dwelling comes up all at once. I tremble from it. She drives the car. At last, we’ve hit the road. I don’t know if it’s for the airport or the confinement of Lebanon. We’re still in the city, the horizon has the yellow and the pink of the buildings, people are on the pavements. It overruns with agitation like in a comic book. The traffic is dense, cars slow down our getaway. Submerged in the flow, it cradles me and I begin to understand that all of this is absurd, I don’t have any reason to leave. Because leaving doesn’t mean accompanying J. but rather going back to France. We stop by the side of the road, near a boutique and I’d like that it were a café. Down below, the cars pass. As if it had been the most beautiful of holidays, all the doors open, we stretch out our legs in the sun (this is part of it thanks to J having long legs) like two young girls on the run. I understand I have to let go, to stop and rest. I have to go home, head down, painfully without her. I manage it. At the end of the corridor, my other roommate is there, I sense her presence but avoid it, I ask myself what would be able to get me out of this terrible mood, of this sad greyness which weighs and renders the walls of this house menacing. I open the fridge, there’s a melon already cut open and I contemplate the simplicity of its orange and of its green. I take some.”

5 April 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 20, Oakland)

SL: The old drugstore in New Jersey. Neon sign. I am showing W New Jersey. I want to show him how it looks, the kind of beige brick of buildings, the flat tall pines, the flat landscape. We go in the drugstore and Aunt T and Aunt M are there. Aunt T exclaims loudly, Oh Sara I’m so happy to see you my sweet darling!!! Aunt M smiles and stands behind Aunt T. I look at Aunt M and make a quick distinction in my mind. Aunt T is alive, Aunt M is dead.

On waking last night to the bark of a dog: There was a rapid move between places -- the flat in Nuremberg that is only a dream location, the north London house, and here, in the French countryside, but with little resemblance to its reality. There were too many people, and I knew only a few of them, but all were shouting at me about a dog or dogs, and I knew it to be my fault, but could not understand why.

Near Dijon, the night from the 5th to the 6th of April, 2020.

I’m with a friend, and we are going to drink some wine together in a park. We go to buy the wine to a small epicerie in San Joaquín (a neighborhood of Santiago, Chile). Everything is normal, but when we get to the park and sit down my friend tells me we should not drink from the same bottle as we might transmit through our saliva the coronavirus. We do not know if we are sick or not. We have no cups.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 06/04/2020, after over two weeks of (solitary) confinement under a stricter ‘lockdown’ regime:

I am exploring what feels like a very long tunnel, perhaps the remnant of some industrial activity. I am accompanied by at least another person, but we do not talk much. There are faint lights, possibly run with electric power. We are looking for something (an object or a room?), penetrating deeper into the tunnel, following its meandering, downward path. I do not remember finding the thing we are looking for – just the leisurely movement and the exciting feeling it might be close. Cut. I am part of the audience of a piano recital in an underground space – red and brown brickwork walls and arches, it feels like a factory ruin, open to the sky (a memory of “Watership Down”?). The rest of the audience are school children. When I realize that the female pianist is performing one of my favourite passages in the development section of Scriabin’s 8th or 10th piano sonata, I also notice something is off about her interpretation. The passage sounds as if she has prepared the instrument in the manner of Cage and Tudor, Scriabin’s elation of flight has become the isolated metallic clattering of a toy piano. I interrupt her and tell her that she is not playing the sonata right. She turns to the rest of the audience and starts to explain the concept of interpretative freedom to them, all the while looking at me with what I feel to be a rather mocking smile. Cut. I am walking down a street. 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. When I am about to continue my walk, the ice cream vendor stops me, telling me that I have not paid for the ice cream. I protest, reminding her that in fact I have just paid her for it. The exchange goes on, I cannot convince the woman, who has now become a man (?), of what I know to be the truth.

Berlin, 04.04, 3 weeks social distancing, 2 weeks Kontaktverbot

NP:

I'm in a “demi sous-sol” on Potsdamerstr. From the window I can see two sex workers wearing leotards. It is cold outside. The view is from above even though I'm below ground level. One of them is wearing a scarf over a neck brace to hide she is injured.

A friend has decided to form an army of ninja women. She goes to be interviewed at a talk show. She sits on the couch and the ninjas start jumping on tables etc. The room starts to flood. I'm unsure if everyone drowned.

I live with A who has had babies. She has swaddled her babies (which are the size of courgettes) individually in paper then wrapped a big sheet of light white paper around them and left them at the table at the entrance. She placed a photograph of herself on top of the package on which she looks very beautiful posing for the camera. Also a little note cheekily saying what a good mother she is. So I get home and see the package and unwrap it. There are two babies in there though I know she had four. I realize she must have killed two of them. There's no attribution of guilt here. She did it because she could not have taken care of four babies. A. gets home. I don't know where I put the big paper she had wrapped them in and start looking. I'm very embarrassed to have lost the paper, I offer some paper of mine instead but realize it is not about the paper but about being someone you can trust not to mess things up.

--

In the kitchen in London, T. has moved all the furniture. R. is there but she is not herself. I recognise her as one might recognise a double. T. does not. The garden has no plants in it, is only bare earth and rubble. I do not blame them as I know that it is the person next door who has stripped it for his own reasons and that all the plants are filling his kitchen. I try to move on as this feels like a particularly dull dream -- I know it is a dream -- that will not lead me anywhere. --

RL Marseille 6th April. 20th night of state imposed house confinement

Extra info: yesterday in our Marx reading group we were reading about C-M-C, M-C-M, M-C-M’.

I watched some Maya Deren a few days ago. It occurs to me that I look into SK’s living room which is red and has many paintings on the way every day on Zoom, while having Marx reading group with T, JS, IX and RG.

My dream was so elaborate I don’t know if I will remember it all.

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. Green - moss green again - velvet. We have to quarantine ourselves in a room to hide from the aunts who are coming to sweep up all the chattels. There is a valuable etching of a wombat or a platypus which must be overlooked in order to distract their attention from it. Meanwhile there is an auction.

I sweep through the house like a slow, afternoon breeze, slightly raised off the ground. I regard the wooden paneled walls (modern, 70s), the objects, the criss crossy modernist 50s fabric (Lucienne Day). Was it not a mistake of my mother’s to want to buy the house? The value is contained in all of these objects. The sale of them is what will allow her to buy the house. I cannot work this out because they will be divided up between the siblings.

The etching of the platypus has mysteriously disappeared, leaving an outline on the wall. This cannot be inquired about, because it would signal the worth of the object. We are very scared -- any infraction is dangerous, terrorist, unsanitary, under the present conditions.

I am in an art gallery with SK, we are speaking to her son F, who my Mum has been to visit with my friend Emily M. I am anxious that my Mum should meet S, but somehow the occasion doesn’t arise because my Mum claims a lot of attention making a performance out of how she is nervous about meeting SK (this reminds me about the amount of work it is taking to persuade my mum to contribute a dream). F is lying down, over in a corner of the gallery, which is, by the way, the Louvre. We think he is sick and that it is our fault for bringing Emily. But as it turns out, Emily M moved in a month ago and they’ve been getting on very well, so it’s good news.

I go home. I’m standing in the landing just at the top of the staircase, between the pulley and the attic. It is so much my house and not my house. My mum is home, she is in the kitchen, making meringues. The stairs are horror -- I am frozen at the top of them. To my left, a mannequin with a Louise Brooks bob wearing electric blue. The curtains down one flight of painted white stairs are electric blue as well. But the colour is a slightly different shade, so it clashes, which suggests to my eyes that the mannequin has moved her arm slightly. A light is going on and off which increases my senses-confusion. It is not my childhood home.

EJWS 12/04/20 Hackney, London

First proper dream in weeks. A permutation of an apocalypse dream I’ve had a thousand times; a cross between the aquatic version and the junkyard/vacant industrial space/squat version both of which always involve a lot of awkward climbing and crawling, pursued by impending doom (which arrives as nuclear armageddon - actual missiles flying - or is expressed in orange-yellow, or red planes paired with some kind of mute state).  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’ve just turned up and I’m worried MS has just walked through it in my absence and I’m wondering who I can complain to about this perceived violation and how to phrase it and if I even should. He (MS) draws my attention to an ornate jar that I have urinated in, expressing ‘why?’ and mild worry and amusement.  Then I’m in a ship, a modern small ferry or maybe large yacht - something with dual  personal and commercial use and a size that would make sense for both. With friends and we’ve commandeered it - not outright stolen it or being chased by police for doing so like in some instances of this dream - but just urgently driving (if that’s what you do to boats, it doesn’t have a sail) this craft out to little islands, some organic, some fabricated, made of metal girders and looking like rearranged offshore rigs. We get to one and then move on, to no purpose, as the sense of incoming destruction mounts. Messages are being sent that will end it all and as I acquire this knowledge I’m at the back of the boat and I slip and fall - I’m clenching and trying to prepare myself to hit the water and I wake up.

JFE April 6 (19th day NYC)

Whales -- we parade them through the streets of the city. Either the streets themselves are canals, or we unfurl long tanks down them as we walk. There are wells in the woods that look like above ground pools only, below, stretch miles of sea vertically in the ground. Maybe this is where the whales came from.  It is our job to get them in working order. They look dingy and forgotten, covered in moss and scum,  and they need to be repaired. I begin to do this, then realize I don’t know how.

LA March 26 (trying to catch up.) ( Michigan USA)

I knew, like a backstory, that I was being inducted into the Israeli army. I had to designate a beneficiary in case of death. I had an envelope that, without seeing it, I knew was filled with cash and with "Amy" written on it. As part of the process of making a beneficiary, I had a one-seat car under an awning into which I put the envelope and my "Santa Cruz Skateboards" sweatshirt (draped over the seatback.) Then there were people around me, but at a distance of a few feet. I realized that they were trying to take hold of the awning, which was now a metal fence, about four-feet high. It occurred to me that I was blocking it and taking all the fence. I knew the fence was expandable and I told a couple women to grab on. I knew from experience that we could make the fence in to any shape we wanted: long, or rectangular, for instance. I guess we all made it rectangular because across from me Brandon Brown sort of took the lead and showed that this fence was actually a tennis court. So, as we all held on and moved forward, a blue rubberized court appeared on the ground and then the net was there fully formed. But once the net was open, it reacted like a sail, so that we struggled against the wind to keep the court open and not reverse or retreat.

LA March 28 (Michigan, USA)

I am at a table with Rob talking to maybe Jesse, and tell him about how good the new film "61-66" is, and had he seen it. The numbers, I knew referred to age, and presumably how good those years are. The thing is, I hadn't seen the film either, only maybe a preview.

LA April 3 (Michigan, USA)

The dream had the structure of a movie. Even though I was not watching a screen, that's the way it played: A man without a shirt has arrived with a room service cart in front of a hotel room. I know from maybe an earlier scene in the dream that the guy had slept with the woman in the hotel room. The guy was preparing a meal in metal tureens to surprise and impress the woman. He squeezed a red plastic bottle of tomato sauce onto a plate of plain spaghetti. It read as comedy, using a crappy ingredient to prepare what was supposed to be an impressive dish. He knocked on the door, and was admitted by the woman. Was he incognito? There was another man sitting on a sort of chaise longue. I think the man who just walked in with the cart was making overtures to the woman who feigned disinterest. As the camera pulled back and the man stepped back from his cart (another comedic moment) we see that his white shirt was stained almost completely red from squeezing the tomato sauce onto the pasta. It looked like he had been shot. 

LA April 6 (Michigan, USA)

I am at a restaurant. I am standing. The waiter, dark blond hair, late 20s, hands me the bill for the previous night's dinner. It's $133.00 plus 15% tip. I asked about the mandatory tip, asked if he got to keep it all. He indicated that he did except for —not clear—a couple percent. He held my gaze and I wondered if he were cruising me. I was also, as I walked outside, completely at a loss at remembering what I had eaten for such a large bill. I felt the least I could do would be to remember my meal. I also thought, "Oh, right. I'm not in Canada, where that $133 would've come out less in US dollars."

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. The theater's box office was open and I was trying to see the movie posters. There were people buying tickets. I saw a passage from where people were coming in to the theater. So I went in against traffic, thinking this would lead to my car. I came out into a parking lot and thought I saw my car. But I was mistaken. The lot was narrower and had a bit of grass and a tree. I walked into a building with the intention of coming out the other side. Instead I found myself at the top floor, in an office lobby. A door led to the roof. I went out and, standing at the parapet, I saw a vast parking lot across the street. I went back into the building and could not find a way out. The office doors were closed. The lobby had transformed into a sort of posh exhibition space, with spot lights on displays of books. A man came out of one of the doors. Then two more people, a man and a woman. The first man had just one or two stray gray hairs on a full head of hair, and was handsome in profile. I don't remember what the others looked like. I told them I couldn't find the exit. I think they showed me.

UL, Los Angeles, California, my parents' house, April 5, 2020. Addressed to RL.

In reality, I've been stringent about social distancing for three weeks now, trying to care for my vulnerable parents....I abruptly left where I was living 6 hours north in Davis, because my house mates weren't taking it seriously, drove down to LA, etc. A lot of the dream inherited that mood. Thankfully not the super-panic parts. A friend of mine posted a dream he had, and I woke up about 4AM with insomnia for a couple hours, was scrolling through your fb feed, thinking about trying to connect him with you. Then I fell back asleep and had this dream.

I dreamed that I visited you. Except it was Australia. I was on some important, stressful, secretive mission. You invited me to stay at your apartment. Everything was pretty normal, the kind of interaction we had when we met in Oakland. I was glad to see you, then soon I was alone in your apartment, and I realized we'd not been practicing social distancing. You had lent me your cell phone. I don't even know if we hugged or anything but I started freaking out that I'd lapsed in my stringent social distancing and isolating practices, wouldn't be able to return to care for my vulnerable parents in LA before quarantining myself for 2 weeks, etc.

Then I had to go.The stressful secret mission continued. I got on to the roof of a city bus. A heavy pack with a big load of cash, your cell phone you'd lent me, and my own, were sprawled where I laid down on the roof of the bus as it drove across the city. Then a quick right turn and I fell off onto the road. My backpack, the phones, were lost, either a couple blocks behind, or still on the roof. Panic for endless reasons. I'd lost everything, thousands in illicit cash. I'd be stuck in Australia, definitely fucked up the social isolation plan, AND I'd lost your cell phone.

IT, LA, usa, April 6. Week 3 of being mostly inside, following a combination of personal and then state-imposed sheltering

Dreamt about being on the patio at school with K, who was filling balloons under disciplinary orders. Small balloons, like tasks being completed. They were happy, grinning manically, but I worried about them, impending getting into trouble. We walked around. What were we supposed to do? They have a different attachment to the place, strife within in it but fully within it. I wouldn’t dream about school before, mostly, but do now that I can’t go there.

MLK, Copenhagen, 7 April, Several weeks of social distancing

Version of a recurring dream: I’m going to catch a long distance train with a friend. As part of a big group of people we drive to the station from somewhere deep in the countryside, each in our own Mario-cart style vehicle. It’s fun, very much like a game. We are ok for time. When we get to the station we have to stamp our pre-paid tickets in a strange-mouthed automat at the side of another train. It’s hard to get it right. Suddenly the whistle goes and both trains start to pull out. I run up to ours which is jammed packed, slap on the doors, try and press the button to get on. The station manager yells at me, telling me to get back, that we might as well face the fact that we’ve missed the train. The tickets were only valid for this one particular departure and I start to cry enormously, explaining to the train conductor in between sobs that the ticket had cost me a fifth of what I had to live on this month. She feels sorry for me but says there is nothing she can do. I get angry and start cussing at her. It is an anger related to the uncertainty as to whether the train left earlier or I was late. Then I wake up. I don’t know where the train was going.

7 April 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 22, Oakland)

SL: I look for my room in a very old, tightly constricted hotel room. The hallways are narrow, and I’m trailing my red rolling luggage behind me. There is fleur-de-lis forest green wallpaper in the hall, textured and fuzzy. Some darkened faded out gold. I find my door finally and an oversize skeleton key sticks out of it into the hallway. There is also some red, the color of dark, old blood in the surroundings. Everything feels very old and musty.  I turn the large key. I can barely open the door into the small room. There is a simple bed and dresser, barely room to walk around otherwise. I find out that my former work supervisor just checked out of the identical tiny room next door. He left two baby blue fleece sweatshirts piled on the carpet. I pick them up and say (to who I don’t know), I’ll take these and give these back to him when I see him. I no longer work with him so I don’t know when that will be.

8th April 2019, 16th day of ‘lockdown’ in the UK

GCD:  Full moon,pink moon and supermoon. I dreamed my friend Callum had designed and built a small aeroplane that could carry three people. I was sitting in the plane with two other people, not sure who they were, and we were flying into and trying to land in South London. I kept exclaiming how amazing it was he had built a plane; also I felt like we were going to die. For a while we just went along just above train tracks, all intersecting (I realise this is a big feature of inner south London, where I grew up, but also slightly more outer south Glasgow, where I live, as well). So we kept going along these train tracks, zooming quite fast, looking for somewhere, a large garden, park or field, to land. Eventually we had to land, and entered a light industrial estate, whizzing round corners till finally there was a strip of tarmac long enough to land on. The cops were there, of course. I think they might have been border cops actually. But we weren’t scared of them and didn’t answer any questions. We dismantled the plane. One of the main components was a really big Macbook Pro, all wrapped up in black bin bags.

Later on in the dream I was walking around South London, listening to a discussion or a podcast or a film, I’m not sure, about a couple who had moved from London to Iceland. I was thinking about moving to Iceland, because Callum was there and it seemed like somewhere we could do things, but hearing this banal couple’s rationalisations for moving to Iceland (good insurance system, good jobs, excellent public transport etc), I realised I couldn’t move there. Here I was walking along the banks of a small urban river - I’m in a sort of boring park and there are houses backing onto the river on the other side. My mother has been in the dream just prior to this but I’ve forgotten all the context. I am now walking through South London with no urgency. This was to be my goodbye walk, maybe it still is. I come to a junction somewhat like the bit outside Peckham Library (3 or 4- way junction, municipal buildings. There’s a small old-fashioned shop with plate glass, crowded with people on this weekend morning. I assume it’s a coffee shop but no, it only sells umbrellas - beautiful handmade umbrellas and people can just sit there like it’s a cafe and admire the umbrellas. Then next door a huge bougie cafe called BeynonBeynon and I realise have done this exact walk before when I also had an important decision to make. I go under a railway bridge (it feels like it’s near London Bridge station) and there’s another huge fancy chain cafe with long bars to sit up at, totally empty. Then I move in to a sort of dream-Trafalgar Square and West End which I have seen many times in dreams. It’s not that different from real thing but it’s all pedestrianised and it goes slightly uphill all the time to a column far away. In this sense a more ‘European’ city layout and also the square is always full of hawkers and tour guides. Just before I reach the square I remember an amazing walking tour I took with a quite elderly and very theatrical woman. As I think of her, I hear her voice. She is offering her tour to two young white American women tourists. They seem resistant so I tell them about how amazing the tour is. One of the highlights is having your own brightly-coloured umbrella or parasol as you go round. I greet the lady and I say to her ‘you, you’re a really special one’, and I point my two fingers at my eyes and then to her, like, I see you.

MT 26 March, London (UK lockdown).

Long dream about being in buildings between homes, no details remembered. The dream ended with viewing from overhead a 2 metre x 2 metre swimming pool where I and one other person were swimming behind each other in anti-clockwise square rotations.

MT 27 March, London (UK lockdown).

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. It was a post WW2 relic, maybe made in the Festival of Britain and had once been the telephone exchange for London (or Paris, or wherever it was). I was being given a tour of it by filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, who was plugging lots of loose hanging cables in and out of the holes and saying, “Look, these all used to work and connect you to somebody, but now it’s all broken.” He was wearing a black leather cap and black polo neck and was quite frustrated by the whole thing.

MT 2 April, London (UK lockdown).

Long and extremely detailed dream that our next door neighbours were arrested for careless talk in a pub and breaking some unknown parole order. Their home was immediately repossessed (i.e. within minutes) and everything was moved out, including all of the things in the garden, such as the fence and the trees, so it was completely barren. Their adult son was taken away in a car.  I looked at the house and it was much bigger and different in design than it is in reality, looked like a large American townhouse, as opposed to a small victorian terrace. The door was left open, so I looked around. Then an estate agent turned up and immediately put a for sale sign on it and muttered something about gentrification as he walked away.

JFE April 8 (21st day NYC)

I am camping, just past the treeline, along a large lake, when I find out the cops are coming. There’s an old man sleeping behind me. As I pack up to leave, I consider leaving him behind. Like waking up in the sun, the next image is bright and for a moment I’ve forgotten how I arrived: I’m on a huge half-deflated inflatable ramp, the size of a car, floating in the lake. I’d been sleeping. E swims up to the ramp. I feel somewhat like a character: I’m an old man, an alcoholic maybe, and E confronts me with a look of concern and exasperation that makes me feel shameful. She begins to tell me about her father (who in reality, had told her the only good thing about cities like NYC is that all the assholes end up there, so when somebody inevitably bombs the place etc. at least they’re all in one spot). She tells me about his opinions of cities and we think about how bad things are going in this one. Far off, in a small harbour, I see a large blue and white crane slowly turning in the sky above a pier. The very top of the crane is red and as it swings by it snags on something and is torn loose from the rest of the machine. I watch from far away as people run and scramble to avoid it. It falls in the water with a tiny splash. The whole scene is silent, like Bruegel’s Icarus dying in the sea. We decide that it’s time to go and I slide off into the water to join her.

RL Marseille, nights 20 and 21, day 22 of confinement, April 8th, state imposed house confinement.

Had two dreams that I somehow felt reluctant to write down (not normal for me)

1. Dream 7th April

I dreamt I was in a summer camp that I recognised as one I went to in the southern states of America, with many people I loved a lot, many people I didn’t know well but loved instantly. One of them who I follow on instagram and feel really very warm towards, called C, was there. The camp was somehow low down, we were there, I don’t remember anyone else, just a stream of information suddenly coming out like a stream of cream coloured repeated images, out of a floating head. I think me and C were trying to steal trucks. In any case I just felt deep admiration for C. When I woke up I felt very sad missing all of these people - one in particular who is paradoxically near by - anxiety about how to exist in different worlds, mix worlds etc.

2. Dream 8th April

I dreamed something about my paternal grandmother, who was a psychoanalyst. She was in some kind of kitchen that was like a butcher’s or a hammam, some hip-height white marble slab, and white tiles up high - like an undertaker’s, now I come to think of it! Of course I think of blood, but there’s no blood. It’s spotlessly clean. It reminds me of somewhere I once ate pizza and deep fried squid in Naples. She is sitting on this slab wearing all black, and she has her perfect legs - actually these are maybe my maternal grandmother’s legs, now I realise - typing this up (in any case they both had good legs, slim ankles) crossed with the superciliousness befitting an analyst or librarian or any feminised intellectual position. I love her. I feel safe and looked after. She is alive but it is also like a Victorian death portrait. I am immediately jealous, though, because someone who I have had a long incomprehensible rivalry with, called Grace P, has worked her way into my dream and is sitting down in my grandmother’s kitchen/consulting room/at her tabletop. She is slightly behind me and will not disclose that she dislikes me, the little bitch. Grace’s fringe reminds me of a 19th century doily. She is trying to stay here for several months. My grandmother is opening her heart up to Grace P, apparently because she is part of (or pretending to be part of) my family. Is she part of it or not? I am trying to work out, is she some offspring of infidelity? My grandmother’s? My grandpa’s?

Now I am in the back kitchen/bothy of my maternal grandmother’s house. Some things hanging up on the washing line. JS is there, I’m glad to see her. And now I can’t remember any more! I ought to have written this down at the time  so that at least JS could read what I am dreaming about her.

JS 09/04 - Day 25 of confinement, France

I dreamt of my most frequented virtual friends, the Capital reading group, RL, RG, IX on this dream doc + others

We were at the cinema (most dreams lately have had a clearly defined post-confinement/break out confinement/confinement as reality context, but in this dream, we were just at the cinema, as if it were normal). There was nothing imaginative about its layout, it just looked like the downstairs of the MK2 Quai de Seine in the 19th with its squat ceilings and stiff carpets. The light was theatrical and glamorous somehow though.

We’d gotten a tip off about something happening in the basement, teenagers were being told there was a film taking place down there, but we knew that once down there, their bodies were being taken (I’m not sure in what capacity or how this would work, but in the dream it made sense). Everything in the dream was very banal, not at all sci fi or dramatic, so we sighed, disappointed to miss our film, and set to discussing how to avoid having our bodies snatched.

In a small, dark, characterless room, RL and I managed to avoid having our bodies taken, we linked arms and stood back to back and refused to participate, the body snatchers exasperated. In fact we even managed to negotiate goodie bags for everyone, back in the cinema sweet shop we sift through the small plastic bags filled with gold lipsticks and hair clips.

Despite the fact that we are all together, our reading group takes place via video call, as usual. We get to the end of the Zoom meeting and someone suggests we allow other people to join, the computer screen starts to fill up with faces and people and they start to spiral out of the screen and my dream ends as the computer crashes.

LF, 3rd of April, Rome, 5th week of confinement

The French Revolution was on our doorstep...I was a servant, working for some rich people in a villa. It was night time, when someone tried to attack us. This person shouted he was Murat, that everything was gone, the Revolution had won, we had to open! I tried to keep the door locked by inserting a spoon in the lock, but in fact, deep down, I was just hoping for the door to collapse as I wanted to join the Revolution!

JM Marseille 9th April night 22

Thing about dreams is when you write them you order their time. Again I had a dream which looped, and I couldn’t say in which order I dreamed it. This is because one element came up as if relating to something that had happened before -- but who could say if this were the rational, chronological ordering of my dream. I will do my best.

I work for the Matrix, which seems to be run by two men. I am an assassin. I have dinner with my paternal grandmother in the 90s in a high ceilinged, dim but splendid restaurant with red wine. She is also an assassin.

I am walking across a bridge in a crowd. I think of this as London bridge and Waterloo bridge at the same time, because it has some bright blue ironwork which is south of Waterloo bridge IRL I guess. But actually the bridge is further in the East. I watch this bridge from a redbrick, classic, side of the railway Victorian building (maybe three storeys, like you get in London), where I am with my boss and two men. The inside is like a nightclub, or a kind of 90s exposed brick vibe. I watch the bridge and identify myself as a child (small, blonde) and my grandmother, in the crowd. I identify us as dangerous persons, and we are pretending we don’t know each other.

The dream moves to the back of the dwelling. I am with B, a friend of my ex, who seems to be one of these two colleagues. I feel warm toward him and remember that he’s nice. The boss says we can go home. I am scrambling to get ready because I know B is waiting outside on the landing (one of these landings inside a victorian studio complex, new york style metal fire escape stairs). I am buying time because I can’t decide what to wear. I decide to wear some wide leg black trousers, but I can’t find them. They were in my hand a minute ago but now they are not, and bloodstained H&M pants (not very sexy) are falling out of my bag next to my pencil case. People are queuing for the toilet next to my bed. I have tights on and suede mules and I put on my dungarees before realising it’s not what I want to wear. I go and find B and tell him I’m almost ready. I know we had to leave at 14h because he teaches at 14h30, and it’s already 14h25. I also know I am not allowed to make the journey on my own. I see a zebra crossing with those stripy round lights.

He comes in as I find my black trousers and am in my tights. I apologise to him hopelessly next to the bed. I remember a line from a dream I had in 2016 about my ex, weird:

I am jumping through a thrift shop wiggling my ass and snoop dogg is following me, as my knickers are scrunched up between the cheeks of my sweet ass, and further, shut in by some black tights.

Obviously I don’t remember the whole thing or word for word but I get the jist of it. He looks at me with kind eyes and tells me in French: ca va aller, then my name, uttered sweetly, and  je n’enseigne pas cette semaine, c’est la periode du paques he’s not teaching, it’s the easter holidays, he can stay here with me, we don’t have to make any dangerous journeys. He tells me my ex is teaching though. I tell him it’s pesach tonight as well and then feel guilty and inauthentic and that he’ll tell my ex and my ex will disapprove. I think I want to cling to it - it’s important to me and it’s also something I can’t explain to anyone around me.

I’m by now embracing B. This is the point at which I look out of the window and see myself and my grandmother. I see the restaurant from a long time ago, in which anyway I’m an adult, and elegant. Me and B are about to have sex but edge around it, it’s very nice and gentle. I worry that B won’t have sex with me because he’s so close to my ex. Then I worry that this is proof that my ex doesn’t care at all about me. Then I realise this is just true. Then I realise I have a boyfriend. After that another sex memory interrupts, someone with whom I didn’t want to have sex, in the same room, and that my boyfriend was downstairs. I decide it doesn’t matter because I will be able to explain it, with B, if I’m caught. Then I realise that my explanation that I wanted to and it was an exception and okay will no longer make sense in conjunction with the other time that i didn’t really want to and it was an exception and okay. My boyfriend is downstairs which makes me seem like an even worse person. The logic falls apart. My truth seems dependent on if I am found out or not.

I woke up and burst into tears! (unrelated). B is very handsome. I am fortunate to have only had sex dreams about sexy people.

9 April 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 24, Oakland)

SL: I am in a cab in Berlin and it is snowing. The snow is shimmering and gorgeous and I admire it from the backseat of the car. I ask the driver to pull up to a bar on a large boulevard. Now I’m inside. The bar is called Mari. It is dark and warm, has a pub-like atmosphere, very relaxed and cozy. There are two rooms. The bar in in the other room.  I take out my phone to call W who does not know that I am in town. My phone is an old Blackberry, with the keyboard that pulls out. I go outside to make the call. W is very excited that I am in town by surprise. He comes to the bar and we reunite, incredibly happy to see each other. W goes in the other room to order food for us both. He comes back with beers. Later our food is called by his name but they call him “bartender” instead of W. They call him twice before he realizes they mean him. He gets our food and they have confused his order. It is one plate of food, fries and chicken strips. He brings it back and we laugh and share it, talk and enjoy. After we eat, various friends appear at the table. J is there and she and W go outside to talk. J wants to get to know him. She wants to see what kind of person he is, she is being protective of me. It snows around them. I see them through the window and they look they are hitting it off, laughing and talking easily with each other, and this makes me feel good.

*

A radio broadcast. Someone who has sex with horses? Something about the “cunts of horses”. It is confusing, uncomfortable and disorienting. I’m not sure who is has sex with horses but it is a man. Then horses gallop over me but I am not hurt. I can hear the noise of their hooves around me, I can see their underbellies, the underside of their necks and muzzles, the underside of their tails trailing behind them.

*

I am on a trail in the woods with friends. Someone up ahead says, there is a dead man on a log up here. We see him on his back on the log, his arms limply hanging down each side. There are many people in a VW style van near the log. He was part of their group. They climb out of the van, dirty, tired, perhaps slightly drugged, stumbling forward zombie-like. They are desperately hungry, reaching out, eyes needy and grasping. At first they seem scary to me, but it’s then it’s obvious they really just need help. They are on the verge of starving and death. I don’t remember what happens next.

10th April - Good Friday 18th day of ‘lockdown’ in the UK

GCD: I had some dreams, woke at 3.30 am and remembered them, then slept about 5.30 and had more.

In the first dream I was wandering through South London (such a lot of my dreams go on in this way and I realised it was late and I wanted to eat something. I found a delicious Kurdish/Lebanese/ not sure cafe and ordered lots of mezze to eat on a table outside. It was dark, quite a few ppl eating. Then for some reason became confused about where I should pay and just wondered to different adjacent cafes. Eventually came back to the one I ate at (queues were confusing because everyone was maintaining distance) and paid . The guy working there said he found my behaviour confusing. Then I realised it was much later than I thought, about half midnight, and there would be no public transport home except long night buses and I was far from home. Then I realised I had a job interview nearby the next morn so I though it best to stay up all night there. I walked down an urban river, there were quite a few people there and it was Day, and a school of stuffed textile fish swam in the river. They were mauve with black spots and people said they were cod. At the job interview, which appeared to be at some kind of legal firm, I was told I was actually going to have two interviews. I was given some papers then called into a room. The people interviewing me were a kind and pretty young blonde woman and a legal man who was clearly in charge and looked like Chris Morris. I apologised about wearing my pyjamas. They asked me quite easy questions, just about my life and interests, and I got talking with them about my research on property guardians, housing organising I’ve done, the difference between being a tenant and being a licensee.... the office was very old-fashioned and had a banker’s lamp and loads of horrible sexist and racist Daily Mail cartoons. I wanted to put them all in the waste paper bin and run out.

In the second bunch of dream I was in a big room with my dad, we were quarantined together and I was changing a lightbulb up a huge ladder. The bulb was very hot, I held it in a tea towel as I unscrewed it. I felt fine up there above the room on this huge ladder. The room was pale yellow. I then descended and was messaged by my most despised ex lover, who wanted to know how I was doing. I replied evasively but part of me wanted to be close to him, to see him. At the same time my dad was trying to persuade my granny, his mother  (who actually died in 2013) not to leave her house and go on a boat trip. Somehow the messages with my ex had become themselves an erect penis, just lying there in my yellow bed. I held it. [this is such a low quality sex dream wtf].

Then a fade into another dream: it was still lockdown but I was in Italy in the countryside and could go cycling. There were cheap municipal hire bikes and they were actually pretty good, I got one for me and pulled another alongside for my friend. Long straight avenues lined with smallish cypress trees, fields of crops either side, it was summer. Suddenly at the side of the road I saw huge mushrooms, ones I’d never seen before, Orange, white, brown and squamous with twisted stems. I tried to photograph as many as possible on my phone. Then I woke up.

11th April - Sat 19th Day of lockdown in UK
GCD: I had a form of a dream I hadn’t had for a while, where two people are telling me to trust them and I know that one of them means me great harm. I was in a sort of university halls of residence in a kind of central London/ Bloomsbury and there was a person telling me I was in great danger. A sort of small meticulous person, I can’t really see them but I know they were immaculately dressed. We made a plan to keep me safe. It involved having a letter with me in my handwriting and staying in one room with a few possessions. We were all making this happen but suddenly I knew this person was not the one, and that earlier on (though perhaps not exactly in the dream - there often seems to me in dreams a sort of knowledge of the narrative that gets activated by the narrative but seems like a memory of a bit before the dream has ‘started) someone had told me this would happen and to be on the lookout for it. Someone else before the dream had told me they could give me safety. And i didn’t trust them then but now I knew that they were my safety. So I carefully took my safety letter, my keys, my bank card, but didn’t put my shoes on so as not to be noisy, and I fled that place barefoot. I was running sort of slow-motion through the streets of Central London (which were deserted) to be at this other place of safety, the real place of safety I had first doubted. I remembered I had to meet my cousin-brother R and I had arranged to go swimming with him and I needed to buy a bikini top (it’s true, i currently do not have a bikini top, thanks brain) - went to Strutton Ground, a strange kind of overlooked street which I used to be completely obsessed with when I worked in Victoria in 2009-11, and went into a sports shop, feeling panicked, remembering this person was looking for me, but this merged with anxiety about meeting R and I just kept trying on bikini tops that were kind of neoprene and didn’t really cover my breasts. Then also some really cool folding sunglasses (like  concertina folding) which I wanted to buy. I kept checking my phone and R was just sending me videos of him in a sort of sunlit sandstone quarry. I wondered if I would be safe there.

11.04.2020, London

DH. Narcissistic dream. I was at a warehouse launch for a new series of books by poets inspired by the tradition of revolutionary letters (Di Prima, Bonney). Incongruously, these books seemed to have been published as the result of some kind of competition. There were maybe four readers, and the books were printed in fine hand-made editions with different coloured covers. I think I was a little jealous that I hadn't been invited to contribute/didn’t win? I don't remember the poetry well, but during one of the later readings I was suddenly aware that the poem I was listening to had buttons (buttons as in shirt, not as in keyboard) - or perhaps was buttons? - and that 'reading' it meant undoing them, one by one. The buttons were big and round, the type that you might get on an old cardigan. I dutifully undid them for a while. The reading ended and I went to the toilet, and while I was pissing I was woken (it must have been about 4 a.m.) by church bells. I don't know why there were church bells ringing at 4 a.m - preparation for Easter? In any case, I lay there for a while, gradually accepting the impossibility of a poem made out of buttons, of a reading that involved the undoing of them, and as this kind of waking logic crept back into my mind it occurred to me that the source of the image was a passage from an early Pasolini novel that I had read in a biography the week before: the Pasolini-character takes a local peasant boy he's trying to seduce to see a Rita Hayworth film at an outdoor cinema (when I read this I had the thought that Rita Hayworth's surname is like my name), and is successful in the seduction when a song that Hayworth sings makes everyone in the cinema feel suddenly sexually aroused. Someone shouts: 'Watch out your buttons don't pop!"

It wasn't an erotic dream. When I woke I was almost frantic with anxiety. A couple of notches down in intensity from a full-blown nightmare. I had to spend quite a long time controlling my breathing.  

GR 11/4 Tel Aviv

We were at some sort of a gym/dancing studio. Someone came in and asked me if I had my solo ready, which I didn't know I had to make until that moment. I got fairly stressed about it. At once the studio was full of people, some of whom I knew and some who were just backs blocking my sight from other people’s performances.

I don't know if I performed in the end, but the next thing I remember is a bunch of us sat on the floor exchanging thoughts about the performances. We were all sat quite close to one another, and besides me there was someone who was petting a snake (that I think has become a recurring motif in my dreams, I wonder what Freud would have thought about it..). At some point she started painting it with a very thick and bright blue. For moments it seemed as if it is losing vitality, turning into a sad blue snake sculpture, in others it resisted its petrification with strong hissings. She just kept pouring the substance on it and I didn’t really know what to think.

When its mouth was already a Yves Klein blue fossil of itself, the snake started molting. I think that in this point the dream turned into an old b-movie, the snake was more of a moving puppet of a snake with really big green eyes and it moved in the slow awkward manner the plant from Little Shop of Horrors moves about. Once it was out of its skin, the dream was HD again and the snake started moving really fast. It tried to hunt another snake that hid underneath a pile of clothes. They were chasing each other, but making screeching meows as if they were cats.

RL Marseille, state imposed house confinement, Saturday (what is Saturday!?) 11th April 2020. Night 25.

A statuesque man, ubermensch-ish, white and muscular is on an operating table or mortician’s slab in an open air laboratory, that finds itself in a rooftop garden in a larger garden. It’s cold, and he rises from the dead, arching his back wonderfully. HD screens float out from the herb bushes and become immaterial, displaying pink forests of some cross breed of a willow, a cherry and a sequoia (pink trees) where I will be able to walk with this person. There is no one else there, I watch from a little further off.

I’m in my place of confinement with M and L and my auntie May. Maybe my granny Scilla (d. 2017) and my mum are there too. I know where the house is, it’s in Berlin off a wide open boulevard near Treptowerpark, dark and leafy. Probably Elsenstrasse. And then you turn off to the left and you get to my friend Hector’s house, where my confinement place is. Kiefholzstrasse or Bouchéstrasse. It reminds me of Camberwell. There’s an empty lot/football pitch to the right which indicates where you should turn off Elsenstrasse. A brutalist building, a school, something horrible is happening there.

However I get there and here is my house in Marseille, it’s just a basement floor, and reminds me of somewhere I was once in New Orleans in 2014. There are lots of carpets and it’s decorated in psychedelic lime greens and soft pinks and black [like Lady Miss Kier in Pucci ‘91 https://youtu.be/3MqDWOIFLcU?t=40].

We are having those conversations from our house meeting last night. M is going to go and see this friend, that friend. She has decided it and announces it, like that. Je me vois faire ca, je me vois faire si. There’s a horrible confrontation between us in the adjoining greenhouse/conservatory where the lime greens, pinks and black are set out of balance by the introduction of a halloween orange.

You can still go outside. I walk up to the boulevard which has become populated like a London street on friday night. It’s like Camberwell church street and stoke newington church street (church? Easter? resurrection?). I have to get through some metal fences. A group of Bosnian football fans wearing what I conceive of as the England home strip accost me. It’s black and white. Someone can correct me, I don’t know about football strips and kits. I’m laughing with them trying not to be a snob but also to try and get away because I’m scared of the virus. One grabs me - his eyes are red and his mouth is red. I recoil and run across the road (south).

I get further, find my Auntie May, in what looks like the parochialism of Islington. Bo-bo people out on the streets. [I mean: the North London kind that only have wooden toys for their children and teach them all the names of birds, but aside from that a total cultural poverty of the intellect -- philosophy and literature are evacuated -- all just pushchairs, primary colours, rice cakes.] I’m really anxious about my Auntie because she’s immunosuppressed, and there’s a child coming towards us. The child has straight blonde hair and is wearing blue cashmere. It’s her birthday. I’m scared of the virus but somehow it’s nice to talk with these people and I feel a strong urge to kiss the child on the head.

Next dream. We’re in a car going to Estonia. I think that’s a joke my mind makes about a stony ridge we’re driving along. I’m in the front, and L is driving, I’m leaning into the back dangerously. The car is dark blue. We are playing a game with stones. You have five stones in the palm of your hand, and you play in a team of two with a third team member, but you don’t know if the third person is against you or playing for you. I think someone in the backseat is my lover and is being machiavellian and devious. We might crash and fall down the side of this dusty scree slope mountain.

Now I’m in a large, old classic department store type building. Like Liberty in London, except the central atrium is much bigger, a large, empty, airy space. Actually no, it’s like the Chambers street museum. But now it’s mostly empty and it’s a commercial space around the outside. I drag myself up the stairs pulling myself along by my hands towards where my friend S is continuing her business with her mum. The floor is concrete. They have two rooms: a showroom, and another room, with a luxurious, modernist, concrete square bath built into the floor. They are divided by a curtain of plastic beads, golden, light amber colour. S is not sure if I should get in the bath, she doesn’t know what her mum wants, they might have customers, I might have the virus. I run the bath anyway, maybe I get into it. I am Cleopatra. I turn into a short haired, medium sized dog. In my head I am a spaniel. But maybe I’m a kind of mongrel hunting retriever. I curl up with my head on a plastic beaded purse (pink red and white) and fall asleep.

CW, Jerusalem, nights of 09/04/2020 and 11/04/2020, after three weeks of (solitary) confinement under a strict ‘lockdown’ regime, only fragments:

I am sitting on an elegant Bauhaus bench in what seems to be a public lounge or a spacious conference room open on all its sides. There is a constant coming and going of faceless, impersonal men and women in business attire. Everybody is silent (?), I hear only what may be the faint sound of their clothed bodies brushing each other in passing. An unknown woman, who is as faceless as the others, is slowly masturbating me, while we are both facing the transactional bustle around us, dressed in similar clothes. My sensations are completely abstracted, I much rather know what she is doing to me than actually feel it. I have the concept without the jouissance – as if I were stuck in a Balthus painting. We do not look at each other, I do not touch her at all, and I have no memory of our exact relationship. Nobody seems to take notice of us, and I do not know why I am there.

I am in a city apartment – my father is perhaps there as well, in another room. I am having a conversation with A., a Berlin friend of mine, we are walking up and down in the apartment’s long corridor. I am showing him the unknown drawings or pastels of a German poet, Stefan George (?), that I have just discovered hidden away in a book – but I have the lingering impression that they are perhaps nothing but reproductions printed in the book. They oscillate between abstraction and figuration, satiated colours and geometric shapes, I recall a very vivid red somehow flaring up as I look at it. A. is questioning the relevance of my find, I am defending myself. It seems he is also alluding to what he regards to be another pseudo-find of mine, a short manuscript by Walter Benjamin. The apartment feels very transparent, weightless, painted in light tones. Later in the dream I leave it and walk around on the streets by myself. (Postscript: The dream later revealed itself as the future past of a wish-fulfilment, another A.’s critique of an essay written by me.)

MLK Copenhagen 12 April (it was announced last week that some of the confinement measures will be lifted in the coming weeks)

The dream in its entirety escapes me. Two scenes remain:

In the first, I walk onto an empty plot of land wedged in between semi-high apartment buildings in a big city. The kind that looks like a house was demolished ages ago. There are two pianos standing on the gravelled ground, about 6 meters distance between them. One light wood, one dark.  Both have names engraved in large letters at their fronts, over the keys. I somehow know these are the names of the deceased relatives of those who are meant to play the pianos. There are chairs set up in front of them. Although it could be for a concert, the way the chairs are placed - six to a row centred in front of each piano such that a wide aisle is created down the middle - makes it look more like the set-up for a religious service. Whoever plays the pianos will have their back at the people seated. There is no one here and it’s a little eerie.

I walk up to inspect everything a little closer and suddenly the pianos have turned into two giant chess boards. Again, similar enough in appearance to clearly be matched with each other but still distinct. The rook on one board is enormously high compared to the other pieces and composed of four to five figurines with some kind of Middle Ages warrior appearance balancing on top of each other. I dissemble it to inspect the pieces and when I try to put it back together they are no longer warriors but a weasel, a polecat, a mink, a ferret, and an ermine, all perfectly balanced on each other's backs with the ermine on top. I realise all the pieces on the board are animal figurines and perhaps alive. The king and queen are great deer for white and foxes for black. The animals of Farthing Wood, I think to myself, as the scene shifts.

Second scene. I’m sitting on a bench next to my little sister who I know has hand sanitiser in her pocket. I ask her if I can use it and she very reluctantly lets me take a little. I’m annoyed at her reluctance and tell her most stores sell hand sanitiser again now. She looks at me out of the corner of her eyes and says, ‘yes, but it’s expensive and you should have your own’.

---

5.4.2020, Brighton

TLT

dreams this morning weaved in and out of *projects I never started* as if to prompt me. There was a brief section where I discovered the lift in my building goes one floor further down -- even if it only emerged at some sidings below an already tiny and seldom-used railway station, and you couldn't access anywhere else. But the best, longest sequence was set in the Wild West. In my possession was a large piece of old, tatty sheet music: the paper is brown and much larger than A3. The cover is the same soft material as the inner pages and has a beautiful, melancholy illustration of a cowboy -- in sandy pinks and reds -- turned away and walking into the sunset. It says 'He Is His Own Sand', and elsewhere, 'Songs from the motion picture' (the name of the motion picture is missing). Inside is a set of five or six songs, all of which are pieces for piano solo with no lyrics. This actually an artefact from a dream I had four years ago (and on waking, I decided I really ought to write that suite for piano) -- but despite having just found this object, *this* dream is set in a small town in the American west in the 1830s, and I am writing, in its setting, the short story which will later be made into the film. Or, trying to write it. I am developing an intense crush on a young cowboy, whose name is Dale. Dale is as close to being an out trans man as the community is capable of understanding or accepting. He and I come up with the plot for three or four stories, all of which have some supernatural or haunted element; we are even the protagonists in some of them. In the story 'He Is His Own Sand' we encounter the man on the cover of the sheet-music from the movie; his name is Compton. We never quite settled on his story, but Compton is almost certainly a ghost, perhaps in some sort of sinfully-earned purgatory; and certainly he is always met as he undertakes an arduous, ritual, repetitive task -- most likely the carrying of an immensely heavy sack of sand to a neighbouring town. This task is all Compton is ever doing when he is seen. He isn't threatening. His presence in a household -- which isn't always noticed -- is, we thought, probably accompanied by all the water turning to sand. It's possible that he is doing penance is for causing the deaths of several men in a mine. This dream seemed to explain to our satisfaction the phrase 'he is his own sand', but I can't quite remember how. The town he carries sand to every day is called Twelve Oxen, and does not exist. Dale and I discussed 'Twelve Oxen Has Disappeared' -- a further ghost story, set in the American west, about an entire town which nobody remembers directly, but is only ever spoken or written about as somewhere which one day suddenly vanished. (This story is also an idea I had four or five years ago and never wrote.)

JFE April 12 (NYC 25th day)

I’m in a diner. It's mostly empty and I’ve been here all day. I find a book, on my computer, scans, called “Tender Buttons”, though it’s by Gwendolyn Brooks and not Stein. It seems like me and my family live here, in the diner, as there are beds here. They’re full of wasps, me and my father’s. As he comes home from work I let him know. It bothers me and I try to figure out what to do. But I keep returning to the text.

As I read I’m transported to what looks like an attic full of junk – old wooden crates, unnameable machinery etc. But I can tell I’m outside, and high in the air. It feels placeless. A large man I don’t recognize is here – precariously balanced, up at the ceiling, he wrenches open a hatch at the roof and sticks his head out. After a moment, he returns, stunned, and tells me I need to look. All the while, a voice has been quietly narrating, reading from the book. But now it’s got a sharp edge to it – a little arrogant, and forceful. It reminds me of the tone in many Tiqqun texts.

As I poke my head out, everything goes silent. It’s difficult to describe this. It’s a panoramic view of new york, from a far periphery, on the edge of the dark water. It’s nearing sunset, or it’s already deep into the night, but each thing is illuminated. Everything has the plastic look of ultra HD stock photos. And seems skewed and “panoramic” even though it’s not a flat image. Like you poked your head into the generic screensaver of your computer monitor. Everything is layered strangely and is incredibly still. I can see all of new york. I think of Walter Benjamin’s snow globes and imagine that I’m inside of one.

When I return, the man is shaking his head and muttering “Wow, so this is the far rockaways”. The narrating voice mocks him. I look again. This time, towering over the horizon, and layered with each other thing in a way I find confusing, is a bright mushroom cloud frozen still and full of fire. Frozen the way a river appears frozen when viewed from far enough away, the top of a canyon, or the ocean from a plane. I somehow missed it the first time, or maybe it wasn’t there. When I return again to the room, my brother is there and we discuss this.

13th April, Easter Monday, UK
GCD: Now I’m starting to have almost totally virus-backgrounded dreams, it has now become the backdrop of most of my subconscious world or at least the dreams I remember (some bias maybe). Again this thing about moving houses, people shifting all their belongings. 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, I find the Iranian shop my friend has been telling me about. Pomegranates and dates, lots of lovely herbs, I’m excited to discover it. But it turns out all I want to buy is ‘jockey socks’, long socks that go right up to the top of my thigh. I spend a long time browsing and stroking them and select a heatherish coloured pair and the cashier outdoors says it will be £8. Then I’m visiting a house with lots of occupants, not all of whom I know, and I know I am bad because we aren’t supposed to be going into each others’ houses, and besides some people here have been ill. I start talking in the kitchen to a very beautiful woman, one of the housemates and then she says ‘do you want to kiss me?’ and I say ‘sure’ and do, and it’s very sexy, and she says ‘do you want to lie on my bed’, and I say yes, so we go to her room and get on her and she just takes off my trousers and pants and starts kissing some more. It’s all extremely good but I feel too guilty to continue, so I get dressed and wander the house, which is a sort of huge commune, maybe an old baths even, with a massive meeting room with a balcony all round it. It’s painted a bit like hippy/communal houses often are, with bad DIY and sort of faded paint in formerly bright colours. Later I see two people I know from political stuff in Leeds and one is deathly white, he tells me several people he knows have just died.

Then I wake up, as seems to be becoming the norm, for about 2 hours. 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. It was sunny but now the clouds are gathering, heavy and dark and flat, seagulls moving white flakes on it. We are looking at a cartoonish map, it’s sort of being projected over my dream, of a cycle ride we could take along, including drawings of lots of abandoned and crumbling factories which are picturesque but smell bad (side note; usually I have a lot of quite detailed dreams about buildings but that’s not been happening so much in these times). There’s a strange little almost toylike narrowboat in the marina, in fact it appears to be the only one there. There’s a sign on it saying it’s £15,000, and Callie and I are excited because they like tiny dwellings. It’s open so we go inside and really you couldn’t live on it, it’s just got a little galley and a deck for garden furniture. We decide to make a cup of tea on it and have our snacks. Then there’s a bang on the roof. I go up and there’s a woman I weirdly sort of know, and she’s asking us what we are doing here and also if we can help. She needs someone to take a photograph of, to pose as a corpse in a bathtub. I feel like we’ve been caught out doing something bad so I agree hurriedly and we pack the boat up and go with her.

[Translated in English, directly below] AO, France, nuit 26 (samedi 11 avril 2020)

Confinement à mon domicile, avec mon petit-ami et mon chat

Je marche dans la nature et je rencontre deux hérissons. Ils sont comme des petits chats, ils viennent se frotter à mes pieds et je peux les caresser (je crois que leurs pics se couchent sous ma main). D’un coup il y a la neige, et mes deux amis vont se cacher entre des bûches, sur le bord du chemin. Je regarde dans la neige et je les vois coincés entre les morceaux de bois, congelés, immobiles, comme des escalopes. Au début je pense qu’ils sont morts, puis je comprends qu’ils hibernent. Je suis soulagée ! Mais je me rends compte que cet abri est dangereux car les bûches ne sont pas stables. Je leur propose de leur construire un abri et ils acceptent. La neige s’en va et le soleil revient. Je passe dans une sorte de fête de village, et rencontre ma mère et une de ses amies, Claire. Claire m’explique que je peux fabriquer une maison pour les hérissons que je peux mettre chez moi, en prenant une boîte et en la remplissant de foin, de morceaux de vêtements… Je rentre chez moi et me souviens que j’ai une caisse en plastique bleu transparent, je décide de l’utiliser. Puis je fais du tri dans mes vêtements, à la recherche de vieux pulls à découper. J’ai hâte de revoir mes amis hérissons et de les recevoir chez moi.

[Translated from French, directly above] AO, France, 26th night (saturday 11 april 2020)

Confinement at my home, with my boyfriend and my cat.

I walk in the countryside and I meet two hedgehogs. They are like little cats, they come and rub themselves up against my feet and I can caress them (I think their spikes go to sleep under my hand). All at once there’s snow, and my two friends go to hide themselves between some logs, on the edge of the path. I look in the snow and I see them trapped between the two bits of wood, frozen, immobile, like cuts of meat. At first I think they’re dead, then I understand they’re hibernating. I’m relieved! But I realise that this shelter is dangerous because the logs are not stable. I suggest making them a shelter and they accept. The snow goes and the sun comes back. I go through a kind of village fête, and meet my mother and one of her friends, Claire. Claire explains that I can make a house for the hedgehogs that I could put at my house, by taking a box and filling it with straw and scraps of clothes… I go back to mine and remember I have a transparent blue plastic box, and decide to use it. Then I sort through my clothes, trying to find old jumpers to cut up. I can’t wait to see my hedgehog friends again and to welcome them at my house.

JS, France, day 26 (maybe) 10th April (maybe)

I only remember the tiniest fragment. I’m on a train travelling east along the south coast to arrive in Marseille. The train tracks are suspended, a bit like the Monorail in the Simpsons, a bit like the A557 that leaves the city north of l’Estaque. I don’t know where I am headed, but the stopover in Marseille is a surprise to me and I am frantically texting RL and MB to ask them to meet me. We are still in confinement and the two of them stand on the other side of the locked sliding doors and wave to me as I change trains. I wake up very sad.

RL April 12 night ? 26 Marseille state imposed house confinement, since the 17th March 2020

I find my real family. 3 blond boys of a sliding scale of size, exactly identical, none of them is older than 8. My mum as well. One of the boys is called Ossian. I love him so much immediately. I want to curl up with him and embrace him. I wonder if this is weird or looks weird, since I’ve missed out on his childhood.

The family configuration seems to change and becomes the family of someone who i went to university with, who is the daughter of a stockbroker. I’m on the floor on my knees near a christmas tree and something untoward happens that creates a jealousy issue, and I’m cast out. I think I am told to give someone head, and then am cast out. But I’m still family.

One of the people there is a boy from Beirut, who I have a crush on in the dream, so perhaps it is with him that this imperceptible vibe am cast out.

Me and L are stressing out, then, about where to be, now that we have been kicked out from my newly found and lost rich family.

There is the problem of M since she will be alone during the pandemic and she doesn’t know Marseille. I am sorting out an overfilled fruitbowl. No, I do, she corrects me, you haven’t been listening, I lived here last year with J, blabla, you haven’t listened. We can stay at my ex’s place in Stalingrad, but I don’t really want to, or else I want to stay there alone.

We must get an inflatable mattress, or maybe there is a pull out couch. Or maybe we should stay exactly where we are, in this kitchen, with this pullout couch, and the fruit bowl. As we pull out the couch it’s clear it is not a pull out couch, made of sharp bits of wood, badly upholstered underneath an ugly pale lime green linen.

I sneak upstairs with the boy from Beirut on my shoulders and am in my childhood home in London, finding possible places for us to sleep. I’m embarassed, it’s a mess. We choose my attic. I leave the room, I find a bathroom on the first floor and F is there. He is shaving. We’re in the kitchen with M, and F comes in and says he’s planning some kind of civil war, an insurrection. He’s cut his beard like L’s, looking like a harley davidson nutcase, his hair is bright orange, he looks like my Antifa friend from Paris, G. I’m anxious about what M will think of my psychopath friend -- as he was very much more F in the bathroom, and since coming into the kitchen has become G, this was something I wasn’t expecting. But it turns out they know eachother. Second time in the dream that I am caught out not listening to M.

LD Glasgow beginning of lockdown

I was staying in a cul-de-sac up the hill. IT was the furthest house along, set back a bit from the others. It might have been a bungalow - it did have two floors but it felt like a bungalow.

I was in the back room which I regretted choosing - I'd gone for it because there was a small fire place but it was blocked off anyway. The front room had a lot more light.

Getting my stuff in was socially awkward. All my clothes and stuff were just piled up on the staircase so you had to step on them to get up or down. I don't know why I hadn't put all my stuff in a bag..

There were a few of us standing around the table outside. My friend had her back to me and was wearing a fluffy coat - i gave her a gentle shove, in a friendly way and then realised it wasn't my friend! We sat next to each other, me and this stranger who i had shoved and I kept apologising. The third time she became annoyed and my mum told me to stop. My mum distributed a whole load of vitamins. I was okay swallowing the smaller ones but there was one massive one I just couldn't get down my throat. By the third try it was so soggy and disintegrating in my mouth.the taste made me gag.

Things began to get a bit hazy after that. There was a man coming to stay in the front room. He seemed nice but I didn't trust him. We had the same issue getting his stuff in but he had way more so that the entire stairway was covered in clothes so you could just roll down without hurting yourself.

Somebody was missing or someone had to be hidden - the parents were coming back and we had gone up the hill to avoid seeing them.

LD Glasgow - A more recent dream (3 weeks into lockdown):

I got up quite early and sat on the sofa for a while. Couldn’t keep my eyes open so lay down and fell asleep on the sofa for another 3 hours. When i woke up, I remembered the very end of my dream. The floor of the room i was in was completely covered in used BBQs and empty boxes of my friends contact lenses. I was trying unsuccessfully to collect both the BBQs and contact lens boxes into separate rubbish bags.

JFE April 13th (NYC day 26)

A lazy afternoon. We’re going to go sailing. Me, RL, and others. I’m trying to decide what to wear. Haven’t been out in months. It’s pouring rain and the water’s leaked in through the ceiling. At Z’s house, I wipe off the top of his piano with a rag. A sort of cruise ship. An escape from a burning building. We rob the houses. W has a new life in Europe – he’s going to help me start over in Spain.

April 13 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 28, Oakland)

SL: I just came out of a movie at the Echelon Mall in NJ. I am in a wheelchair. I call my Dad on my cell phone and ask him to come pick me up. I wait for him in the courtyard in front of the mall. It is dark out, people are milling around. I feel bad because I know my Dad will arrive with his pickup truck and  it will be hard for him to lift me up in my wheelchair to put me in the back of the truck. He is getting older and his strength isn’t the same.

Tuesday 14 April (Copenhagen, a month at least)

This is the first dream I can remember in which the word ‘corona’ appeared. L, E,  F and I are on an airplane. L and E are in a long term relationship like in real life but F is trying to give E a blowjob without anyone else on the plane noticing. I’m sitting in the aisle seat and feel slightly uncomfortable. L tells me that they’re just trying to discover the objective structure of desire under corona.

MJZLAH 12th april - state enforced lockdown at louie’s - Glasgow southside

Dream that I am at a nazi meeting in the 1930s in Berlin against my own will. It’s in a tenement flat at the top floor. People go in and are forced to stay because of a guard at the door and one halfway down the stairs. They take your papers when you go in. In the kitchen is the meeting. Some other anti-fascist people have managed to escape to an adjoining room so they don’t have to listen to the meeting, and are just sort of wallowing in there in a nervous lethargy. I join them. It’s evening. The lamps are lit. I keep trying to escape. My friend Noah is annoyed with me. I’m supposed to be somewhere. I try several times to escape, but keep finding I have left something precious inside and have to go back.

Later I arrive home and feel excited to go back to work the next morning. I come home to the news that my flatmate has coronavirus so I can’t go to work after all. I feel dejected. My flatmates are being flippant and silly.

Later I am a novice witch battling an evil older witch outside a mansion/castle. It’s a bit of a harry potter situation where I have Goodness on my side, so I am strong even though I am new. It is ill-advised that I try to fly because I have not tried it yet on my own, but I do it anyway and fly high above the castle. I feel in control and euphoric. The witch strikes me down into the sea. My wand is a bent old fork. I keep it in my pocket but worry it will fall out. I swim to land. There are some people we know living in a simple way in a stone hut, battling the elements somehow, wind and waves washing over the hut, candlelight and quiet and an old fuzzy television playing re-runs. I am to join them. But now I must park a teal green long-wheel-base transit van into a narrow parking spot next to the house, with another smaller van beside it. Once parked, I stand on the roof of the transit while it accidentally slides into a ditch. Several of us retrieve it. We are able to move it just with our bodies. Later, after lots of faff parking and re-parking the transit I lift it upwards from being on its side with superhuman strength. I feel angry and tired of this work, and eager for it to end.

MJZLAH 7th april (i think) (starting to lose track of the days)

so much. house dreams. our old house on ambergate street. my brother elliott takes me out back to look at the garden. he takes me beyond the end of the garden. there’s a huge expanse of green fields, dried stalks of farming. we walk on. the fields are golden in the sunset. we are in the highlands, the green mountains of the sound of music, golden hills of utopia. there are others there. there are dogs running free. it’s glorious. we walk up and up and up until we’re just laughing in joy. it’s very steep and we look down. we can see for miles. there is an enormous sense of space and freedom. we look across to another hillside, with an impossible hairpin road descending it, like a ringlet spiralling down and down. there is a little vintage convertible making its way down with a glamorous couple in it. it’s almost vertical all the way down. we are right there with them in their peril, as they drive, more like slide, down the hill. we also reach the bottom. we are back in the city. a deserted sunny town. like los angeles. miami. downtown. briefly we are in a sunny waiting room. some hint of dodgy dealings. we must get back home. i am with david burchell, my dad’s ex wife’s father, a wheeler dealer, a wide boy from peckham. we ride a rollercoaster home. i have a £20 note that nearly flies away but magically doesn’t. the sky is white with sun, just pure brightness as far as the eye can see, miles above the city, a startling bay beyond, the sea, hurtling home.

MJZLAH 6th april - state enforced lockdown at louie’s

city dreams.

my mum’s friend reuben has some funding to convert a section of Glasgow Autonomous Space that hasn’t yet been used. it’s not clear what the purpose of his section is but he plans to put in a toilet that will have perspex walls filled with fried chicken. outside it’s evening and he starts work installing his entrance statue, a slightly larger than lifesize man pissing into a saucepan, made of black metal. He’s shifting it onto its plinth. a few people are helping. we all think the statue is an ambiguous welcome message to be sending out to the world, and we say so. reuben is indignant and petulant. this is not really GAS and this is no Glasgow, this is like the south bank, it’s definitely london. we’re on a wide concrete pebbledash platform, high up above a promenade overlooking a wide black river - the thames - lined with white bulbous streetlights. i awkwardly wander off, end up in a building walking along an open-plan corridor where i know i am walking parallel to the river. it’s a brightly lit, well-funded and prestigious public institution, an art gallery or a library. tonight there is a dinner event, celebrating an event in iranian history, which is being commemorated through an elaborate narrated meal. while people eat, a woman talks through a microphone, telling the history. there is the sense of pink pomegranate seeds, black squidgy aubergine, white sour yoghurt, beautiful astonishing food. i want to go in but there is a large sign informing diners that their bill will be a flat fee of £43.15. i think this is reasonable at first, then i realise it’s hideously expensive so i move on.

i am at school now, in a crowded corridor. through a small square window, i overhear my friends being harrassed by the headteacher and i run to provide solidarity. daisy is there. they are being unfairly insulted, so i stick my head through the window to hurl abuse at the head. we have power in numbers, and he leaves, disgusted by us but defeated. we head to a small ledge a little away from the school. a very vivid dialogue ensues. we sit dangling our legs, sitting in a line on a car bonnet, the school in the distance. my dreamfriend, who has a physical disability, tells us the story that when she was younger, her neighbours, friends of her parents, believed she had a certain condition. superstitious types, they believed she could be cured by regular beatings, to exorcise her of her condition. they did this, and her parents allowed it. she said “obviously, no doubt did these beatings lead to my condition growing even worse”, gesturing sadly to her disabled body. we all console her about the tragedy, that people who were trying to help her had caused her such great harm. we wandered back to school. my dreamfriend has become aimee gibbs from sex education. she is feeling insecure. she won’t be in school tomorrow and fears she will miss out on our daily rituals. as i’m walking away i say to her “you know, you have a place amongst us that will not go away. your place is safe with us + will remain even if you are not always here”. she looks moved and reassured + gives me a cheerful “thanks!”. i have a feeling, as earlier, that i know what to say to fit the occasion, to offer soothing to my loved ones. i go into the building. i’m now visiting louie, who is doing his land art project. he’s been away for several days. it’s a big wood workshop with huge high ceilings. he has a shaved head + a sort of layered grey smock. he looks in his element. he doesn’t see me for a moment, so i can observe him. he’s working on a piece of wood with a trendy looking blonde woman. they are absorbed in their work and i am extremely jealous. it’s 4:30pm and he is supposed to be finished + we are going home together. he sees me + lets his companions know that “his boyfriend” is here. he comes over, pleased to see me. we go into the entrance corridor. i am distraught + stroppy, my worst self. he needs to stay a bit longer. i feel enraged + need all of his attention. i act out + reprimand him. i wake up feeling very sad.

MJZLAH friday 3rd april - state enforced lockdown at louie’s

• I made 2 gigantic pillars of salt, dirty grey. An art piece?
• Describing to my granddad the kinds of books i like.
• My granddad working quietly in his bedroom at his desk. Me reluctant to go in, waiting on the threshold
• My bedroom is populated with loads of women, a big unwanted sleepover. This has been going on for several nights + i can’t get to sleep cos they chat and play music. This night i can’t stand it anymore and shout out to the whole room that they need to turn the music off and be quiet i’ve got work in the morning!
• Dr. seuss-style surreal mystery dream where i (?) am an older woman and i have left a pile of clothes that distinguish me with reception in the hotel i’m staying. While i’m gone a man called hayden is looking for me. My clothes are laid out on the floor of the lobby like a whodunnit. The helpful assistant helps him by doing something where they are both kneeling on the ground making a tally system out of tiny black sticks or marks. They notice that without meaning to their tally system has followed the pattern in the carpet all the way up to the front desk. A sign! They continue to investigate, asking the receptionist questions about my whereabouts.  (it’s all harmless)
• Amongst a social gathering in a cosy living room, chatting with a young woman about taking drugs. She has a log of everything she said one night while on coke. She’s quite annoying. Then we’re setting off to drive home. She’s walking. But because of the coronavirus curfew there are no streetlights and it’s pitch black outside in the wide streets of the american suburbs. It’s creepy out so we give her a lift. A wild feeling, driving along with the boot open, dangling our feet out the back.
• High peril: my brother flynn falls into a magic puddle. Brown water. He disappears completely. He’s young, like 10 or 11. I see his hand surface and fish him out with an almighty pull. An extreme sense of relief and elation. I then carry him to the highstreet. I carry him like i am big spoon he is little spoon, like he’s in a papoose on my front looking out onto the world with his legs hanging down, swinging. We go into a shopping centre + through a scratched up perspex window we watch some people further inside riding on a rundown sort of pretty indoor go-cart course. I am sharing with him an urban wonder he has never seen.
• Then i dream i’m at school in a huge fancy art gallery. I get the lift to go to class + inside the lift are 2 women doing yoga (childs pose) on the floor. It’s an enormous lift and there are bowls of fruit on the floor. The yoga teacher welcomes us to the class. We say oh we’re just using the lift. I take a grape and then feel bad and put it back. It’s a bit awkward. At class it’s an IT lesson. At my desk i take a bite of kit kat and then think better of it and put it away, but the jannie saw me came over to tell me off for eating. When he’s walking away i see him eating a kit kat and smirking. The hypocrisy makes my blood boil. I call him a “fucking twat” very loudly. Others are also angry. We’re all retaking IT, many of us mature students. I stage a coup + we all ceremoniously quit and walk out. The teacher shouts that she doesn’t like us anyway. We careen through the building euphoric. At a side door to outside, we are met by a band of theatre types all dressed the same, in little brown suits + white shirts. They want to come in. we want to come out. It’s a powerplay + they win + we wait for them. They are like the flouncy french girls out of harry potter 4, like loads of fleur delacours. They are well-kempt, we are hooligans in our school uniforms. I look down an idyllic avenue of daisies, dappled with sunlight where the pretty theatre girls are now walking away from us towards some special nice place for nice people. We head to the flyover to make our ways home. The sun is low in the sky + everything is very brown and yellow skies, the flyover was built in the 1970s, it’s the time of day in winter when you have to shield your eyes from the glare of the sunset. A boy looks sad. He’s not in our company but he’s from the same school. Seeing us leaving en masse he thinks school is finished + he has nowhere to go. we reassure him that it’s still open. He looks relieved. He loves school and would be lost without it.

MJZLAH A few nights before.

Wandering around with joel white in a beautiful brown brick town at sunset. The light is beautiful, crepuscular rays streaming down the streets pointing at us. I’m holding his hand and it’s so nice. It’s a northern town, like wigan. Trying beer in an alehouse outside of town in a more rural place. Quite magical and busy. Scrabbling up a steep mound to some train tracks, a scree. Wandering around the market of the town as it’s closing down at dusk. People shutting up their stalls. An underlying sense of patriotism, saint george on a white horse, right wing pub folk, maybe a painted pub sign squeaking while it swings. Wondering what the hell happened in towns like these to cause the election results of december 2019.

MJZLAH Friday 27th march Day 10 of self-isolation at home

The night before: i dreamt of los angeles. The last 3 nights incredibly vivid surreal dreams.

Italy? Dream italy.

But first a house. A squat house. An annual event but its a bit underwhelming. Hanging out in a grimy room - catching up but i don’t know anybody. Something to do with megan brevig - it’s the highlight of the moon year. It’s a reunion. Go to sleep. Louie is around. Now it’s his house, but not. I’m sitting way too close to bryony budd, much less than 2 metres, right up close to her, sitting at a table which is also a bed. We are opposite 2 people, like the grandparents from charlie and the chocolate factory. The house is huge  and ramshackle and everything is honey brown - brown wood floor, brown furniture, leathery stuff. Like an edinburgh hippy house with lots of stuff about - quite cosy. In the gigantic kitchen (his old kitchen) which is cold and lonely, i request louie walk me home because i don’t think he’s giving me enough attention. It’s like an order. Bryony laughs like she’s on my side. The kitchen is bright and milky white. We head out past the enormous coatstand. Louie laughs at me while i struggle to retrieve my gloves on tip toes which someone has pegged with little pegs way up high. I have a huge amount of stuff with me, including a video camera with loads of parts with no case, and loads of clothes. I have no bag for it all and bundle it up in my arms + we leave. Inside was evening. Outside is daylight + full sunshine in dream italy. It’s beautiful. Cars tooting and wide grand marble streets. Maybe it’s not italy maybe its a colonial district of costa rica or cuba. Some of the white marble hotels are literally on the beach + there’s beach streets with sand right up to the edges of little grocery shops. The streets are cold in the shade of the vast hotels. Maybe it’s a showbiz place like bearritz or monte carlo, where poverty is visible + side by side with vast wealth. We carry on. I walk along a bustling street + there are the sights and sounds + bright sunshine of an entire city around me and i feel fully present as i look at the paving stones beneath my feet but i know i am dreaming. An incredible feeling. We end up in a restaurant with high windows. I grow angry with louie and throw a tantrum, throwing my stuff everywhere, causing a scene. We start to pick it up together quietly. We are not guests of the restaurant. The guests politely ignore us and go on eating. I realise now i have more than i could ever carry, i have a thousand little trinkets and makeup freebies, like my stepmum’s old make-up boxes, most of it is trash but within it is treasure and there’s not time to sort through it so i must take it all. Louie suggests asking the proprieter to send it on to me at my lodgings. I corner a sweaty white woman in a chef’s uniform. She agrees. We move on. I get to my lodgings, a vast hotel in the colonial style that’s mostly empty. Louie dissipates.

Inside i am getting ready for the school play (primary school). All hustle and bustle. I’m an adult but i’m allowed in. i’m wearing a black velvet period dress. I direct another actress to the toilets. Now we’re heading on stage and i have a realisation that i don’t know the words or the tune (it’s a musical) but thankfully i don’t have any solo parts. And i look fantastic. All the kids line the edge of the stage. I grab a fake newspaper that all the kids have got that i think is the words. There must be about 10,000 copies of the newspaper, piled eratically in a huge cardboard box at the side of the stage. The house lights are on. It’s a dress rehearsal but the audience is there. The back of the stage is a circus tent, with ropes stretched out and tied to the ground. A mixed race girl is swinging on the ropes - obviously queen bee of year six. She shows off her acrobatic skills, some kind of teachers pet trick to back up something the teacher is saying. She’s a very cool kid.

Next i’m back in the hotel. I go to enquire about my trinkets. The same sweaty woman who worked in the restaurant is proprietor of the hotel. I find her office and she’s asleep in a chair and the phone is ringing, the tv is on. There’s flies flying about. Someone’s voice is coming out of the telephone. Her office is sparse, suspicious and disconcerting. I wander down through the beautiful streets back to the restaurant to investigate. It’s dusk + the streets are colder and quiet. A woman beats a rug on her balcony. People call out to each other. The restaurant is gone. The building is there but there are no signs of the restaurant at all.

Now i’m clearing out my room in the hotel. I share the complex with lots of fussing women. There is an unsettling feeling, and a sadness to be leaving. There is a communal shelf in my room where one of the fussing women deposits communal items, brand new dog beds + naff cushions - the kind of stuff you get in TK Maxx. i pick out 3 cushions to take with me that are not too offensive. We’re in some kind of meeting with the fussing women but they don’t quite have physical presence (a zoom meeting?). She’s justifying the dog beds. Others are asking her if she would stop storing her crap stuff there and saying they don’t even have dogs. It seems it is the unsold stock from her homeware shop. I start to clear the walls of all my beautiful found objects, which are all arranged on simple glass shelves. I clear photographs, old playing cards, pieces of amber, miniature columns made of plaster of paris, bits of ornate glass with bobbly bits that are shards off old vases, glass milk bottles, slices of colourful scuffed plastic that are broken off old toys. The arrangement of all these objects is beautiful and i scoop them up carefully into a box for my new house. There is a kitsch cross-shaped frame inside which is mounted a collage and a figurine of jesus on the cross, with tiny coloured glass lightbulbs inside it. I wonder whether to keep it. It’s kind of incredible. I decide that i will.

RL Marseille, state imposed house confinement since the 17th March. Tuesday 14th April. Last night Macron announced very worrying measures.

I dreamt a remake of Godfather 3, in which my great uncle, who is confined near by in the south of France dies of the virus. I want to go and see him the day before, but his partner refuses, because of risk of infection. I speak on the phone with my mum, who would dearly have loved at least someone to go to him. I see him being shot in front of me, like Mary [Sophia Copolla]. There were other bits of the dream I remember. Something about my student from when I worked in a high school, Charles.

AH, Confined at home (large 300sqm apartment in Beirut), Date 12.04.2020; social isolation, 5 weeks.

"I had a series of candy-colored nightmares, one of which was especially interesting. I was a detective investigating a murder of a piano teacher. And I found out that her very young students killed her (about 3-5 years old, several dozens of them). But the whole story was visualizing front of my eyes as an animation that I was making; the teacher was being killed by thousands of ants, and my screen was being filled with bloody red color."

CW, Jerusalem, night of 14/04/2020, after four weeks of (solitary) confinement, and after my neighbourhood has been cordoned off from the rest of the city until at least Thursday:

Together with others, I am preparing for an imminent attack of a group of hostiles. I do not know how I came to be part of the group of defenders none of whom I know or why we are about to be attacked (and by whom). Our position is a strategic nightmare, a narrow, winding corridor situated underneath a hill with no clear view of the surrounding landscape. The earth of the hill feels like the humid sand of a sandbox. I am fortifying our position by digging small holes into this earthy sand, placing small, brightly coloured toy figures of monsters I used to collect and play with as a child into the holes. The dream skips the attack itself and carries me to the aftermath of the attack. We have held our position and have made a number of captives in the process. They are all men, just as there are only men among the defenders. Our captives are lined up against the invisible boundary of what I know to be an abyss opening up behind them (the only term fit for the generic nature of my knowledge in the dream), beneath a faint blue sky. The topographical fact of the abyss seems to have entered the dream only at this very moment. I am walking by the file of captives, they are all facing me, men in their 30s and 40s (?). Suddenly I know that I am about to pass judgement on them. One of them senses what is about to happen, smiling anxiously at me, gesturing with his hands as if to say that it is not his fault. I approach either him or another man. I point something like a wooden, white spear (but without a sharpened tip) to his breast and push him gently over the edge with it. He gives me a surprised, yet blank look, which in me is accompanied by the sensation of deep horror. He is gone without a sound, he just falls back – as if made of cardboard – as if he has disappeared into a void. The whole scene plays out in complete silence – just as the preceding parts of the dream. Afterwards I do not look over the edge to see the result of my action (I have very probably killed him). I may also have pushed more than one man into the abyss. The dream then continues in a huge apartment. A man in his 50s is sitting in a chair in the middle of one of its rooms, lecturing me and others about the wealth of his life experience – he looks like some shady character out of an Italian Giallo film, heavy glasses, brown or black hair. Behind him is a bookshelf, which I am trying to either stabilize or to sort through – but all the books are stapled on the ground, propping up the shelf itself. I vaguely remember that I am supposed to salvage something important from the apartment – but probably not a book. I leave the apartment eventually, making my way through the afternoon streets of a city, alone and/or in the company of others, by car and on foot. The impression lingers on that I am on some kind of mission (as a courier?).

MJZLAH 13th april - lockdown glasgow at my boyfriend’s house

Been at my boyfriend’s for almost 2 weeks.

Dreamt i was pregnant, with 3 days left til due date. I was horrified, as i realised i had not thought this through at all. I am with my mum’s friend carolyn, a glaswegian. Everyone is happy for me, but also nonchalant. I am having a freak out. I call louie, like what the hell are we doing i don’t want this! Too late for an abortion. Later i’m at some kind of camp, leading the camp. I can picture the whole of scotland. I want to take the kids to the north of a particular spot, to the wilds, across to an island on a boat. I can see the islands are all connected by huge motorway flyovers. The scale is all weird, so i feel both underneath the towering flyover (hundreds of feet tall), and above it, like i have a birds eye view of the map. We are loading up our bikes, and as usual, i have too much to carry. We all have the same bikes, brand new, cos we’re hiring them. I am excited to try mine. We set off towards somewhere, a house where we’re going to do work exchange, and we are on a huge water slide. There is a bit with a tunnel with a vertical drop for a long time. My cousin charlie is there without his seat belt on so i reach out my hand to steady him. But i can’t reach but it’s ok in the end. It’s actually fun, even though in real life i hate vertical drops, and i think this in my dream. At the bottom my mum arrives and she starts being sick. The ride was not good for her.

UL, 14th april 2029 - 3rd week plus in lockdown in Los Angeles

At my (vulnerable, sick, old) parents’ house.

Another dream of messing up on social distancing.

In this one I was flying just over head level of crowded streets and sidewalks. Flying has always been my favorite thing to do in dreams and it always gives me this feeling like "I KNEW it was REAL that I can fly -- it's not just a dream!"

In this case, I couldn't go any higher than just over people's heads and so I had to be careful to avoid all the gawkers. I was enjoying the attention mostly. Couldn't control my movement well though. I was going like a constant 8 miles per hour. And could only veer left or right a bit.

I had several close calls of getting closer than I wanted to people. But it was still going well after a few miles of this.

Then I flew into some kind of postal service facility, like the parking lot where workers were coming in and out of big buildings. Without knowing it I had drifted in to an employees-only zone and this guy reached up and stopped me and told me I couldn't be there. I was mad!

IX, April 15th, have been confined for a month -- apparently, will be confined for another month

These are two dreams I had a week ago, actually. I am not sure how many nights were there between the first and the second dream, but they seem connected, because in both of them there’s the Devil, and he’s kind of the same person, even though he’s more like a young ‘racaille’ in the first one, and a mature men, sort of ‘latin lover’ type in the second one. So I dreamt twice of the Devil. The first time, I surprised some kind of ritual in progress, after seeing a group of men hanging around in front of a building in a neighborhood that looked like Recife. I follow them and find myself witness to their ritual, I get scared, try to escape and when I get to the elevator, the Devil catches up. By then I am not afraid anymore, though, because I have decided that he’ll notice in my eyes that I am not giving up and will fight him. He let’s me go because he recognizes some kind of power or determination? He gives me a head start, I run, I know he’ll kill some other people and feel conflicted about this and also am lost because my googlemaps app is not working as it should - I don’t remember the rest. There is a whole first part of this dream where I loose my family, I want to stay behind to check some store or something and I tell my cousins and aunts to go ahead and can’t find them after.

In the second dream the Devil is having a kind of sex party in an apartment. Just before having this dream, I had mentioned, just like someone else in this journal, that I was envious of people having erotic dreams. So in this dream the Devil is a dark, hairy man, completely naked but I don’t remember his penis. I think his sex party is filled with women and he explains, more than shows, something about oral sex that is very sensual and delicate and arouses me. I am not completely convinced, though I don’t think that’s it,  it is not that I am unconvinced, it is that I feel that it is wrong and corrupt to let myself be seduced by the Devil. Maybe I just think it is unoriginal. But I get on the elevator to leave. Then I change my mind, I have so much desire I decide to go back and have sex with the Devil, or at least try and see if he’s really as good in oral sex as his description has made me believe -- or rather if he could match the desire he created. So I go back and I feel we start having sex, but not at all the kind of sex I expected, I feel he wants to fuck me in the ass, in which case I say, no way, and then things turn around and I fuck him in the ass. I remember the act very clearly and feel like I have kept myself from waking up or maybe have gone from dreaming to simply imagining the act at some point that I cannot actually determine. I felt very excited waking up.

RL Marseille 15 April, confined at this house now for 4 weeks.

I can’t remember what I dreamt but it was extremely elaborate. I woke up thinking that it’s 7 years since I finished my undergraduate degree. My mind is deteriorating and my late twenties will be effaced by Covid19. I demand a new passport with a later birthdate. Now feel guilty for making a big E personal Existential crisis out of a global existential crisis.

April 15 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 30, Oakland)

SL:  The military needs money and so they are begrudgingly offering rides to civilians in military planes. Me, my partner and our baby son get in the plane. Doors are open to the air, as if we were going to skydive out of them. The baby is securely strapped in but is very close to the door. We take off and fly low to the ground. Sometimes I wonder if we are still on earth or if we are now on another planet? We fly over unattractive landscapes…fields of rusty old piping, military yards. We fly close to the tops of dilapidated buildings. We fly over billowing whiteness, and this feels disorienting. The pilot is unhappy at this job and jerks the plane around a bit. The baby is thrilled, my partner is OK. I’m aghast at what we are seeing and just want it to be over with. But I am happy with my partner and baby and that we are together makes it feel a little better.

HC, Berlin, Social distancing since the 12 March, dream addressed to RL.

I dreamt I was walking in Venice beach and you pulled up in a big open top American car with a friend in there with you and asked me where I was going. I said I was on my way to Sara's mum's birthday. You said "It's in Venice Italy silly, get in we're gonna be late" and we started driving to Italy.

We're then in a loft and all perched on miniature chairs that mean your knees are up by your ears. Let's Dance was playing (was let's dance on in the Skype chat too?).

S.O.: The date was: Thursday, April 9th; the place was: the region known as Quebec, Canada; and the conditions are: away from those I love.

A friend and I were on a deserted island, and had built a raft to escape. After pushing it out to sea, and getting a fair ways away from the island, we had capsized. After capsizing, we realized we were being followed by a grizzly bear, and we had to swim further and further away from the island to escape it. Night fell; we were treading water, unsure where to go; it was too dark to see. For some reason, my phone was working, so I turned it on and used the flashlight, which did nothing to help us locate the island but did attract the attention of the bear. We split up, going left and right, and, as I heard the bear gain on me, I knew I was going to get caught, but that my friend may still life. I felt the bear bite down on my arm, shake me like a rag doll; I was screaming; then I woke up.

When I awoke, I googled it, and bears are indeed faster swimmers than humans.

14th April, Lockdown, London - E

I saw your sister, mother and a vague rest of your family coming out of a flat between the pet shop and optician near where my parents live. Apparently your sister had just moved there, and I thought that it was a suspicious coincidence. You were trying to stay close to me, even through your family.

Your sister and mother had incredibly sleek long hair and they wore long dark coats.

I saw them glamorously walking off into the distance with the rest of your nondescript family.

In the dream you also had a little brother who was a chubby toddler, who I had seen on a swing.

They were going to a celebration. I think it was a family party. I was invited. I went too. It was in a round hall that was mechanised and the centre of the room, a kind of stage rotated with everyone on it. It was very busy with people, I felt dizzy, I tried to leave and was finding my way off the spinning platform when you called my name, clambered through people to get to me and didn’t want me to leave, you were all in soft fabric, a soft navy sweater and black felt trousers, your arms were long that pulled me back.

April 16 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 31, Oakland)

SL:  I am looking for W’s house. I am on the street I grew up on, in New Jersey. I think, I know his house is nearby, but where exactly I’m not sure. I knock on a neighbor’s door and say, do you have a key to the L’s house? Yes, yes I do she says, come in. Are you renting there or are you upstairs? I don’t remember my answer but I remember picturing the two options in my mind. I think I’m upstairs. She gives me the key. I say thank you Mrs --- (I forget her name). Her house is big and there is one large empty living room space near the kitchen. I wonder if they are remodeling or moving out or what. I leave and walk up the street. I cross Burnt Mill Road and go into another part of the neighborhood, but very close to where I live still. There is a street festival of some sort. I get a newsletter with stories in it, many by friends. I’m flipping through and there is a story by WL. I see a picture of him from when he was about 20 and he has gelled spiked hair. It is silver like it is today. I keep walking and looking for the L’s house, his house. Then I am taking the SAT and seem to be in a nursing home. I am running out of time on the answers. One of the questions is about Prospero from The Tempest but I am unable to formulate my thoughts quickly enough for the essay. It’s like I know the answer but it is exhausting to regurgitate the whole thing.

RL Marseille 16th April, night 30 confinement, day 31 confinement

[Last night I watched a film about Dora and Freud]

One part is I’m here, in L’s room [the room vacated by the third colloc], and Mum comes to visit and she says mattresses are best when you don’t cut them up because they retain something of their whole aura*. [*I recently sawed off part of my mattress with an electric saw, we have been reading the rate of surplus value stuff in Marx, and I keep thinking something about the whole being more than the sum of its parts].

Then we open it up in her bedroom [which is her bedroom], we peel off its mattress cover, to see inside. I warn her against it, I have done it before, and sewn it up again because of what I think I may have found. [If I don’t look, maybe what is there will not emerge]. Inside there are constellations of dead bed bugs which I don’t want to look at. I tell her. I am so disappointed because now the bedbugs will now infect her and my Dad’s bed. Panic of picking them up to be sure, then dropping them in the process, my sister helps with the transfer of the bugs from one side of the bed to another. When looked at up close some of the bugs do not look like bed bugs at all, they look like lumpy ginger-roots, some are dead, some are probably alive. Mum just leaves them by the side of her bed, of course, on a face-down photograph.

I am home in London. Home is full of people, and somehow, steamy - [but steamy like the Beigel bake in brick lane]. I’m leaving for an art class I’ve seen on a - video? Zoom? Film? [the quality of the image is 16mm film] - which takes place at ? - Mayday rooms? I see SC sitting on the floor, surrounded by people. She’s wearing dark green. I get my outfit really right one of the times I go there and the next time I get it really wrong. I come to the door: MH is there. I knew he was coming to pick me up but now I’ve missed out on the interval of him coming to the door and ringing the bell - I could have used this time to get ready and now I’ve messed it up by coming down too early. It’s dark outside and my house is situated where the Courtauld institute in London is, and he’s with two old ladies, vaguely, their faces are distorted and softly blurred, their lipstick is grotesque or I think: they’ve been bludgeoned. It’s a dark night, he’s under an umbrella, not necessarily carried by him, and there’s a slight rain.

I want to wear: my umber vinyl PVC knee length skirt, my Marni red and black stripe jumper [IRL it’s Cacharel, it’s in Paris, so is my skirt], my mum’s blue leather sheepskin lined coat [which is hanging in the hallway in London, next to the door], that audrey hepburn screen printed t shirt from the past [the 90s, I don’t know where it is, probably in my sister’s bedroom]. But when I put them altogether it’s a mess, even if it’s only a slight variation on what I was wearing yesterday [in my dream]. What’s more my mum has been wearing my ‘Marni’ jumper and she’s left other layers of clothes inside including a kind of colourful crochet jumper and I think to myself, god, I should wear more colour but I don’t have time, and now I’m accidentally wearing them. I’m stressed about keeping MH waiting.

I know we are going to have to cross Waterloo bridge, I know it’s dangerous, what we have to do.

We are organising a hit on someone? Me MH, ML, and LML. We file into a kind of Parisian cafe that’s been redone in the late 80s, it has a special comptoir in which one half of it has special curves built into it where you can sit up on a high chair and rest your legs on to the counter. ML and LML both do. LML’s legs are longer than ML’s, they sparkle in a kind of golden, amberlike rum diffusion. ML reminds me of Pacino in the Godfather 1. I sit to the right of them.

I’m with LML’s mother, LM, visiting her in a room, a kind of wall-less platform with plants and a red sofa on it, it moves. It’s above a bus depot. Everything is beautiful, modern, hardy, sturdy. She’s angry with me, I have done something to sabotage something. I don’t remember now. I wake up.

IK (french countryside, 5th week of lockdown)

I was in a business district maybe in Paris and taking lunch at a company canteen (was probably working for this company). My colleagues are men, wearing suits, and the one facing me at the lunch table is Alain Soral, an antisemit french far right wanna-be ideological leader. But he seems really sad and kind of disconnected, and will never talk about politics during the whole meal. It’s like we were all agreeing on not talking about what matters.

At the end of the dream we are waiting for a car in the empty streets of the business district.

WAH (London, isolating with housemates in an apartment block that features in dream) 17/04/2020

travelled/ended up somewhere urban but unrecognisable maybe a mixture of portugese city, Sydney and Glasgow. I have nothing with me except a bottle of red wine and some black clothing that I have been wearing for a long time, very grubby now. I stay at a Motel where my companions are somehow staying for free/squatting out on sofas in the parking lot in the front, and sofas in the reception/lobby. I go between fucking M on the sofa in the front, in public (I am sub to her) and there is also this other storyline going on where I’m also originally fucking a blotchy nosed anarcho guy just across the way (other side of the parking lot?) He’s a painter. I can ‘go about’ with either, but as usual I have a block on the woman I have slept with so I go wandering about the ugly city. Familiar feeling of being lost and not knowing where to go or what to do, except gravitate toward ‘a lover’. End up doing some work for a guy, it’s a paint job up on a step ladder, painting of a wall, but loose interest and walk away. Meet M again and we go to a community college open day and I’m shown how to fill in a form by a gorgeous trans woman who is not unlike R.

Before all this, there was some visiting of Nan Goldin and another woman who she lived with, neither of whom actually looked like who they were meant to be, and who lived in a nonedescript terraced house in this weird city. .Some task is given to drive a moped and a horse around some vague recollection of another major phase of the dream being set in a glamorous shiny apartment complex, in chicago or something.

Back at the community college the ceiling is caving in and it starts flooding/raining. Then it gets really busy and I start to leave as it becomes an arty party. B and HR are at the entrance, ‘ on the door’ looking stunningly beautiful. I feel miserable. They ask me what’s up and I start to try and explain but also ‘keep it light’ and then decide it would be more radically honest if I just sat there with them but said nothing, looking grumpy.

JS confinement day 33?

A very strange sex dream, it was long and drawn out and detailed and I think good, but I had been reluctant to sleep with F, as if I was doing her a favour. I haven’t seen her since we were both 18 and she has, both in the dream, and in real life I believe, retained something girlish about her that makes me feel uncomfortable. She told me she had always wanted us to sleep together when we were teenagers and now we’re in a white bedroom with white sheets and a cheap wooden bed frame and a fitted wardrobe with panelled mirrors and I’m giving her these awkward side smiles as she stretches looking pleased with herself.

I’m with N and T (I maybe woke up and went back to sleep, the mood is distinctly different) we decide to go to an exhibition, it’s in Birmingham, we’re in Bournemouth, we had decided to walk wherever we went, I apologised, it was going to take at least three and a half hours. The visual pans out and I see the length of the country as if on Google Maps and we’re at the bottom and we have to make it to the middle. T returns to his parents house to pick up some walking shoes, I feel concerned that they haven’t quite understood how long three and a half hour is and I wonder if we should take the train. We pick T up, his parents house is in fact A & J’s pebbledash detached down by the marshes, he waves from the second floor and N calls him a loser. C tells us we can take the line 14 to London and walk from there, I trip over in the metro and C grabs me by the collar to stop me from falling on the tracks.

JFE April 16th (Day 29 NYC)

K is living in an apartment building with a downstairs lobby like a hotel. Or like a shopping mall. There are people who’ve come from all over the place here. It’s very busy. Men keep approaching K, and she’s oblivious to their intentions. Two men in particular also live in our (It’s not clear if I am living w her, visiting, or a disembodied onlooker for now) building. A guy with dark hair and a beard who’s obviously infatuated with her, and a creepy muscular bald guy. Tall, with a german accent maybe. (kind of looks like the bald middle aged german dude who would come into my old job and talk about his days raving in the UK in the 90s and how great LTJ Bukem is) I get bad vibes from the bald guy. Like serial killer vibes. I try and convince her he’s dangerous but she won’t listen. K is also E sometimes, it’s not clear when who is who. One evening, while K/E is in bed, and I’m lying across the foot of the bed, I hear the bald guy’s door open. He’s one flight of stairs up from us. Our door is open. I quickly go to close it but, both to avoid making a sound and to provoke him, I leave it cracked open. I had bought a gun before, a small black 9mm. I grab it and keep it next to me in bed. As the bald guy passes he stops for a second. Then I see him get closer. He puts his face up to the crack and slowly pushes the door open. It’s still sort of unclear if I actually exist in the dream, but either I or K shoots him. It’s crazy and confusing and I/she shoots him over and over again. Then alarm. It very quickly feels like everybody will be out to get her/me/us. At this point, K is more of E, and they are both me. I now need to try to avoid all these shitty men who keep trying to bother me. They’re going to find the body. It’s almost as tho they know I’ve done something. I’m in the lobby now, my closet is there for some reason. I’m digging through clothes looking for something to wear while I flee. I grab a tacky colorful blouse with a deep neck and covered in rhinestones. Its ridiculous, but seems like the warmest option at the time. I almost grab a red leather jacket, but leave it. Then I need to get back to the apartment, but I can see workers, younger women sort of dressed like flight attendants, packing up the staircase. Less than the other people knowing, its like the world does and it’s trying to get me. And I’m watching it raise alarm and begin to close in around me. I try and climb up the fire escape. I don’t remember what I needed from the apartment. But the bearded guy is trying to get me too now so I get out of there.

I take a bus across the country. I’m worried they’ll find my gun. I’m worried that because I shot the guy so many times, the police will accuse me of being malicious. It never occurs to me that it could be considered self-defense. This strange version of the country again. Everywhere is unfamiliar in a way that comforts me. At some point in my flight, I’m riding a bike through a town during some sort of festival. Dusk, and people everywhere in the streets smoking and drinking, kids playing, costumes etc. I ride the bike through a very deep puddle, a flooded section of the road. I enjoy the solitude of this place. Nobody knows me. The town is utterly singular to me – I have no sense of where I am.

I get off a bus in the northeast somewhere. Near New York. I feel relief at having not been searched by security. After some time, I find myself walking toward a railed ledge over water. I recognize this as niagara falls. There are a few kids next to me with their families on vacation. I recognize it as niagara falls, but instead of a waterfall, there is a long corridor, riverlike, though not a river, at the edge of a canadian city. From high above the bottom of the corridor, though slightly below the apparitions, I watch as huge tattered clouds of fog are launched from the “mouth” of the corridor. They fly through the air as if flowing downstream. Occasionally, the mouth of this corridor spits out a huge assembled image, as if one took a photograph of a city street then cut out a rectangle, and reconstructed all of the objects pictured only insofar as they appeared in the rectangle. These are the size of billboards, or larger. They glide past me and the kids, then collide with the facades of buildings constituting the periphery of the city before exploding, without a sound, into wisps of fog.

JFE April 17th (NYC day 30)

I’m in a class on afropessimism. Sort of an old fashioned classroom. And more like a gradeschool than a university. I’m happy to be reading the book we’ve been assigned, and a bit nervous to be back in school.

DH, 18.04.2020, London

1. I was trying to walk down Southampton Row in the mid-19th century but couldn't. I had to walk down it today, in 2020. The 2020 Southampton Row had been 'gentrified' into one giant swooping steel and glass structure (all of its actual high bourgeois tenement buildings gone). This dream recalled another in which London had been transformed into a network of extensive ramshackle canals, very flat (Dutch?) but at the same time symbolic of containment, narrowing, enclosure. A strange intermixture of the British seaside (white paint, decaying wood) and warzone (barbed wire).  

2. I was in my flat in Hackney. Loren Goldner lived in one of the Council blocks opposite me and had asked me to give a presentation on the social context of Covid-19 in the UK, but he kept replacing my talk at the last minute with boring samey lectures on epidemiology by 'scientists'. Was irritated by this. Walked around the estate gardens, which were full of (what I thought were) quite beautiful blue 'brutalist' urinals. These seemed to exist in place of benches. Next to one of them I saw a man who I understood I had said I would help. I would do this as a part of my local mutual aid network. I was going to trim his lawn for him. I was listening to an audio tape of a child talking about a crunchy green apple. The lawn was a crunchy green apple. I trimmed the lawn by eating its skin. When I was done the lawn was a massive flat peeled apple. How satisfying! Very quickly the surface dried to a beautiful shining quartz. Job well done.

3. It was Christmas (2nd Covid Christmas dream). I was 'socially isolating' with literally everyone I know in a tiny house in which everyone was sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the largest room. While they slept I looked through their teenage CD collections. The doorbell rang and I climbed towards the front door over an enormous mass of presents. By the time I reached it, the postwoman was already halfway up the street, enraged by how long I'd made her wait and by the obvious flouting of social distancing norms. On the doorstep she had left a tiny perfect Christmas tree.  

IX, 19.04.2020, in State-imposed lockdown for 32, 33? Days now

Had a weird sex dream with old DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, it was awful. Then told two people about it over the internet and have been getting insta ads of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which makes the nightmarish quality stronger and lasting.

I haven’t dreamt a lot, but I have the impression that some images or sounds get stuck in my head just before I go to bed and then they play on a loop during the whole night. Leo and Brad were the first; then the music and lyrics for a Maluma song, ‘Felices los 4’, then a tweet I saw that said all countries that had a good response to covid are headed by women -- in the thread someone raises the much more reasonable and les click-baiting hypothesis of them being progressive countries which invested in health and had elected women because they are progressive. These two tweets are in my mind all night long and it reminds me of one morning, I was trying to sleep after taking a quarter of an ecstasy pill that was mostly amphetamines. I couldn’t sleep but was physically exhausted so I kept having this kind of lucid dream where I saw my phone’s screen as it went from one app to the other. I got very upset about having my subconscious colonized by screens and the images coming through them and apps, that my mind was becoming a long list of apps.

These recent images that come to me at night make me feel like all my subjectivity is gone, like my subconscious has not been working anymore and doing the associations it should be doing. It is like there is nothing happening anymore and so nothing to process, I am just replaying images/sounds I have seen during the day, and they are not a lot, nor interesting, I am afraid of just not having anything in my mind anymore, I guess.

MLK 20.02.2020 Copenhagen:

My friend T is standing in a snowscape. She has built a little bench out of snow. She lies down on the bench and I start to cover her with snow, to build her into the bench structure. Suddenly, when fully covered, both her and the bench are split into two, like the assistant in a box in a magician’s performance. I uncover her face and she is smiling at me.

21.04.2020 State-imposed lockdown, apprx. 45 days Beirut

Home confinement

I had a long series of dreams. 1. it involved you and me, and moving to a new city. I remember corridors, and doors and rooms and then you telling me that we will live separately, you will go to another city and visit me once in a while (I thought it's a solution as long as you would visit me, and I was happy to be living separately afraid to break the screen of fantasy - your and mine). 2. The Frequent Defect was hosting its first rave after the quarantine. There were many chairs in the club put within 3 meters of distance from each other. There was a long line up of DJs none of whom I knew. They were all young and beginners, I thought I don't really like young artists. The club had a bookshelf with very small tiny pocket books. I reached for one, not too small, the title was The Idea. I started browsing through it. It had numerous unexplainable diagrams. 3. The third dream involved a classroom environment. I was holding a class on Dada. A major Dada figure was attending the class (Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann?). I was thinking that the Dada women were missing. What was strange was that I was helping to photograph or was photographing with these figures. I was thinking that now that the Great Recession was about to start, Nazis will scapegoat them. This was by far the most vivid dream the details of which are hard to recall.

JFE April 21st (NYC day 34)

There is some sort of link between the Tiger King, and my grandfather’s esoteric religion. He tells me he knows this, but has never read any of the Tiger King’s work because, on the website that hosts the writing, it’s listed under the “pornography” tab and he doesn’t want to click on it.

 So there are tigers everywhere. They keep climbing into the busses and scaring everybody. This h        appens over and over again and each time I put my head down and try to avoid them. It’s almost like humans getting on to rob the bus. The way they do in that part of the city where the anarchist who got his teeth kicked out by cops lived, where it’s common to find bullet holes in the ceiling, from shots fired to announce the robbery.

Later at night, in a city, two leopards in a subway car. Everybody flees. The station is full of so many people that it’s difficult to avoid being trampled. A lot of our things get stolen in the commotion.

         Some vitalists are reading my grandfather’s literature – the stuff behind the cult that built the town I grew up in. That esoteric tiger king shit. I discuss it with them, all of us sitting on a heap of vague objects in the desert.

         I’m out partying all night with M and J and others. We get separated but eventually I show up at M’s house on the side of this hill and find everybody there. I’m relieved that everybody is still up to hang out.  

April 22, 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 37, Oakland)

SL:  I am in the ocean waves at the beach with my parents and their small dog. Waves come and we float or skip over them. I am facing the beach with my back to the waves momentarily and when I look forward I see a huge, almost breaking wave behind me. I somehow skip high over it. I say to my Mom, you knew that was coming and didn’t tell me. She said yeah I wanted to see how you’d hold up. You did OK! My Dad is holding on to the dog and dog leash closely, he is concerned the dog will get carried off in the waves. The waves keep getting bigger. I’m going to dive into them before they break but Dad yells to me to stand still in order best get through them.

Later, a lagoon. I am swimming in it. There is a crocodile. Crocodiles mostly come out at night and congregate near the floating gas station for boats. I swim to the edge and prop myself up on an algae covered concrete shelf.

-

W comes to my new place and brings his lapsteel. I show him around the place. I look in the mirror and see that I am physically someone else, a man with long stringy brown hair, jowls and heavy clear glasses. I am surprised and dismayed. But I ignore this and go on as if I am myself anyway. We kiss and fool around. But then we are interrupted by my roommate outside the door. And restless moving around the apartment. It’s hard to get time to just focus on each other.

JFE April 22 (NYC day 35)

Walking into my old town, I notice the state of degradation of the entrance and it irritates me. It’s been that way for years. It doesn’t feel like i’m a child now, but throughout my dream I will suddenly be one for a few moments.  

Some time later, I am walking through the entrance again. This time I'm stunned by the beauty of everything. Its all new. All upkept. And lining the entire perimeter of the town (it’s a very very tiny town and apparently walled-in) are dispensers of vitamins, dietary supplements, and candy. I wave to the guy doing landscaping work out front. I realize that this is the work of the communists. There’s been a revolution. I associate it with the bolsheviks. I feel proud etc.

As I'm getting candy, skittles, sour skittles, things change and behind me is the ocean. I am a child, sort of. Then while swimming something terrible happens. I’m with my uncle and a few women I don’t recognize. It's hard to tell what happens next. He’s sucked underwater, but it feels like I am too. Tangled maybe? But there is a sensation, of something emerging from my leg, or something possessing me, which then becomes external. I yell out. He’s been sucked underwater. The woman next to me dives down with me. We come back up. She says she saw him being dragged down. We try again. This time breath does not seem to be an issue. We keep swimming, and soon see something terrifying in the panorama of rock far below us. The yellow body of a snake, miles of it, draped and coiled in the landscape below, unmoving. It must be at least a few feet wide, and seemingly infinitely long. Its tail somewhere in the distance behind us, and its head presumably somewhere beyond the edge of the cliff ahead. It feels, in the open water, like the thinking part of the snake could emerge from anywhere around us. We know that it has my uncle. We swim over the precipice. I don’t think we see its head, but we know it’s close. It seems to be sleeping. Over the precipice to the right, just below its lip we find something. It’s as though we’ve found him, but the snake has a bite or a grip on him and we need to cut it. Except my uncle doesn’t seem to be there and all we do is cut off a piece of the snake’s body. I pick up a length lying across a rocks. Its suddenly flat and thin, like a piece of plastic. I can't tear it, so I bite the edge then tear from there, like I'm opening a package of food. It works. The snake didn’t wake up. We return to the surface.

Later, I am with will and some other people. The same women? But i'm an adult now. And an old man is there. Are they family? I don’t think so. We’re walking to my apartment, taking a shortcut through a building. Many staircases, doors at the edge of barrooms etc. I get lost and think how the fuck am I lost walking to my own house? The others slowly follow behind. When we get there there’s a bar in the room beyond my apartment. We order drinks. I'm attracted to one of the women with me, who reminds me of the women from before. I recount this dream to these people. We order drinks. The old guy wants a hot coco and insists that they must have one, because there is some sort of chocolate thing on the table. The woman I was attracted to starts making a big deal about how the bartender’s making her drink, this all stresses me out and irritates me. I lose interest in these people. Will tells me he has an extra room at his house in Maine. This is an exciting idea.

Later I'm driving down the highway with my dad. Through the city with the leopards? We see a sign for the soviet union’s embassy, in a tunnel passing under the highway. I tell him to pull off because I need cigarettes. We get struck in traffic and he gets pissed. It's pouring rain. Eventually we get through and he, cheerful again, comments on how cheap my cigarettes were.

I’m working as a janitor in this strange building and doing a terrible job. At times it seems like a public school, at others like a house I’m not supposed to be in. I’m wearing a thong? Yes. A neon thong. From a strange boutique in the storage room of this building. It’s reminiscent of boutique shops I’ve stolen from in other dreams. I'm supposed to be changing the trash and they're definitely going to notice that I haven't. I can't even find the trash cans. I leave. Out front I find S, who I haven't seen since I was a kid. She’s with somebody I don’t recognize in a strange vehicle, with a cab about 10 feet up in the air.

Dreams April 17th-April 23rd.

RL Marseille. State imposed house confinement.

April 17th confinement night 31, confinement day 32

I’m in a semi-underground, no, just low down on the hillside, looks like a car sales warehouse/ carpark/ art gallery, and there’s a man in a suit there. He’s pleased to see me, he’s showing me around. There are several of him, like agents in the matrix? I’m joining their team? I am going to be useful to him?

The catastrophe implicitly happens. I see the map of the US stretched out (in 3d form from a 15 degree angle) in front of me. My godfather, Michael, contacts me: he has a job for me. His assistant wants to employ me looking after her baby? She’s going to India. She has bought a cheese and it turned out not to be good, called Reblouchon, and she wants me to take it back to the market.

I’m not hundred percent sure these are necessary tasks at the height of a pandemic. Production is starting tomorrow of whatever she’s doing in India. I’ll be a nanny, and I’ll be paid as a nanny, but the job will be interesting for me, don’t worry, I’ll be able to ‘contact’ actresses and so on. So, I’ll have ‘more interesting’ things to do, spiritually, but it won’t be reflected in better pay. I don’t want to accept but I feel maybe I should because my godfather asked me to. And the added pressure: the pandemic and the production starts tomorrow.

I cut up bits of different cheese into squares including some crappy ones from Lidl already in my possession. I sweep them into a drawer along with some sliced fried mushrooms, some peas, some rocket slathered in olive oil. I say there is no more exchanging at the market. I present the cut up things to my boss as pasta.

I’m in Kansas, in front of a small house, which looks like Victorian English workers’ cottage architecture. I’m confused because I thought houses in Kansas were bigger, more open and had more space between them. Here the yard is full of junk, I look on to a silver birch forest, though the silver birches are stumpier and sturdier, with thicker trunks than usual, not tall and elegant. I then look off to the right, hay, cornfields, the crop swaying in the wind. Light comes off the crops but there’s no light in the leaden sky. Kansas, Massachusetts, I think to myself.

Jacob calls me on the phone. This dream is clearly “about him” in some ways, Anne, a part of the old testament we once read together: the book of Ruth. I said I was safe and how was Anne. I said all the things I’d initially thought in my description of the yard. I couldn’t figure out why Kansas was in Massachusetts but I told myself it was the ‘mid-west’.

RL Marseille. State imposed house confinement. 19th April, day 34 of confinement, night 33 of confinement

I go see JC in his office. LT is there. Anna Mendelssohn’s poems is what we’re talking about. The book has big, actual gaping holes in it. I am jealous, but I have to take my flight home tomorrow.

I get to BK’s. She is played by Gwyneth Paltrow and is holding a baby. CK-D is briefly there, mourning her.  BW-C is there. Something - danger? - a hit?

We are in the countryside, next to a beach. The person who has placed a hit on me is dressed in an all red romper suit, and a mask. I unmask them on the edge of a cliff. Rather, someone else unmasks them. I can’t tell if they are sibling or lover. IX rips their mask off on the edge of a cliff and they kiss passionately.

We’re doing sport on the beach, running up and down the sand. Dangerous toffs come by on hoverboards or skateboards, dangerous, they almot kill me and I shelter inside a volleyball court.

RL Marseille. State imposed house confinement. Dream 21 April, day 36 confinement, night 35 confinement

I am in a country house with L - a fancy country house. Many people are milling around. It’s a bit like being with L and a bit like being with my ex, who is an aristocrat-rapist, HR. I start to act for the toffs. My French is not good but they find it charming. L starts to act, he is brilliant at it. We are at different times outside on the grounds, and inside in a glassy room.

A small threatening sequence in the corridor. This country house is a sanitorium, and everyone is dressed in hospital sheets. We are planning something among the nurses, we pass eachother conspiratorially in the corridors. CP comes, she gets my role in the film which I have been performing in front of a camera, with a circular window behind me.

My aunt K comes to visit. We go down to the basement at my childhood home to lock her bike. Dangerous. There are lots of bikes and dad is locking and unlocking them. I’ve disappointed him, maybe because I choose to write under a different name. There are big medical drawings on the floor in between the rails the bikes are locked to. Blood drawings. Virus: the bikes are not adequately socially distanced. I am cross with my sister’s boyfriend, FM, for locking the bikes irresponsibly.

K arrives, she wants her coffee ‘her way’ and says she will go straight off, will we have coffee first. My mum has found her a wrong coffee pot. I pull one out of the cobwebs, a small, 2 cup espresso pot. We will be there in a minute. The phrase ‘a thimbleful of blood’ comes to mind.

RL Marseille. State imposed house confinement. April 22 2020, day 37 confinement, night 36 confinement

I don’t remember my dream again, something about Sara, toast with dill and feta, a competition over it and a voluminous dress.

RL Marseille. State imposed house confinement. April 23 2020, day 38 confinement, night 37 confinement.

In a parallel reality I have an apartment with at least two rooms. One wall by the entrance is bordered with a tall fish tank which is like a book shelf, it is made of several shelves of separate fish tanks. It is ugly, like most furniture made to accommodate any technology or practical purpose. It resembles the furniture of post 1991 oligarchs, made of something like fake plastic walnut or mahogany wood.

There are many different compartments with different types of fish: tropical fish, goldfish. Some of the fish have a lot of character. They can’t breathe, it is my fault, I have bought too many and their collective body heat is making the water evaporate and the glass steam up. When I look closer I realise some of them are already swimming in mid air, with the reduced water beneath them. In the other room I have somehow managed to accumulate two other fishtank/bookshelves and they are in a similar state of decadence, although I have moved some of the fish to this one and it has become my principal project.  

I wish I hadn’t bought so many fish, why o why did I? Lines of banal goldfish are keeling over, an exquisite black and spotty fish is swimming in midair. I start panicking that it’s because I forgot to put the pump on, and as the chemicals aren’t being filtered into the water the water is heating up. I have put my fishtank from the other room next to this one. I’m trying to plug in the pump which is inside the tank, in one of the compartments with a straggly black angelfish. But when I switch on the pump I realise my fish are making an exodus in thin air round the back of the tank. Although they will dry out soon for lack of oxygen, they prefer to leave my hellish and neglectful care.

My apartment is geographically (temporally) located inside what looks like a medieval kingdom, a space of pageantry and bunting. Now I’m with F, and he has to leave soon, I take the wrong decision to bring him to my mother, to show him how much I like him, and because I’m proud of my mother. She has just been given a residency in the North, in Svalbard, to examine bears. He says how impressive this is, but she just berates herself and talks herself down, and then for no reason at all -since they have given her a large sum of money - talks about how poor we have always been. I am so ashamed, and her insecurity has really just been a way to wipe me out and talk about herself in these last few hours I have with my lover. F doesn’t mind, but I am mortified. They both leave by the ‘portal’, which is the bristly orifice of a bear.

I also leave by the portal and end up in a high school. I am the judge of a competition and there are a lot of people in the school that day. I am also being told I have to do my A Levels again, which suggests to me (to my absolute panic) that I haven’t done my A levels ever. All the things I thought I possessed as my own fixed intellectual ‘qualities’, reified in a trajectory of certified education, have diminished and fallen down before my eyes. I know for a fact that I’m university educated but I fear that by doing the A Levels I will be revealed as a fraud and my university diplomas will be invalidated. On top of this, despite being far too old for A Levels, I won’t even be very good at the subjects they have given me, chemistry and maths.

So, even though I’m a judge and a teacher, I’m sneaking through the crowds trying not to get caught because I don’t want to be brought to the exam hall. A high school student I once taught called Flora is walking past with her friend, who has long black frizzy curly hair. The friend is stressed because she has to go and have some kind of operation at the gynaecologist. I have had that operation, I say, pleased to be of help to someone, and start bragging about my many experiences of going to the gynaecologist and the STI clinic. I’m trying to send her a text showing her where she needs to go, and have accidentally enclosed a picture of my bare nipple. I keep trying to delete it, but every time I do I accidentally take a new picture of my nipple. It’s a nice nipple anyway, maybe I should just send it to show her how relaxed I am and to empower her to go to the appointment. I end with the nightmare thought: AM I A STUDENT OR AM I A TEACHER?

LA  April 12, 2020, (Michigan, USA)

Fragment:

Several of us are entering a theater. I think Rob went through one entrance, but once I realized it, "we" were entering another. I remarked on it,  and once inside, looked back to see where he must have come in from. But I didn't see him. We entered from the stage direction, and walked back to the rear. I was looking for Rob, but someone mentioned that Chris was already seated. I soon saw Chris. All the seats were behind long tables and I realized I was in my Economics seminar. I understood that Chris was visiting me. There were no empty seats, and many seats had bags or books on the table to reserve them. I realized we had to go to another "spillover" hall to hear the lecture. We left the rear of the theater outside into the night, on a campus. Someone, maybe Chris, pointed to a tower and asked what building that was. I said, "It's the lighthouse." I was aware of a kind of satisfaction in knowing Chris was seeing my world in academia. I knew that I had finished the Economics program, but was taking this last class. We entered a building beyond the lighthouse and that's all I remember.

LA April 16, 2020 (Michigan, USA)

Fragment:

I was in a restaurant. Nancy Pelosi was at round table with two others, but she wasn't with them, only sharing the table. I asked her where I could sit. I don't remember what she said. I remembered there might have been a bar upstairs and asked her if that were true. I don't remember what she said. She then told me about another place that had exquisite food. I asked which place. She said it was called "Between Seasons" and the food was top-notch. I then realized "Between Seasons" was another restaurant, not a part of the restaurant where I was and wanted to eat. I looked at Pelosi. The table was empty and Pelosi was sitting at a table to the side with two other people. Why was the table empty, why had they moved, I wondered.

LA April 18, 2020 (Michigan, USA)

Fragment:

I was in my "house", came out and a man I knew said the gaps in the brickwork were dangerous, i.e., structurally unsound. The building was dark red brick, sort of like a Chicago apartment house. I was worried, but when I looked I saw niches, a sort of corbelling at about knee high, that were obviously a part of the design, not missing pieces. The man reached around, grabbed something, then screwed a stainless-steel nut into the top of the niche to repair it. I was surprised it was so simple and expected him to fill in the void.

#2

I was in a house at night. I heard a noise and went to the front door, opened it and looked through a glass storm door into the night. The reflection didn't help and when I tried turning off the porch light, it was already off. I toggled the light switch and saw that it didn't turn on. Just then, a man came to the door and said, "Can I have the tobacco leaf?" I knew I was supposed to hand over a leaf to someone, so had it ready on a table within my reach. The leaf was as long as a palm frond and as dry as a fallen sycamore leaf. I handed it over and he took it.

OE 22nd of April, (London, UK) - Day 33

Note: This dream is followed by an interpretation

A Green Dream Framed by Clarice Lispector

A sleep of so many dreams, or perhaps a single dream that splintered into distinct chapters. Most of the dreams seemed to centre around a house that I was now living in; not only with Becky but many others including my father, who had difficulty waking up to go to work, and my colleagues, one of whom I morphed into and discovered, looking in the mirror, a disturbing black blotch that had spread all over my/his neck and collarbone. There were also strange pets in the house that had been assigned to us when we first entered. I was responsible for two dogs. Well, one of them was recognisably a Pomeranian, but the other was some strange kind of marsupial-dog-rodent type creature, both of which I neglect over the course of the dream.

But the most significant part of the dream took place in our room. Becky and I were facetiming our two year old niece. We wave into the screen of my phone: "Hello, Layla!". She giggles back. Then Becky points to the wall across the room: "Look! It's a cancer!" I look over to the corner of the room and there is a large green winged insect on the wall. It looks like a cross between an exotic moth or butterfly and a daddy longlegs. I try to show Layla by pointing the camera of my phone at the 'cancer' insect on the wall, but every time it comes into focus it flies away out of the light and into a shadow. It flutters about the room and whenever it lands on a patch of light I aim my phone but it escapes into the dark the moment the camera brings it into frame. I follow it out of the room and continue to fail to catch it with a picture.

Lots of other things happen in the dream. I seem to have become employed at a hospital and Alexandria Olivia Cortez visits us to thank us for our hard work. For some reason she spends the night admiring us all from a waiting room chair; she looks exhausted but inspired as she observes us going about our business. There's a big group photo being taken, but I'm new so I don't feel fully integrated into the team who are all giving each other comradely hugs as they line up for the shot. I'm indecisive about joining them so I stand hesitantly to the side, waiting for someone to tell me to get into the frame, but nobody does. Then I'm returning home, whatever 'home' is in this dream, and I pass through a thick, green forest. I encounter a man who has set up a shop in the forest for the homeless people who are living there during the crisis. I commend him for helping vulnerable people during these times, but I am surprised to discover that he actually charges them for his products. "They always manage to pay," he assures me. Then I find myself on a very soggy green grass path. I start accelerating down it, as if I'm in some kind of invisible vehicle or I'm just sliding down. I look around me and realise I'm travelling down a valley. There is nothing but mountains of trees on either side, so rich with multiple shades of green. I try to take a photo of it all to convey the beauty but it seems impossible. I try aiming my phone at the peak of the mountains but the trees just seem to go on forever, as if they domed the sky.

***

The first thing I realised about this dream after waking was that the 'cancer-insect' which Becky sees on the wall was a recollection of a Clarice Lispector story, 'Uma Esperança'. In Portuguese esperança means both 'hope' and 'cricket'. Although the disturbing contrast between the word cancer and the image of a beautiful green creature is in itself meaningful, it is very likely that 'cancer' was a homophonic echo of the last two syllables of esperANÇA. Since returning to the story, I'm surprised how much of it had wedged itself into my unconscious.

The Lispector story is a short scene in which a mother and her two sons watch a cricket walk across their walls, hoping that it doesn't get caught by the spider that appears from behind a picture frame. Despite the superstition that spiders bring good luck, one of the boys fetches a broom and kills the spider because he didn't want it to 'pulverize the hope!'. The boys revel in this momentary confluence of the abstract and the concrete and laugh at the pun. 'There was no doubt: hope had alighted in our home, soul and body.' The mother considers the fragility of the esperança and how 'it alights more than it lives' and how its 'delicately formed' 'little green skeleton' explains why she 'who likes catching things, never tried to catch it.' Her narration ends with a memory of another smaller 'hope' that once landed on her arm. She recalls how she didn't feel a thing and was frozen by its delicateness: 'I held extremely still as if a flower had sprung up inside me. I no longer remember what happened next. And, I think nothing happened.'

In terms of form, what appeals to me about this dream is how reveals a bridge between language and dream; the hybrid of the abstract and concrete, when the recollection of recent embodied sensations and experiences unearths a web of thoughts and memories. The surface stimulus for Becky saying: 'Look! A cancer!', sitting up in bed, came (I assume) from earlier that evening when I saw her lying down in bed with teary eyes. 'You ok,' I asked, 'What's up?'. 'Oh, nothing, just the usual: death and disease.'

I think this is part of what the dream was processing; quite explicitly reminding me of how Becky responds to the trauma of the outside world. Whereas I seem to distance myself from trauma through distraction, Becky confronts it directly with her entire soul and body which leads to a kind of stillness (much like the fragile stillness that ends Lispector's story). But of course, in the dreamworld, even being direct becomes indirect. She doesn't point and say: 'Look! A COVID-19!' (If she had my homophonic brain would have had her pointing at 19 crows), she said 'cancer', because my unconscious also wanted, for some reason, to establish a poetic-linguistic resonance; not only a dismembered, homophonic translation of esperança into cancer, but the hard 'c' creates a consonant echo of 'Covid' and 'Corona'. That's the concrete component. The abstract connection between cancer-esperança-hope would at first glance seem contradictory, but there is hope because there is cancer, or death and disease. Like the pun, there is an ambivalence here; something that is yet to be resolved, and perhaps can never be resolved.

Like the woman who narrates Lispector's story, Becky doesn't go chasing after the insect. She is aware of its fragility and has no intention of catching it (...as much as we also have no intention of catching the virus...). I, on the other hand, although not trying to ensnare the insect, do spend the dream chasing after it in order to capture its image to show to our niece. The boys in the dream similarly try to preserve the creature by actively protecting it from the spider. Is the dream trying to say something about gender and maturity? Passive and active approaches to the virus and our uncertainties about the future?

The other important detail which seems to run throughout the whole dream is the colour green. The other connection between Lispector's esperança and the cancer-insect is its greenness:

Right here at home a hope landed. Not the classic kind that so often proves illusory, though even still it always sustains us. But the other kind, very concrete and green: the cricket.

(Lispector, 387; trans. Katrina Dodson)

Concrete and green. This greenness at the moment, I think,  has to do with several things, primarily the environment and the 'green behind the ears'-ness of younger generations. I did wake up with that final image of the infinite green valley; the latent material for which came from clearing all the weeds from our (previously) very messy garden. We are incredibly privileged to live somewhere with a garden and therefore live amongst the greenness of 'nature' that appears to have returned with a vengeance. But the greenness also has to do with the curiosity of younger generations or, at least in my dream, an attempt to frame this moment in history to them.

Earlier that day I had been teaching my class of 12-13 year olds on metaphor. As a way of getting them to reflect on their situation I asked them what kind of animal they felt like during the Easter holiday lockdown. Restless dogs,  lounging cats, hopping rabbits. Their metaphors were fairly concrete: I was a rabbit because I jumped on my trampoline a lot. I was a dog because I wanted to go outside. I was a cat because I was lazy. But why should they be going any deeper at the moment when so many of us adults can barely focus on reading or writing for more than half an hour? (I am failing spectacularly at writing my novel and getting back to finishing The Magic Mountain; maybe this is why my dreams have started to pick up the slack.) I think that my attempt to frame the insect for our little niece was an echo of my attempts to get my students (who were framed in their own little Zoom squares on my screen) to frame their own experiences and try to understand what is happening. But I soon realise that I don't have any answers for them, especially for their very concrete questions:

'Mister? When are we going back to school?'

'I don't know, Tristan. We go back when we go back. But what animal do you feel like right now?'

So another motif in this dream was the frame. In Lispector's story the spider emerges from behind a frame. In my dream I am trying to catch the cancer insect within the frame of my camera but it keeps evading it; when I'm a nurse at the hospital, I'm not sure whether I'm within the frame of the comradely group photo of my colleagues, and right at the end, when I'm trying to take a picture of the sublime, infinite green forest that domes the world, I find it impossible to get it all within the frame. The latent stimulus for this is obviously how more pronounced our reliance upon framing things on our screens has become. I have to teach through zoom; students, colleagues and friends have become reduced to framed moving portraits; I'm using Instagram a lot more to represent my surroundings with pretty filters and captured 'shareable moments' and performances. We keep returning to our rectangles, hoping that some truth will emerge from them; as if it will help make sense of the ungraspable enormity that surrounds us; the endless unfolding of thick wet greenness smothering us all over.

I keep moving and chasing in an attempt to find some kind of illuminating stillness, but I keep falling into the shadows, always out of frame. Perhaps the dream and the story it remembers is telling me just to keep still and let the flowers spring up inside me:

Once, incidentally, I remember now, a hope much smaller than this one, landed on my arm. I didn't feel a thing, light as it was, I only noticed its presence when I saw it. I grew bashful at its delicateness. I didn't move my arm and thought: "Now what? what should I do?" I did nothing. I held extremely still as if a flower had sprung up inside me. I no longer remember what happened next. And, I think nothing happened."

(Lispector, 389; trans. Katrina Dodson)

source:

Clarice Lispector, 'A Hope' ('Uma Esperança), in Complete Stories, trans. Katrina Dodson (Penguin: 2015), pp. 387-9

LA April 22, 2020 (Michigan, USA)

I was working behind the counter at my bookstore. To the left, along the glass case part of the counter was my cousin Lorry (Larry), wearing a gold suit with bright red lining, and a matching red shirt and tie. I haven't seen him in 46+ years, so was surprised to see him; I noted to myself how he hadn't aged. I forgot what he bought. Then came Robert M, who looked exactly the same as when I saw him last in high school in 1975. (I noted that in my mind, and  contrasted that to how I must have looked in comparison.) Robert brought up two nylon, white yarmulkes faced inside-out, to purchase.  I had no idea of the price and thought they were part of a display we had set up. Another worker behind the counter and I discussed it, perhaps. At any rate, I said we should ask/tell/talk to the owner, whose name was something like Sally. I think I was aware that we all had been too close together and should have been distancing.

LA April 23, 2020 (Michigan, USA)

I was walking with Robin G through a park. She stopped and sat on the grass, and I kept walking with the understanding I'd be back. I walked on and eventually was in a large rally for the Democratic Party. I was towards the rear and it felt —like at Bernie Sanders' rallies—fairly upbeat. At a certain point I thought Robin would wonder where I was. I  headed back through the park, unsure, but not worried, as to how I'd find her. We (not "I" at this point) went up a slope and I saw this ornate tower in the park; looking forward I saw the old DeYoung Museum, indicating that I was in Golden Gate Park, albeit from another era. (The museum was built for an exposition in the 1890s.) Then I noticed, and remarked out loud, "I never noticed before how all of this had been laid out." In front of me, from the tower to the DeYoung and other buildings was a Baroque layout, offering a strong perspective from the tower to the DeYoung and the perfectly geometric gardens.

Then I was walking through an enclosed food hall, past different prepared food spaces, until I saw people lined up at one offering a type of sweet: fairly flat, covered in powdered sugar. I wondered if it were Turkish Delight. The people behind the counter looked Arabic and customers spoke to them in French. I didn't know what to buy. Then I was back in the political space and people were breaking up into little groups, meeting in different rooms. I think I expressed my ambivalence about staying, and some man said, "You have to be there when they call your name," or, "If your name is on the list." As I walked away from him I thought if I didn't show up to begin with, then I couldn't be obliged to stay. So I saw an escalator going up from, and down to, the Berlin subway and went down, wondering if I'd be caught leaving.

I needed to go to Kleiststrasse, but even though I was fairly certain I could board a train that I heard coming, I was looking at all the route signs. I couldn't find which line to take. I was going to buy a one-way ticket, but saw cups of gold Euros in 4, 10, and 20-Euro denominations, so took some and tried putting them in vertically into the ticket machine. They wouldn't go in until I shoved and twisted them into an almost horizontal position. A woman behind me assured me that I did it correctly, then led me to find where the ticket would be dispensed. "By the Star Wars display," she said. But the display was clearly not there. We were suddenly outside, going to a vendor selling black velvet items, all indistinct. The woman said something about the ticket being here.

MJZLAH - Lockdown Glasgow - 23rd April

Intense period paid - long deep convalescent afternoon nap

I dream first of just sensations of pain that form shapes. I can’t remember these very well, but there is a slimy milky browny blue landscape. I experience a cessation of pain (in real life?) and the sensation of this is depicted in me being inside a bulbous egg-shaped dark grey stone bath with high sides. The water is simple and warm, no bubbles. The bath is roughly hewn out of rock, sometimes it is like i am inside a real soft-boiled grey egg, and i occupy the space where the yolk would be. Later i wake up from this dream and i am trying to write it down on a piece of paper. Later i am again trying to write it down on my phone, knowing that writing it onto paper felt extremely difficult, almost impossible. Writing on the phone is the same. Pressing each key is extremely difficult. I am trying to describe the dark grey egg. It’s very important that i describe it as dark grey and not black. I think about what it would have looked like if the egg was black and shiny. I get up and go into the hall. The hall lights are on. It’s evening. There is water seeping out of the bathroom under the door, a big slowly seeping puddle of warm water on the hall floor. I push the door to the bathroom and louie is curled up next to the bath fast asleep, which he’s left running (he’s wrapped up in the quilt in which i am sleeping in real life). He stirs, but goes back to sleep (?) anyway it’s my job to turn off the taps. I start frantically trying to take off my slippers and socks but end up dropping them in the puddle anyway. I turn off the taps. Somehow the bathroom floor is bone dry, and the bath is perfect, not too full and full of bubbles. Louie gets up and i show him the puddle outside. He looks sleepy and amused. I get into the bath. It’s luxury. The bathroom is spacious and beautiful and clean (unlike reality). The only thing is the door is open. I get out to close it, and realise there are no walls on either side of door. I close it anyway, despite its futility at giving me the privacy i require. I am dying for a shit (in real life too!) and sit down on the toilet. Next to the toilet i am vaguely aware of a bookshelf full of childrens novels, like the full set of harry potter. I am constipated and can’t wait to get back into the bath. Now joe from this flat and louie come in cos the door has gone and some of his neighbour’s teenage children are here to see if they borrow some of the novels. The teenage boy comes in too. I feel annoyed and embarrassed, sitting on the toilet. I ask everyone but louie to leave and try and pick out a few books while still on the toilet - there are loads of series of books like those series of animorphs from the 90s. Dreams peters out here. The parent of the boy look pleased, they explain he’s not been reading, just sitting there. (this dream is during lockdown times)

 April 23, 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 38, Oakland)

SL: About 5 of us walk arm and arm through the city street singing Rhythm of the Night by DeBarge. Celebratory and happy. W is in the middle and I’m on the end. I look over at him lovingly. He is singing on and off.

--

I travel to meet W at the train station in Berlin. I get there and see him from afar standing at S’s bookstand. I remember that S has a bookstore, not just a bookstand. They are chatting. I just observe for a moment, and then I do something I don’t remember (change my jacket? put on makeup? something that requires opening my cross-body bag). Then I walk towards W and wave to S, who is giving me a strange and serious look. W and I kiss and hug happily. It feels so joyful and warm.

--

I am eating a chocolate cake on the floor with my friend in her room. A guy (her brother? a brotherly type) is throwing a ball around the hallway. It feels hostile and aggressive. He throws it in our room and I see that it is a tiny toy bomb, it will blow up. Feels dangerous and fucked up, he is menacing us. It’s fluorescent green and the size of my hand. I pick it up and throw it back out in the hallway towards him.

JS confinement day 40?

We’re in a large field, the light is breathy and damp and everything is very green, in a very English way, there are two large oaks hanging over the top of the field. It looks like the sprawling grounds of one of the private schools we would occasionally get shipped off to for our cruddy state school to play netball with them. I would get upset with my friends who’d lose their shit over being given sandwiches after a match or having proper changing rooms to get dressed in. They’re not better than us, I said to L, yeah but their school is, she responded.

My grandma emerges (except its not really my grandma, it’s some kind of fictionalised version of her) from a large stately home, again, this could be the boarding school, but in the dream, it is our home, or her home. She asks me to prepare dinner and I’m thrilled for having been asked. She tells me that my uncle has invited some friends, there will be 24 of us she says. I keep trying to tell her I can’t cook for 24 people, but I can only find the words in French, c’est un peu limite, I keep repeating. A colleague has arrived, he is wearing his Christmas jumper that a student gave him, it has Marx’s face on it and it reads, "all I want for Christmas is the means of production.” He’s standing next to a bbq under the oak tree holding up huge slabs of meat, what do you call this, côtes, in English? He’s asking me but I’ve forgotten how to speak so I just rub my belly in an over the top way.

I miss the dinner, busy in the kitchen constructing some huge architectural dessert, Eton mess or something, I’m shaping it like it’s on a pottery wheel, covering my hands in meringue and shaping it upwards.

We take dessert down to the bottom of the field, except its no longer a strange family dinner, friends are around and we’re celebrating something, or something political is happening. We arrive at the river and local school students have gathered on the other side of the banks and they are chanting in support of us. I see someone I had a fleeting crush on before quarantine, it’s now summer and he’s wearing bad sunglasses and I don’t fancy him anymore. We’re sat in rows trailing back from the river edge, organised by institution, his group have had t-shirts made up in support of the strikes at the beginning of the year and I feel contempt.

RL Marseille 24 April 2020, state imposed house confinement, day 39, night 38

dreamed my name was a girl Friday, i was naked and reading bolaño in a diner drinking a cocktail called Friday, it was gooey and thick and purple and I spilt it, the waiter kept bringing me drinks and saying "there's your Friday, Friday"

I had been to visit my family, my brother was weird and trying to save or take a hit out on my sister. She was Concetta like the girl in the Leopard, but actually Connie from the Godfather. We were all sitting in the diner but they were sitting at the table in front of mine and I kept butting into their conversation.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 24/04/2020, after six weeks of (solitary) confinement:

Scenes from a dream set in Berlin. I have been out in the city on some important business with S., my ex-wife of 7 years – the (academic?) matter in question seems strangely formalistic in nature, arranging numbers or something of the kind – this preceding, elaborate part of the dream is very sketchy. The streets are suffused by a light reminiscent of the thick shades and marked contrasts of a charcoal drawing – as if darkness is falling and holding back at the same time – the ashen light of an aftermath. We are moving through abstract architectural structures – a series of open courtyards. Cut. We are now at her flat, which I have not visited before. Sitting on the floor, we start embracing each other, very slowly and tenderly, as if about to cry. The embrace gives way to gentle kisses on our cheeks, moving towards our lips but stopping short of kissing them. I have the feeling of being observed, of observing us from the outside in a cinematic close-up à la Chéreau. Suddenly there is a small chimpanzee with us, S. has disappeared, I have no memory of her resurfacing again in the dream. (Is there another ape in the flat?) The chimpanzee gives me a long, thoughtful look, then starts swinging around in the flat. We do not touch. Cut. I am entering an apartment building which I identify to be situated just across Potsdamer Platz – there is a smooth red brick façade on the opposite street side with elongated windows. The building itself is an architectural landmark from the 1930s (?), the entrance hall looks like some Art Deco rip-off. I ride the elevator to one of its upper levels, together with a German TV actress in her forties. We do not talk. After I have stepped outside the elevator, I find myself in some kind of piazza which opens up to the much less refined façade of another building (?) – the latent memory of my first Studentenwohnheim. I let my eyes wander across its lower rows of mostly lit windows. I had entered the building complex in daylight, but now it is dark. My father is standing in the entrance of the building at some distance. He is engaged in the activity of what I make out to be reordering the tenants’ name plates. Oddly, their longish paper slips are fixed, as I note in passing, way above the entrance. Standing on a ladder (?), he calls out to me, seemingly in reference to an earlier conversation, I am embarrassed. I know that my mother is waiting for me in one of the small apartments. Cut. My parents and I have left my place to visit a museum, which looks like a huge department store filled with rows of (empty?) clothes racks. Its space is composed of different levels opening up to each other and connected by flights of broad stairs, and its floor and pillars are covered by some greyish, soft carpet fabric. My father informs me that he has spotted A., a colleague of mine, and his girlfriend B. on a lower level across from us and that he wants us to talk with them. I am embarrassed again – without knowing why. We go down to their level and talk to them. Smiling animatedly, B. tells me that they have been attempting to get access to a zone of Neukölln where they can be married. I vaguely infer that either marriage has been restricted to certain zones of Neukölln or indeed of all of Berlin or that their search has been prompted by the complete lockdown of the city the cause of which is unknown to me. I cannot make out whether they have been successful or not in their endeavour, but I do note her happy excitement.

MJZLAH lockdown glasgow 25th april

last night in my dreams i was spinning in the swirling snow in a field on my lunch break with joel white. joel white is my best friend in my dreams, every scene with him is so euphoric in a simple way. if i jumped up i span and flew with the force of the wind cos i am so light as a feather, it spun me up and spun me round. the sun was beaming through the haze of snow and it was such a small perfect moment. we just ran around for like 10 minutes, then went back to work. i was starting a masters at art school. it was my first day. we had to present our first idea, i had done some grey mournful sketches of landscapes across 2 pages of my big sketchbook. i told the tutor what my piece would be about - he was a big man - half alan gillis (my personal tutor at edinburgh uni), half steven wallis masterchef champion from 2007. he was a total snob. i went second, after louie. i said i thought my piece would be mostly “textual”, and he said “oh will it?” in a disparaging way. i said yes. someone else, helpful, looked on and explained that “alan” doesn’t like textual art. i said what about if i print it on a big canvas? “alan” said that would really be printmaking. the conversation drifts off. i find the other parts of the building. someone is painting interesting things in a corner. a woman sits smoking a cigarette on the threshold to the kitchens. The building was just like the reid building in glasgow, big and white. there was another tutor, a younger peppier woman, who saw me later in the dream and i knew instinctively that she would be supportive of my textual art. i contrived to talk to her about it at some point. (ironically alan gillis IRL is a successful poet.)

RL Marseille day 40, night 39 of state imposed house confinement.

I am in an underground restaurant. We are not allowed to assemble so we are trying to be clever about it. The restaurant is owned by a Punjabi family. There’s a kind of student party that we’re trying to gatecrash, students from goldsmiths, that will happen later on. Are you sure we’re welcome? I ask SD, who I have come with. Let’s just have a kulfi and then leave. We go closer to the table where the family are assembled, and try to read the laminated menus underneath their plates and cups, from a distance. We want to order a kulfi or a Lassi. I get caught up thinking of what flavour of Lassi I want. The family are chill about the curfew and are not really listening. I wanted a rose Lassi or a salt Lassi (the restaurant is pale pink and green), but I end up getting rushed and ordering a mango one, or maybe I say Rose and they say Mango, not hearing me, and I’m too embarrassed to correct. Me and SD go and sit down at a half empty table which was previously empty and we kick ourselves for having got up to order, the people at the table have been sitting down and they already have their drinks. When the Lassi arrives it isn’t a lassi, it is a steel vat of ‘kulfi’ except it isn’t kulfi, it’s more like a big drum of candyfloss (blue, white and pink), being swirled around by a slow, steel arm, you have to reach to get at it and you risk losing an arm.

Something about my family. In any case they come and we live in the house they’ve bought, which is a bit like the long, galley, kitchen of one house we lived in, crossed with my parents’ bedroom, and the bedroom of another house. My old bedroom - the only one I ever lived in independently of my sister - is adjoined to this room. There is also a prairie-house-ish kitchen with wooden boards. Honestly, it’s a fancy house. What’s weird is my sleeping arrangements are all compromised; for example, in the long room there’s the long bunk bed my Dad built for us with her bed at one end and mine at the other, but much more sombre, and I am supposed to sleep under my part of the bed in a kind of grey-curtained compartment. I don’t want to have this type of redundant furniture in my bedroom if my sister doesn’t want to sleep here too. It seems a waste and a fiction, and an infringement on my sexual freedom. “Look”, I say, I bring my Mum up to inspect what it’s like up here, we stare down the bed corridor together “I hate my side of the bed I say, It’s weird and creepy. Ish had the right to a double bed before I did, even though she’s younger. Here I have to live in a fantasy, plus she’s not even here, so, why the two beds?” We agree I’ll have my old bedroom back, and I see it clearly, as well as the (European) queen size bed which reminds me this is partly a fiction. I feel a twinge of guilt.

Then, in their prairie-house kitchen, a square room that opens on one side to the outside like an American porch. It’s a fancy house, apparently, but apparently not: there’s a huge problem with the plumbing. A steel bath in the corner of the kitchen. I go into the back kitchen which is the real kitchen and find that there’s a constant leak, the water runs on the outside of the pipes like a stream, and the floorboards are open. A stream runs through the house as a permanent feature. Implicitly, someone is staying with us, which is where my shame and embarrassment comes from.

Next, I’m in a lecture hall. I have come to see Sami in Cairo. I meet someone at a party in the corner of the lecture hall, a kind of biker-aristocrat with long hair in a ponytail, a mustache, a leopard print flowy blouse, with red (?) or yellow ochre (to match the background of the leopard print) trousers. He looks kind of good, kind of like a pirate, kind of like a lothario. I’m interested in him but only insofar as he displays such a direct indifference or contempt toward me that I can flex my power and camp routine of being over the top. I give him my number in a display of sexy contempt for him. I can be outrageously forward in such a contemptuous situation. He grins wide, revealing a threatening row of gold teeth.

Sami is giving a lecture from another part of the lecture theatre, the middle, he is standing up from his chair. He’s wearing a fancy honey coloured fur bouclé hat, and matching boots, which although they are fancy also look like they are cheaply constructed -- they come from some kind of deadstock of a far flung corner of St Petersburg CCCP. He’s trying to give a lecture on Hegel’s Logic, and some American liberal students put their hands up as soon as he begins to speak to give a description of the immediate subjective feelings this reading and the lecture have brought up for them. We can tell it’ll be something cheap about how we shouldn’t read Hegel because he’s a man, and how Sami occupies a particular space as the man giving this lecture. I feel like such a good student and good friend of Sami as I anticipate Sami’s response and then he gives exactly the response I think of (after all, it is my dream) “Do you think we want to hear about your subjectivity? Do you think this lecture is a space of demagogy and populism? No! I am trying to teach you about Hegel, and in learning about Hegel you may even destroy what subjectivity you claim to have”. But people are still talking during his intervention - they resemble two, shaggy, black and white sheepdog-poodle cross breeds. All at once, the laws about social distancing and about not talking during lectures become the same laws, and I take great umbrage and start to yell at them about safety and Sami becomes fed up and terminates his lecture early. We walk up the steps and I tell him how happy I am about his boots and hat, and he says, as he always does, that of course “we always have the good style”, and then starts talking very specifically about what kinds of weapons would have been bought with the hat and the boots and vice versa.

I sideline off to see my old flatmate, who is sitting at a table at the top of the auditorium. I am very happy to see him, our third flatmate shows up at the end of the aisle. She has been ‘taken’ recently by a love of astrology and this is apparent in her image. She is dressed in a frumpy burgundy dress, spattered with white flowers, and a heavenly ray of light is falling on her. I am glad because her madness brings me closer to my male flatmate, but I also feel guilty and disloyal.

Dita Von Teese shows up wearing a powder blue pencil skirt of a loose, viscose type fabric, and no shirt, her pendulous white breasts bare. She is introduced to my aristocrat biker and goes really crazy for him. I think they get married, which suits me because he’s too obsessed with me, and I think he probably will murder whoever he has the least respect for, so him marrying her will keep me in a relatively safe position (what atrocious things are in my dreams). Still, her desire for him sparks my desire for him, and I realise my time is running out, and I masochistically want to have his danger inflicted on me, I also have desire for Dita Von Teese, her wet black hair and her pendulous breasts. So I set off alone, naked, working my way across the heather and peat fields in an 18th century Scottish countryside. I am looking for their manor, even though I know he is really the Marquis de Sade and she, his attractive wife. It’s strange that I’ve made this decision now because I’m going to him naked and without any of the potential benefits and securities he promised me: marriage, motorbike rides, a manor or mansion, money. So I’m walking across the heather, naked, and it’s a treacherous countryside and I am quite aware that I am Pamela from the Richardson novel. There are knights in armour who might snatch, rape or kill me at any point, or bring me to their masters. I am looking for one such master but the difference being that me and my master have already exchanged contacts and have a personal relationship, he has a soft spot for me - it is at this point my only possible safe option. There are also long stretches which are the gated property of other mansions, and also those kinds of motorway-side adverts for new developments, pottery barns and sculpture gardens, it has become post-industrial and suburban.

I cross under a bridge on top of which there is a castle and enter into a mossy, medieval city, and I open a door to my left which looks on to a staircase which curves around the ramparts of the castle. I walk down it because I know I’ve already missed the turn in the road to go to him, I’m hoping to get there quicker, or maybe I want to be caught. A knight with an arrow sticking into his eyes through his visor seizes me but I think Oh no no no , not like that, I want to reach my own Sadist, this is an erotic dream in which I take pleasure, I’m going to keep dreaming and contourner ce danger ! So I twirl away from him and skip blithely down the steps, but I cannot stop spinning around like a spinning top, I have lost my bearings, and so I wake up.

April 24, 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 39, Oakland)

SL: A chasm in space looks like a giant translucent jellyfish. I pass thru it and my body shakes as I enter thru. W passes thru it and his body shakes as he enters thru.

MJZLAH glasgow lockdown 26th april

dream of the day something to do with shirley pegna, my boyfriend’s mum. shirley pegna’s name in the dream is jack braille which is a mix up of jacques brel and georges bataille i think. there are miniature copper pipes wrapped around shirley’s fingers very satisfying and shiny and pleasing. there is a point to it all which is now lost. i want to tell louie about this and much of the rest of the dream involves returning to this scene and putting it into words, rehearsing the words over and over again, moulding and remoulding the scene in order to remember it and make it vocalisable, and when i wake (irl) i find with frustration that it has not worked and i do not remember my spiel really. apart from the jack braille bit and the copper pipes, but i think i invented the jack bit at some point in the remoulding process i don’t think that was an original part of the original moment i dreamt about shirley but then that doesn’t really matter because i still dreamt the jack part. my dreamself trying to make the dream moment legible to the waking self. quite interesting. there is another part about dave and hayley being part way through doing up the bathroom. they have put a door in the bathroom because before there wasn’t one except this new door they’ve put in is behind the wall so first you have to open the whole wall which swings opens like a huge door with a hinge on one side, and then it’s an illusion cos the door is there but it’s hard to see it cos it’s camouflaged under all this plaster stuff and white paint like its been painted over and i’m the first person to open it and crack all the paint off the sides. at first i open the wall and approach what seems like another wall and i bang on the wall and it’s a very strange feeling and that’s when i hear the hollow sound of the door and realise the door is there but just hard to see. inside the bathroom is all weird and it’s not actually my bathroom but a bathroom from my dad’s flat on peacock street when i was growing up, but with the sink in the wrong place, and there is a bright blue wall behind the toilet which is a horrible shade of primary colour royal blue and hayley and dave have written all over the walls over and over again from floor to ceiling (like the shining REDRUN/all work and no play makes jack a dull boy) in big painted capitals something like a warning like BATHROOM NOT FINISHED WET PAINT ETC. ETC. and the sink itself is also roughly painted blue in the same colour, you can see all the brushstrokes and its terrible but i remember thinking that’s definitely how it’s always been and it’s nice that they’re gonna do it up, i assume that’s something they’re in the process of changing. i go for a wee on the toilet and the toilet spurts water up at me whenever i let any wee out, like a raging sea in the toilet. it’s quite funny in the dream, or quite entertaining, a little bit stressful. there’s another bit with a garage, and some kind of domestic scene. my mind is on the very edge of remembering this bit and it’s getting mixed up with a dream from a few nights ago when i am standing at a doorway of a house and it’s dark and there is someone walking up the garden path and there are little floodlights lighting the path so it’s a bit hard to see the person because the lights are a bit dazzling and i expect them to come in the door to see me and i am ready to welcome them, i am fond of this person and they are female and pretty, maybe with their hair in little bunches, but then just as they reach the door they step to the right and out of view and suddenly they are behind me in the hallway and i turn around and it’s a disconcerting feeling and they actually came in by another concealed entrance to the right of me which i didn’t know about and which doesn’t really make sense in my understanding of the architecture of the house. but now they are in and i greet them anyway.

 OE, 25th of April , London, Day 36 of Lockdown

A dream of languages and two recurring locations from previous quarantine dreams: Budapest and China.

Unlike a dream I had a few weeks ago in which I'm trying to leave Budapest (which is actually London), I am now on a train platform trying to get to Budapest. It is quite crowded, but there's no sense of rush or bustle. I notice that tourists keep going up to a Hungarian ticket inspector and hand him their passports and some coins. I wonder whether they are paying for visas. So I go over to the inspector and ask him in (shaky) German: "Muss man ein Visa kriegen, um Budapest zu besuchen?" <sic> I don't think he replies. I never leave the platform.  

Elsewhere in the dream, I'm with my old friend (who had turned up in my previous London/Budapest dream). It's his birthday (which in reality is in November) and we notice a sign that has some writing in Chinese. I try to interpret the writing. For some reason I assume it needs to be read from right to left (like Arabic). I only recognise a couple of the characters and I translate them homophonically so that it sounds like: 'Birthday Boy!'. The two characters were, 不 and 的 (bú and de), put together, 不的  不, I translated bú-de bú into Birthday Boy.

These are two of the most common Chinese characters and they are primarily grammatical. 不 signifies a negation, while 的 is a genitive particle indicating possession. Could these characters actually mean anything in Chinese when put together? Google Translate interprets,  '不的' as 'Nope', while 不的 不 is 'no no'. I will ask an actual Chinese speaker when I can, but nonetheless the 'poem' in this dream could be something like this:

                                                                    不的 不

                                                                bú-de bú

                                                                    Birthday Boy

                                                                    No's no

JS - confinement day 43

I watched Caché by Michael Hanneke last night. Normally those kinds of films give me nightmares. I went to bed anxious.

I dreamt, all night, that I was waxing my legs, slowly and methodically, sat on a stool in the bathroom.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 27/04/2020, after more than six weeks of (solitary) confinement:

Fragment of a much longer dream. I am in what feels like my old room in my parents’ flat. I recognize bookshelves, with very few books in them. I have come to look for a particular book, I am in a terrible hurry – I am about to be sent away from the city/country (it feels like deportation), expecting to be arrested very soon. My mother is with me in the room. I find the book, it is clothbound with a white cover, coarse to the touch, like canvas. I notice that it is not the exact edition I need, but it is the only one at my disposal, so I will have to make do with it although it is not scholarly sound. I hastily flip through its table of contents, looking for a specific set of texts (or section). Without seeing the title, I know that is a compilation of writings by Hannah Arendt. I am intently searching for her sequence of dream texts [NB: in her entire Denktagebuch, there is only one very short summary of a dream in the space of over 20 years], the lines and letters of the table of contents are very close to my eyes, dancing around, blurred and distinct at the same time. I finally identify the dream sequence, being very elated about it – the German adjective glücklich captures my sentiment, more than happiness and different from joy. I show my discovery to my mother. I do not remember what follows after – if I take the book with me, if I leave the flat. In the dream, I do not read Arendt’s dream texts, I only know for certain that they exist.

JS - Confinement day 44

I dreamt that there were large ants under my bed, except their bodies were nauseatingly swollen and crustacean pink, each was the size of a small mouse. On the sloped ceiling that hangs above my bed were damp spores. There was another kind of threatening insect too, but I can no longer remember what it was.

I was unwell and confined to the bed and being tended to by my ex boyfriend, I didn’t tell him about the infestations though, I was embarrassed and trying to hide it from my housemates, and so every time he left the room I would check under the bed and sometimes they’d be there and sometimes they wouldn’t and I woke up and they weren’t there but I couldn’t be sure.

JFE April 28 (NYC day 41)

Me and J are dressed in drag. Their makeup is done perfectly. There is a woman in a tiger suit pressing our shoulders to the ground in a way that makes our breathing stop. I think I’m in love with her. I’m anxious. About my relationship with these people, about feeling unwanted, among other things. Joking, I tell the woman in the tiger suit her eyes are beautiful. I expect it to be late at night, but when I turn around it’s the morning, and the sun’s slanting thru the window of J’s living room. I realize we are about to begin our day together.

MJZLAH lockdown glasgow 28th april

(Did i already write the one where trump was my flatmate???? Can’t remember it now but oh well)

Last night: as i was waking for what felt like hours i dreamt of different types of ice cream. Making ice cream for my dad cos it was his birthday? He made me choose a sandwich out of the bottomshelf of a brightly lit counter in a corner shop before i went to make the ice cream. I chose a veggie wrap, vegetables in cream cheese - it looked pretty boring. I went round the back streets of a red brick town to get back to the primary school where the industrial size ice cream churner was - an ancient 1950s thing in the main school hall and there was also one for making bread. I visited this school several times over in the dream - sometimes the school is empty, sometimes it is being laid out for lunchtime, with long tables in an arc formation and little place mats with faded pictures and tiny chairs. When i make the ice cream the kids are in eating. There is a huge grand piano behind me and i know there’s a teacher who plays it. I think what a great school this is. There is vast amounts of fresh seeded bread, sliced unsliced, on a big stainless steel counter, all types of bread, about 100 loaves scattered about and crumbs. I want to make vegan ice cream out of avocado, and am deciding whether the better flavour would be raspberry or chocolate & marshmallow. My dream swirled around these flavours for hours, thinking avocado raspberry chocolate marshmallow over and over, mixing all these up into one zingy flavour. Someone who worked in the school told me that the ice cream would take 24 hours to churn once i’d put it in - disaster! Dad’s birthday is right now! We had to wait. There is a table full of ice creams. In big bowls. One of them is caramel chew chew by ben n jerrys. Its texture is divine. There’s other toffee one that has big chunks of mars bar in. the vegan one is dark and delicious but a weird texture, more like bread. Louie tries to do acupuncture on the side of my forehead and i ask him to stop - he’s not asked permission. I’m angry about that. It’s a big buffet. BEFORE. I have been asked to do a shift in a hospital because of covid-19. Everyone has to do one, never mind not being qualified. I am nervous. I oversleep and take an age to get dressed - i have so many clothes to put on. I’m living in some kind of chaotic dorm. I am several hours late for my shift i realise. I feel terrible about this. The shift is almost over. But i also know i only have to do this a couple of times and i’m a volunteer and probably a lot of people don’t show up. I do a bit of hospital stuff, just walking around corridors. I get changed after this in the chaotic living quarters, but it’s all a bit vague. Piles of clothes everywhere and beds.

There is another part of this dream where I am working/lounging around a big natural pool of water, quite muddy slopes leading down to a pool of water full of wildlife but also people swimming with blow up swimming pool rings in the shape of friendly dragons, etc. with cocktails with cocktail umbrellas in etc. it is a holiday atmosphere, very hot. But the environment is far from hotel luxury, we are lounging in piles of crispy leaves and we are in a rainforest place, very raw and wild. I am with my colleagues from bike for good, and we are at “work”. “Work” is growing cats and birds from seed. To grow a bird or a cat, you plant seeds in very little earth, and then the seeds grow into eggs and then the eggs hatch into birds or cats. We are growing them in the big white greek yoghurt pots you get from lidl, that are lined all along the edge of the pool. Inside the pots the seeds are growing into little eggs, some of them are tiny, others are growing faster and look the size of quails eggs. I feel very protective, proud and excited. The eggs are covered in little bits of dirt and the yoghurt pots let a little light through. It feels very real.

FM Hudson Valley, day 35

Vladimir Putin had been made monarch of the world. His ascension to the throne was part of a KGB plot — a long con that originated in the USSR. As soon as he became king he put in place a working, global communist system and dissolved the monarchy. There were camera flashes on a red carpet, celebrities, smiles and handshakes as I watched the announcement on TV.

FM Hudson Valley, April 29

Post-pandemic world, everything is owned by Amazon, there is no US government, everyone lives in tiny houses. My partner and I are invited to “go to the movies” by an unseen acquaintance. “The movies” turn out to be one of these small houses. The carpeting and furniture are similar to memories of my high-school — thin, mat-like carpet ripped up around the edge by the walls, tall tables with metal legs and wood-laminate tops. I can’t see over the tops of the tables — as if we are children in the Peanuts cartoon, our hosts (the adults) are hidden from view. The carpet begins to tear-up from the edges and close in on us. It is revealed that the hosts have a sexual fetish regarding cats, and the invitation to the movies was, in fact, part of a ploy to get to our cat. In the fracas caused by trying to defend the cat, my partner disappears, has been kidnapped. I am awakened by my own whimpers feeling afraid and alone.

JFE April 30 (NYC Day 43)

Some kind of brawl between workers (?) in a parking lot. Later, racking shit from a tiny strip mall in the middle of nowhere. Supplies. We get caught and end up running. Me and R are planning to burn down a building, or a large truck (hence the supplies). I feel very self-righteous about it. It feels like the owners of this place in the woods have wronged us all somehow. And I realize I’ve been here in another dream. Something threatening, an escape. Anyway we want revenge. There’s a gate at the front where people with fishing passes can enter. I note where each security camera is located, and climb in through the window. I look around then leave the same way and go to discuss it with R. Sitting on a balcony with friends in NY. I ask them to imagine all of this, but somewhere beautiful, like missouri. So as to suggest we all move there. I return to my apartment, which is narrow and maze-like, and find everybody, A, G, O, M, S, etc. Many friends from Chicago, and we’re all living together. More conversations, masturbation, vertigo-inducing flight, the ocean etc. The dream unravels.

April 30, 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 45, Oakland)

SL: My mom and I have guests over at our big, very old spacious house. I am flipping through a book of my work that I never really looked at much. Turns out the line spacing of poems is not correct and there is artwork behind the words that makes it hard to read. I can’t find the poem I want to read aloud to our guests and finally just say, well you can read it later if you like.

Then I am in my new bedroom. I share it with about 5 other people. Some have beds, some sleep on the floor. I sleep on the floor near a big window with a shelf in front of it. The window is ajar, I close it because it is cold. This house is very old, perhaps from the 1800’s, the glass panes old and thick. Someone has put her sleeping back in my sleep space. I debate whether I should move it or just get under it and sleep. I think about putting a lamp on the window shelf. Then I will have a nook of my own and a place to write.

--

I am in bed, there is a woman with her top off and her tits shaking. Every few seconds she turns into a different woman. Nothing else happens but it is very sexy.

May 1, 2020 (shelter-in-place Day 46, Oakland)

SL: Busy grocery store with J. Teenage girls push past us in line. We pay for our items and walk through the city. I discover my bank account is -$30,000 for the next 5 days and I don’t know how I’ll buy food and get around. I tell J and ask her if I can borrow $500 for the next few days. We are climbing the stairs to my apartment. She says yes, of course, we’ll stop by her apartment to get it. Later, we are still in my apartment. I go to take a shower and see that my clothes are in the toilet. I ask J about this. She’s like, there was no where else to put them. I say, just put the toilet seat down and put them on top. I’m a little mad. Then I feel guilty because she is going to lend me $500. Then I think that shouldn’t matter. I wonder when we are going to go to her apartment to take care of that. I feel that sunken, anxious feeling I feel when I’m broke and somewhat desperate.

MJZLAH glasgow lockdown 30th april

Supermarket dream. Driving to a supermarket up a hill in a snazzy 70s mercedes. The car works by changing gears and this is the speed setting. There is no accelerator. It takes me a moment to realise this is how the car works. It is a good feeling to get the car to go faster. It still feels like an effort to get it to move anywhere. When you put it into second and then third and then fourth the revs go up loads and are really loud but you can feel the force of the forwards motion increase and drive you forwards. Then you can use the brake to control your speed a little. I go into fourth to go up a really steep hill. The revs are super high and the car struggles but it slowly and steadily gets up the hill. I feel weird going up a hill in such a high gear. I get to the supermarket. It’s sunny and like i am in a foreign country, maybe spain. I am doing a big shop for the house. I can’t park properly and keep driving up the entrance ramp of the shop and nearly through the automatic doors. I reverse really well and eventually manage to park in a very long bay. The car park is pretty much empty, but the shop is very full. It’s closing time. People don’t social distance when i am getting a shopping basket and i get very exasperated with people. I can’t decide what to buy. The shop is full of exciting things. At the ends of the aisles there is a chilled fridge section displaying ice creams which you can scoop yourself. The flavours are pineapple and strawberry. People are scooping a bit and carrying on. There is a beetroot flavour. The ice cream is in big bowls and baskets, sometimes in big tubs, neatly arranged like in a posh section of a supermarket. And maybe a nut one. I am intrigued. Foreign supermarkets are fun! I continue shopping. I am looking for a particular type of ready made syrupy cake, but i can’t remember the name of it exactly. There is a proprietor of the supermarket making announcements near the bread section, which is an area at the end of the building which seems to have huge golden arches and a golden glowing appearance. Beyond behind her i am aware of people shopping in this golden area but i never go beyond this part. I stick to the front part which is aisles and feels like a normal supermarket. She is extremely tall and glamourous, dressed all in flowing black clothes, mixed race, very beautiful with a big relaxed afro, and she seems more like a gallery owner than a supermarket worker. I ask her about the cake and she takes me to the back aisle which is full of cakes in boxes, and she shows me a “white chocolate titties cake”, which is white with a little pair of white chocolate tits in the middle. I say this is not what i’m looking for. I can’t find the cake in the end. She shows me the chocolate section which is a whole aisle. I see some reduced fancy chocolate in colourful packaging and think about buying it. She shows me to the most expensive chocolate which is sold in slabs that are the size of table tops, leaning stacked against the wall in greaseproof paper. They cost 11euros. Which in the dream is very expensive, despite their size, or i can’t really work it out. They are very luxurious. I go back to the cake aisle to browse. There are big glass demijohns of interesting brewed tea, and boxes of cakes. This shop is very fancy. A bit like the food aisle in TK Maxx. everything is a bit strange, and has rustic style packaging. The cakes are boxed up like panettone at christmas. I go to the end of the aisle to look at the spices. I am feeling the pressure to take back a good load of shopping to my flat but i can’t decide on anything. There is nothing normal in this shop. I see a bunch of samphire and pick that up. I look at a million types of peppercorns. Next to the peppercorn section you can buy a pair of brown boots and the samphire. I nearly buy a grinder filled with pink and black peppercorns, and miniature fresh red bell peppers, which i have never seen. The bell peppers are the size of the peppercorns and very cute. I move over to the counter where there are plastic plants for sale for your home, like little fake succulents and small green leafy plants. There are fake bamboo canes and bullrushes and “jungle” decorations. There are some fairy lights that are shaped like mini coconuts, with a fake husk enclosing a little lightbulb which represents the coconut flesh. I think of buying these because they are clever. And i think back to a (real) conversation with my flatmates about how coconuts grow and now i know. I must tell them.

MJZLAH glasgow lockdown 2nd may

Bullet point list as last night was so disparate

• Dreamt of cooking a crumpet in a “slow grill” for an hour. Was worried it would be burnt but When it came out it was the perfect golden crispy crumpet
• Dreamt i was pregnant and had a realisation that the baby was 1 month overdue. I was being questioned on this and we all realised together how bad this was. I asked “should i go to the doctor?” i thought about pregnancy and how other people say it is an incredible experience, whereas for me it has just been “meh”. When i am thinking of this there is an image of a glowing blue ATM. I really don’t want a baby all of a sudden. I am panicky thinking about the raising of kids. Images of raising kids comes into my head, them always needing your attention etc. i think about how i cannot just sit around one day staring out the window and reading a book/going with the flow/doing nothing etc.
• I visit a bank to cash a checque. It is natwest. My friend noah also has to go. She is watching a television screen and complaining that the £100 that they promised her for getting a friend to switch their accounts (me) is very slow to materialise. This natwest is like a pop-up hipster bank in a covered market with clothing stalls and food places etc. it has brass handles and a high mahogany desk like it’s from a period film, and 2 trendy young women bank tellers. I have to write my earnings down on a form in a box that is too small to fit them all in. i write “£117” at the bottom of a list.
• I have been offered a flat from the housing list and it’s in a strange street in london which is inside another building (in real life my application for a housing association flat is stalled by covid-19. This is not the first time i’ve dreamed of a fantastical version of my potential new home). I am quite excited to go and view it. It is in a grand marble building which is a gigantic hall and inside there are 2 built lifelike streets with shops and houses. Completely deserted and completely silent. The floor of the “street” is stone slabs in a diagonal pattern and i say to my companion (i think my bf) that “it’ll be like living in a church!” i browse the street looking for the doornumber to my flat. There are fake roofs and facades and everything looks very lifelike, like a smart street in a posh part of london, like mayfair or somewhere. I go to the street behind the first street and to the very end of it where there is a dancewear shop/dressmaker stall against the wall of the actual building. It’s quite dimly lit this place, with one bright light. I browse the garish shiny leotards on hangers along one side, realising there are two women working in there on a big dressmaking table, i thought i was alone browsing this street/building so i am a bit embarrassed/shy. They know me it turns out and it also turns out i sort of work there/used to work there. Some awkward small talk and i want to get away
• I return home having gone through a break up. Everyone knows i am sad. My house is up some steps. My parents have come to visit. It’s all set in this weird “London” that is sort of topsy-turvy, sort of like a set from a film. It’s dark now and the streetlamps are lit. i go to help Will get his stuff to bring up to my house. We walk along the cobbled street a bit to get it. There’s some big duffel bags and 3 electric guitars on stands in a dark corner of the street. We comment on his belongings, especially the guitars, laughing. I carry 2 very big bags towards the house but my legs are unable to really move properly because of the weight of them and it’s a really weird feeling. Eventually i get the hang of it and drop the stuff off upstairs. At the door on the floor are three black caps and one of them is my boyfriend’s with a pink oval sewed on the front (an object from real life). This is not the person i have broken up with in the dream, and i am excited at the thought he might have dropped round to see me as a surprise, and can console me about my breakup. I am aware that there are lots of visitors in the house, and i can hear them at the end of the corridor, in the kitchen. This house is sort of open to the elements, there are no external walls, but i do not “see” this, i am just aware of it. I look around for louie but can’t find him so i try my room thinking maybe he is waiting in my bed. On opening the door i find an older man reading in my bed, with a scruffy white stubble and white hair. I am shocked/embarrassed/confused/angry my room has been used without my permission. This is obviously one of the guests. I say sorry and leave. I go to look again at the black cap, and it turns out i mistook it for louie’s, it is actually black with red flames going up the front. I go through to the kitchen, suddenly desperate to socialise with all these fun guests. People are sitting round the table, having been involved in some kind of game. Some of them are on their hands and knees, and leaning right over the table. I exclaim “let’s play a game!”. They invited me into the game they were playing, handing me a piece of paper with a musical score on it and i had to guess the song. There were three notes repeated at the beginning, and i thought of a couple of pop songs it could be (now forgotten). Then a bob dylan song was playing and i was humming it, and they were all like “that was it!”. And then there’s another game being played involving a piece of paper. My flatmates are around, definitely michael and jess, and these guests are all their friends.
• Later i am outside downstairs from the house. There are stone walls that are damp and covered in green slime and moss, like walls in the underground arches of abandoned railways. It is a party atmosphere. But i am sad, still going through this breakup. Michael takes me aside and we are walking to do something away from the crowd and he says “you know, i’ve seen you smoking weed every day, opportunistically from others, and you know that is not going to help”. I protest that i have not been smoking weed (which is true) and that he’s got it all wrong and that i know what’s good for me. I say “i haven’t smoked weed since christmas. No, since before christmas. I can’t even remember the last time”. I am now sitting with jo smith and we are talking and then i have loads of leaves, long thin pointy ones neatly piled on top of each other and i go and give them to jo, and i stuff them inside a packet of chocolate he is holding and he scolds me and says “don’t. I’ve been talking a lot about you to someone and this chocolate is for them and now they will be upset”. I am upset by this and wonder if he means his partner and now she will somehow know about our romantic past, which i am not sure if really has happened. (in real life it has not happened/ever been on the cards). I complain to others that jo has been talking about me in depth to someone and i know that others will agree that this is very immoral/out of order.
• I am watching some kind of theatrical production/huge screen showing a film and there are people around who have been involved in making the show. It’s all very disconcerting and surreal
• The whole of this dream is very unsettling.

MJZLAH: 4th April

Some kind of dream about humous. At cookery school but the room is very slopy and it’s impossible to not slide down the shiny floor. The humous the teacher has given us is very bland, like its been made only of chickpeas and grey powder. I ask her if she’s spiced it at all. She’s slightly offended, tells me she has put “cusmin” in and something else, exotic spices i’ve not heard of. I imagine brown brick buildings and grey skies. We are in my housing coop. There are several extra rooms which have been lying empty which i suddenly realise the potential of. They’ve been used to store chairs, unwanted furniture and bin bags (chairs like the stackable type you get in conference centres/doctors surgery waiting rooms, with stained, faded squishy mauve seats) and every room has a slightly uninviting bed in it, ready for guests. These rooms are on the ground floor and have blue curtains which are drawn. One has a dining table in a bay window. I realise these rooms are south-facing and sunny and i think why have we never used these rooms before?? I open the curtains. One room is brightly lit and has a big television on the wall and a dingy sofa and shiny honey-brown parquet-floor style lino. I watch bek oliva’s latest tv recommendations in there with her. I think about having my parents to stay in all the beds. There is also something to do with one of the rooms having been involved in a break-up, maybe it used to be inhabited by a couple who have since disbanded, but the breakup takes on an almost physical, tangible quality, like it is the room itself or an object somewhere in the room. Dave is clearing rubbish. The way we get rid of rubbish is to roll it all up into toilet roll style round things or stuff it into tins and repackage it on the cardboard squares you get tinned tomatoes in bulk. Something like this. We’re all helping to sort it out. I’m helping someone. Before all this i’m at glastonbury and it’s hot and dry and overwhelming and quite boring and there’s not actually that many people there and everyone is a b-list star. I watch an act with a very small crowd, a new female hip hop act from london with loads of attitude who is amazing. Afterwards she and her band have left loads of amateur ceramics they’ve made on the grass for people to take and empowering messages, like nu-agey, cosmic, afrofuturism. The next day i see her crawling on the grass looking for her nose ring.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 04/05/2020, after over seven weeks of (solitary) confinement, with some easing of the lockdown since last Sunday:

Fragments of a much longer dream, the memory of which for the most part seems to have been suppressed instantly after waking up this morning. I am a rather young debonair Nazi, dressed up in a black SS uniform - fleeting memories of inspecting and admiring its fit. I am conversing with a group of other elegant Nazis in the spacious hall of some kind of rococo castle with a distinctly Austrian feel to it. It is night. It seems that the hall, whose ceiling is painted with frescoes, has been converted to an office space with tables and chairs in rows. Adjacent to the castle, a very beautiful park slopes down, complete with hedges and statues (a labyrinth?). We are discussing the imminent collapse of the Reich. In what I feel to be a rather hallucinatory fashion, our discussion oscillates between carefree comments and laughter and the intellectual clarity of knowing that our world is about to end and that our lives are very much in danger. I cannot remember if we at all discuss possible escape plans. Suddenly everybody starts moving - we are leaving. Amid the general confusion, I meet a woman in the hall who resembles M. - I in fact recognize her before deciding to forget that it is her. In a very controlled yet natural way, she presents her bare and breathtakingly shaped left or right leg to me by raising it into the air, and I proceed to suck the big toe of its foot, enraptured by the sight of her leg and the sensation of sucking her toe. Unclear images of entering the terraced park after that, darkness, trees rustling in a faint breeze, I am not alone.

07.05 Beirut, the city is opening.

AH

The first was a strange scene, a sea and a glass castle looking like from a Russian fairy tale made from oversized bottles of alcohol. It was right in the middle of the sea (or my point of vision). I went into the sea, and there were many women by the glass castle, and as I was approaching they started taking their bras and shirt off...they were all beautifully breasted, white, well shaped breasts with large pink nipples. They were playing with each other. I turned around because I didn't want to join the "lesbians", I was reluctant to go forward and at that point I re-entered the sea but the castle or the women were not there. There were some random people and I was struggling to swim and not to show that I can't swim.

May 6, 2020 (Day 51, Northern California)

SL:  I like my new glasses but it seems like no one else does.

-

My two Buddhist strings…K says to A, Sara didn’t think if she threw them in the fish tank they would dissolve but they are. I look at the fish tank, and the fish is playing with them, whipping them around with his mouth. And they are dissolving, they’re crackling, making sounds like the way Alkaseltzer does in water.

May 7, 2020 (Day 52, back in the parisian suburb with partner)

IK
I’ve parked my car upon a kind of rocky outcrop in a suburban town nearby. I know this town, i’ve worked here three days ago and it’s totally flat, there aren’t any kind of altitude or rocks there, but anyway, my car is parked right on the edge and the rear door stays open.
I’m in an conversation with a colleague from my new work about the flat that she found in this particular city and how exciting the flat and the city are (then she makes a list about everything that can be found in this town : a theater, a swimming pool, lots of libraries and how everything is so great here - this is not the case, it’s a small town, part of the 93 district with lots of social housing and small houses, a populist mayor and not so much stuff to do because you are a bit too far from Paris. But there is a swimming pool in fact).
Anyway, at one point of the conversation which is strangely not getting hold in my car, a kind of anthropomorphic pheasant (?) comes at the open door and then try to intimidate me, refusing to leave my car. He certainly arrived by flying and now he’s taking a weird anime-bad-guy pose and all of my attempts to make him leave are unsuccessful, then I wake up.

May 10 IK (same situation as last dream)

I was back in the countryside where I spent most of my lockdown time with some friends. One of them was sweeping the floor and there was a discussion about whether or not it should make sense to put the dust inside the oven. I think that’s the best solution, and we (the other two friends and me) try to convince her that it’s the best she has to do.

May 7, 2020 (Day 52, Northern California)

SL:  I am about to text J and I notice that things are beginning to spin. I look at my phone and it is melting in my hand. I almost text “my phone is melting” but only type the “m”. I think I may be having a drug experience. I call out for my Mom.

May 10, 2020 (Day 55, Nevada)

SL:  I need to contribute dollars to the group, but I open my wallet and only have Euros. I realize that I haven’t opened my wallet for a month and a half since I got back from Europe.

10th of May - Night after Boris Johnson’s ‘Stay Alert’ address (Day 52, London, UK)

ORTE:  Failed Hitler Assassination Attempt

This seemed to be a new variation on a dream motif that I’ve been having in which I am at a banquet with friends, but somehow excluded from eating.

I am working as a waiter in a high-class restaurant in Paris. It turns out that it is Nazi-occupied Paris, and the room I am serving happens to be full of high-ranking Nazis and Hitler himself.

Much of the dream consists of me serving the Nazis while trying to come up with the best way of  killing Hitler. I imagine going up to him and shooting him point blank in the face. I imagine putting a grenade in his soup. I also imagine shouting at him in German and thinking that I would be much more successful at this because now my German has reached quite an advanced level. I imagine a covert meeting with the resistance and calling for backup.  But I never enact any of these plans. I leave the room and wake up.

My interpretation of the dream the next day:

•Hitler = Boris

•My frustration at not being able to figure out and enact the best way of killing him = the new confusing and enraging ‘guidelines’, coupled with my own daily feelings of futility and indecision.

TFK, May 12 (Providence, RI, Social Isolation, businesses are closed but we are anticipating the reopening of the state):

My parents want to send me to be in the army, and I ask them if it’s possible to sign up for just the training portion without having to later serve in the army and be deployed. The answer seems to be yes. I’m satisfied, and I have a surge of excitement as it dawns on me that I will be infiltrating a hostile organization I have no intent of falling in line with.

I am now joining the army. The training involves going to a remote mansion and holding a loaded gun pointed at a chandelier, along with the other recruits. I wonder when they will start making me do push-ups. I am afraid to do push-ups, but the chandelier, which seems to be both the enemy and the entity conducting this training, does not require me to do push-ups.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 10/05/2020, after most of the restrictions of movement have been lifted:

Fragments of a dream the exact order of which is uncertain. The dream felt as if filmed in the grainy, saturated, and luminous images of Technicolor – possibly influenced by my recent viewing of Melville’s “Le Cercle Rouge” (but also reminiscent of Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under The Influence”). Its first sequence takes place onboard a train – I am travelling past an empty landscape under a warm light. Suddenly the train passes by scattered groups of people moving along parallel to its tracks. They are either carrying their belongings in sacks on their backs or dragging them behind in small wooden carts. They are smiling, perhaps also gesturing with their hands at the train, yet I have the impression that they are fleeing some major calamity (war?). Cut. I am with my mother (?) in an apartment that has the design feel of the 1970s to it. I am about to take my final written exam for the Abitur. For some reason I am already in possession of the text questions about which my essay will have to answer. It is a brochure about whether atomic war is morally permissible or not, published by the GDR and licensed for sale in West Germany. I flip through its pages and notice the very artful typesetting and cover design (again very much 1970s). I am very confused about an East German brochure having been accepted as set text for the Abitur by the West German authorities. Cut. I am with S. in her sun-lit apartment, trying to stop huge flower pots with succulents in them (?) from leaking brownish water to the floor. Cut. I am moving through a spacious school building, shortly before my written exam starts – scenes in its lavatory.

13th of May, 2020, Hudson Valley, New York -FM

Home Invasion

Frenetic images all through the night ; semi-lucid but unable to control any characters in any scene. Began as radio static, then a clear signal of new music — being semi-lucid within the dream, i believed with certainty i was either clearly hallucinating in a conscious state or that perhaps a radio signal was in fact coming through a radiator — an already dead new sort of rock n’ roll, washed-up at 22, something a friend made but i did not care to go to the show even tho it had made it to the local airwaves.

Then a home invasion, multiple bands of people led by men, over and over again barging down my door for what seemed like hours in countless scenes. Again, auditory and semi-lucid, i believed that a home invasion was in fact occurring, so I attempted to awaken myself and scream out at the men, hey, what are you doing in my fucking house, angry and afraid.

Frustrated that i could not awaken myself to intercept the intruders, i forced the scene into a luxurious party — the men were paying a social visit, and somehow i had become wealthy — wealthy in a way that repulses me — in a way that actually had come before in nightmares during periods of woolgathering about becoming a famous film script writer with the sole purpose of amassing enough money to live rent-free and also pay my luxurious shrink. My shrink is in the dream somewhere, distant as she always is at public events — i miss her, i love her, i cannot talk to her.

Perhaps more poignantly, I miss this sort of drunkenness that is familiar with estranged homosocial relationships — A meeting at a crossroads, two dramatic events have taken place in unconscious heroes' quests (something I take with irony). These men and I unknowingly touting heroism until enough booze has been consumed that egos disappear and real revelery, camaraderie takes place, a sort-of mysticism or a new cosmology  arises  from a common belief in a future — any future where we are able to survive in a way that is perhaps not merely eating salt. Nonetheless, this commonality we men found was frightening, and each scene was punctuated by horor. Being semi-lucid, I eventually managed to change the location to a pond that implied some tranquility, but again it was invaded by a frightening sort-of masculinity.

May 14, 2020 (Day 59, New Mexico)

SL:  I go into JB & JG’s house although they are not home. It looks like R’s old house from when we were teenagers. I feel comfortable there and even though JB & JG don’t know I’m there, I feel like they would be OK with it. I look around the living room where I will sleep. Then I turn around and JB is asleep under the covers on the floor. I can see his sneakers sticking out. He wasn’t there a few moments ago. The quilted purple blanket my Mom made me is propped up against the door.

I go and take a shower. It’s as if I hadn’t seen JB. While I’m in the shower, I hear JB & JG come home, they are talking on the stairway. I yell out, I’m here! I go out to greet them in my towel. They are happy to see me. JG’s blond long hair is gone, her head is shaved.

-

JB has written an incredible poem, something about angels with huge wide wings. As he reads it to me, I am lifted up high in the air by an archangel. It feels sublime.

-

I am driving on the highway out of town. There is a fork in the road to take I80 or I20. Without really choosing I take I20. Part of me realizes I often miss that turn for I80. The road is very twisty and I am going fast. Often it is a treacherous bridge over an abysmal canyon and I do my best and hope to stay on the road. It is very difficult driving and I almost feel like I am going fast not by choice. I make it over the bridge and around the bends.

RL, Marseille 26 April 2020, inundated with confinement problems. Living with a person who takes every opportunity to say how much she hates hearing about dreams - I haven’t once so much as asked to tell her my dreams. She did however have her astrology chart made up and read to her over the phone this week. Who would look to the planets to explain themselves before inquiring in to their very own psychic substance?

Something about a film shoot, Michael my godfather, a lake, my sister, the wrong clothes. I couldn’t tell you beyond that. Coleslaw. I have to give the dress back to Sara. I said goodbye to the dream upon waking.

RL, Marseille, having changed confinement zones (illegal) after conflict with astrology chart girl. At JV’s house. 30 April 2020

I am in a school. I am a schoolteacher. I get swept up in a romance with “Tarzan” also called “Sharks”. Everything gets swept up in a mass of foam that comes out of the edges of the jacuzzi we’re in. I got here looking at paintings of my grandfather and grandmother. I ask her - what is this stately home? Pointing at a kind of red brick, long house, my grandparents kiss romantically. All I remember is being on a London red double decker bus with HdS and TR. Something about one of my students. “Tarzan” is more like King Kong, he swallows up the foam from the jacuzzi, including me - I’m Fay Wray, a fragile, barbie-esque body - I am shot out in foam that comes out of holes in his cheeks. I think Tarzan is TR.

RL, having illegally moved to the Luberon under the guise of being olive farmers. May 1st. Confined in a house looking on to the mountains, wolves in the valley.

I work in a shop, I want to go and see FE. Somehow in between I lose the job by not being serious about it [IRL I have just been ‘let go’ for striking]. CS gets the job, which is a retail job, and she’s sort of squatting on a chair like a wise woman sorting out stones or bones on the floor, surrounded by high street clothes and she winces and says she has bad news for me. I know she feels guilty because she’s taken my job, but I know she also knows I didn’t do the job “seriously” meaning I had been on strike. She hands me some candy, or stones in candy wrappers. She encourages me to go and see FE.

I go to his room, which is inside Corpus Christi college, Cambridge, UK (something like this anyway, on the second floor to the right as you come into the quad).

I think I get to see him but not long enough, or else I’m waiting for him and it takes too long, or maybe I lose confidence in myself? A kind of Christmas market? Then I’m home, somewhere between home and going to my Granny Scilla’s, which is ‘back there’ near where the shop was. The street turns into Diagon Alley [IRL, astrology girl has regressed and been reading Harry Potter and then getting intimidated about me reading Marx, although I never said anything about it]. I can’t quite get the name of it: Diagon? Diagonal? I know my Grandma’s house is hidden, I’m looking for it but I keep missing it. I have m wand but I’m not convinced that I’m able, or have ever been able to do magic. My family are all endowed with magical powers, and are protected by that. So why doesn’t this pathetic little stick work? It’s beginning to get dangerous walking around outside looking like I don’t know where the house is. I think I’d love to teleport out of here and go back to FE in his lawn-overlooking room but it doesn’t seem I can muster any magical powers.

There’s a bar just next to where I think my grandmother’s house disappeared, where they are not practising any kind of social distancing. A tramp/drunk from there, white, with red trousers I think, a guitar, a reddish face, follows me. I think there’s a girl sitting on the steps of my grandmother’s house, I think it’s astrology chart girl. In any case it’s she who knows where the house is. But I think she rushes in the door to my mum before I have the chance. I’m then outside with the tramp whose coming far too close to me and making me anxious that he’s going to try to come in the door. He’s not magic, or in my family, so I can’t go in for fear of letting him in, at the same time he’s putting me in danger by spitting on the floor.

I tap on the black door with my wand and miraculously it opens, I rush into a long dark corridor (painted 18th century style tobacco stained paint  like in the Huguenot house museum in brick lane, also uncannily like a gastro pub, I suppose). Anyway, the door to my horror, is open and I can’t close it against what I suppose is the tramp trying to enter. As it turns out it’s a very beautiful boy from south central LA, he has a scar on his face and he’s very angry. I’m ashamed that I’ve tried to close the door on him, and I’m ashamed for my security attitude in general - for fear of the virus, trying to exclude the tramp and then him. It becomes clear he’s my half brother, and I want to do anything I can to include him in our family life. I know that in the depths of this dream there is my mother, who is wearing some kind of white dress and is sweeping, and waiting patiently like a queen for all the family to come home. She has even opened her arms to the usurper, astrology chart girl, so I want to bring him to her, but it’s too late - he’s too angry with my father and wants to kill us all. He’s lived and survived too long without us.

I get there finally, it’s a big room with roman baths and lots of people bathing in two baths. It’s sort of burgundy, ancient roman baths, repainted, with fabulous plants sprouting between the two.

I find astrology chart girl, the dangerous element, but she has turned into someone else - a queer, tattooed goddess in a bright purple one piece swimsuit, who I really fancy. Conical, bionic breasts. Whoever she is, she has become a benign and less entitled element of the party.

I sigh in relief and go up to a balcony with her, to a private pool, thinking about how lucky I am to be part of a Mafia family.

We go on a trip with my new brother and my mum, downtown LA. The lights, the palms, the grotty old buildings. The cardholder machine in the car spews out credit cards and calling cards in a constant flow.

2 May. JM, countryside confinement. France.

I’m at a party with G, a party we’ve been to before, on exactly that day the year previous. She has to leave and get on a plane. Just before she leaves I meet a sex worker who looks like Megan Fox and is wearing a kind of awful dress with a low U-neckline and a circle/ice skating shaped skirt, made of a kind of black matt spandex. She is a sugar baby, clearly, she hangs out at this club with the old men (it has a bingo hall, school hall vibe). I say I want to do what she does, she says she’ll take me on as her project - not quite that we’ll do doubles together which is what I would have thought to be the most obvious way for me to start working straight away. Instead she says she’ll train me to work alone.

I’m excited and proud and stand up to show G my costume - red lips, the same black spandex version of a 50s dress but with the waistline too high, kind of empire line/princess line, spike porno heels. She’s not pleased, she says “Oh god….” dragging out the word so I really know I’ve lacked tact or singled her out, exposed her. She’s out of work, I think, as well. And the Megan Fox sugar baby is someone who isn’t very refined in the trade, a vulgarisation of the subtle art of G’s previous work. We all rush out of the bar, G will forgive me in time but this is awful, S holds the door of the car open for G and then for me very coldly and shows me that he knows I didn’t mean it, but that I’ve really fucked up.

We drive through a city a bit like Beirut, with graffiti on the scarred walls. And it’s awful because I know we’ll make up but that we don’t have enough time before the flight. The place where she gets into the car looks like Pilrig park in Edinburgh during Mela season.

Next I’m in a marriage. LM-L? JM-L? L changes girlfriends a few times, I think I become one of them. In the middle of the wedding, J is sitting up on a kind of museum installation - a fake rock - it’s all modern, he’s explaining to some little children in cake-like, pretty, dresses and some adults about the virus, it’s impressive. I go off to pick up my next outfit, and L pursues me down a wisteria lined grand London stone street and we kiss. I see all his different girlfriends flash beside him, wearing wrap dresses, one very pretty - dark hair, brown dress with white palms, sandals - tout à fait banal, en fait. I wonder what on earth to wear - I can’t wear banal things like that, they’ll just drain me and swamp me out.

The salle de danse of the wedding is a kind of Roman/Greek style pavillion of monolithic proportions, with pillars at each end, very impressive looking - in Hyde Park probably. I get to where I wanted to be to change clothes, a small kind of children’s toilet on the edge of a children’s park. So, I’m disembarking from the red double decker bus and I get stuck - held up by my friend and her mum - except it’s not my friend, it’s my sister’s friend, and my friend’s mum. The child is embarrassed and kind of babysitting her mum, who is moving plastic bags around and asking me where I’m going.

I’m trying to be polite and not invite them to the wedding, which I can’t do anyway since it’s the wedding of a “grande famille” - the B’s. I edge away to change my clothes, in a plastic bag, in this little sandy girl’s toilets on the edge of a sandpit and the bus depot. Unfortunately I realise I only have a kind of pastel coloured cake concoction, you know, a bit like one of those toilet roll holder dolls,  and it’s too daytime, too prom for the effect I wanted to achieve. My auntie M arrives, talking about various misguided and delusional thoughts about her relationship about the grande famille and saying that she has an infection and some kind of STI.

I arrive at the parking lot and it’s already the time for singing a song all in synch, I’ve missed the ceremony, and the B’s are there: C, P, R, in fact it’s C’s wedding. They are sitting on the floor in front of a car with its trunk open, with a crowd of people who all start to sing, swaying together. It’s hot and sunny and there’s some kind of food shop like Dunkin’ Donuts which is shuttered. The driver is someone I know from New Orleans -- JB -- here he’s a fat, amiable, anarchist-y type with a red t-shirt and sports sunglasses (really ugly, alien shape with a chrome finish) and a ponytail. I wanna say his name is Bob, or Robert in the dream, and he’s been taking care of the mutual aid and brought all this food down the mountain in his truck with his partner who looks a bit like him but with a grey ponytail.

Then something about getting armed. I’m embarrassed in front of the B’s, yet understand the necessity, yet also feel alarmed that they won’t pick up on the subtleties, given the overlap of gun discourse and the extreme right. I clamber up a staircase/ladder fire exit with a rifle Bob has given me, hidden under my copious skirts, I’m scared the safety isn’t on and I’ll shoot myself up the pussy. I come into a church hall from the top of the fire exit, I’m high up and looking down on the celebration preparation below, unperceived by the people. The church hall is kind of pastel coloured, with gold braid, the staircase is straight down like a ladder, pericoloso. But it only leads halfway down the room and then I’d have to jump and probably break something.

RL, Luberon, May 3rd.

In the first my fringe has gone curly and the texture of straw and at the edges are white hairs and curls as tight as corkscrews. Raffia, skunk hair.

In the second: at the end I’m printing out my play with SK on A4 printer paper, and some covers mauve and thick paper but some just yellow and the ink is smudging.

Before this. Me and mum are at LM’s. We are looking after her grandson all together. He’s running around and is very delightful. I’m sorting through painful memories which literally take the form of dresses I wore to school. I’m deciding which ones to sell. I start out with the idea that I want to keep some. There’s a white shirt with some kind of -- ?? -- pig? Monkey -- embroidered in line form over each breast. There’s a blue brocade dress, red underneath. I think I’m hiding. The clothes rail covers us partly, the cutting board where mum and L have meat, flour, bleach and L’s clearing the pantry so as to make everything fit better.

R - the grandson - is running around screaming 2 syllable words, but maybe just his own name?

I thought my clothes could be stored in L’s pantry or freezer but there’s no space.

Before that. 

Spilling out into the streets, somewhere like York Way (Kings Cross), scattered on to the street in front of a suburban lawn, it’s night. A dangerous blond toff is trying to find me.

Before that.

JS sends me a text which says “Twin Peaks jour 1080, Toxic gets killed.”

I see a stylish woman in her bathroom with an extreme Louise Brooks bob and a flowing, minimalist kimono, with a red circle on it, maybe. She sweeps elegantly into the next room of her apartment, naked foot. She is tall. She steps over a cream telephone wire. Her living room is empty save for a sofa and a low coffee table, some cigarettes in an ashtray, bare floorboards, a bunch of newspapers/reviews on the floor. She hasn’t bought any new furniture since the 1990s. She finds her cat, a brown, straggly cat, dead. The cat is called Toxic. She calls the police. She herself is a journalist. Toxic is standing up, eyes wide as if he has taken LSD or had a shock, jelly and rigid. The other cat, black and white, skulks up and sees its friend toxic from behind. Don’t do that, little cat! Dangerous.

Toxic was killed - of shock? Of a stabbing? Its rigor mortis is so complete, its corpse is so intact. At exactly the moment of Toxic’s death, in Twin Peaks, years ago, Audrey is being killed by her father. I see him, taking off his belt, an ill-fitting grey suit. He is so big and fat, he will overpower her. He has already raped her. She is pregnant, from him? From someone else? The hypocrisy of this abusive and jealous man seeing his beautiful daughter come of age, and engage in consensual sex with some local sweetheart(s). All that came before she has washed off her. He’s going to whip her with his heavy, leather belt.  She defies him, she’s goading him, walking backwards. He’s laughing, but he isn’t playing. I’m watching from some ephemeral state, somewhere above the ground. Audrey - run, get out while you can! He’s pulling out a knife or the thin barrel of a gun from his crotch and he shoots or kills her, puts her body in the other room.

The journalist arrives, looking for Audrey, finds the body. I know she’ll be murdered too, just like the way her cat, upon approaching Toxic, was petrified into the shape of death. The body is chopped up in pieces in a clear plastic sheet. I zone on a double decker bus trying to avoid Audrey’s father, knowing I’m the only witness. I think the blond toff I was terrified of earlier was the same man.

JS day 55 (de confinement imminent, still quarantining in normandy)

Lots of dreams all claustrophobic in nature

Most recent dream, maybe between the hours of 7am and 9am :

In a house, much like the one I’m in now, filled with the people I’m also quarantining with, we are trying to leave, we hike along the trail where the trees stretch maybe 20metres tall, many of them wrung and wrought with parasitic ivy wrapping round their trunks, some of them succumbing to the disease and toppled over creating an arching canopy towards the bend in the river.

We arrive at a sharp cliff face, we climb the short steps, there is an old man on a bench in front of a corner shop and there some vague notion that we have been deconfined. We come across a cinema with a bar cut into the face of the cliff, this is apparently what we are here for. The bar is cut into the rock and the overhang protects it from the wind and the rain, but today it is sunny, a dusty heat. There are older, leather-clad patrons perched on tall bar stools chain smoking, there appear to be red earthy lights lighting the bar. We file inside to the cinema, apparently inside the cliff face.

The whole thing is completely joyful.

We want to reproduce the idyl of yesterday but we’re having a hard time leaving the house. I’m horribly bored, I text a museum curator at least 25 years older than me that I’d attempted flirting with in a previous dream, and I ask her if she wants to get a drink with me.

N is devastated about something, today is awful she says, I ask her if it’s because she’s leaving, maybe she says.

By the time we are really ready to leave on our walk it is dark, we all stand at the gate waiting for something still, some elderly people in evening wear, maybe kilts and sashes too, walk past and wish us a good evening, at this point I notice T & C are naked. Good job it’s dark, says C, wouldn’t have wanted to get a bad reputation. A lot of our concerns are about how we’re being perceived

Ronan is picking me up, can you cycle to the top of the hill he asks me, where the cinema is, it will save us time. I realise I have left it very late to try and make it to my flight (this is a scenario repeated from earlier in the dream but in a different location and with different characters). I am also concerned that it will be totally impossible to cycle up such a steep incline.

We’re all aimlessly milling about the house, but with a sense of urgency and importance as if we’re trying to achieve something. The museum curator texts me back, désolée pour ma repose tardive, I’m sure it’s only been a couple of hours, but she seems to think it’s been a full week, it’s been a crazy week with the kids off school now, also, sorry, I’m straight (winky face)  

I show everyone the message in faux outrage, how presumptuous, why does she even think I’m trying to flirt with her. I walk into the other side of the house, it looks like my aunt’s lounge, I pick up my phone and try and call E, desperate for validation elsewhere.

Dream fragmented and trying to sort it into some kind of chronological order and for a minute my waking mind couldn’t distinguish if one writes from the end to the beginning or the beginning to the end.

W walking along the river, Paris then London then Paris again, canal, tower bridge, walking ahead of me, can’t catch up, we see kids doing really shit graffiti on the river bank and we mock them. Sat in a naff café with friends from school, D is trying to get R to leave, there is a bus in 1 minute he says. The café is maybe in St Pancras station, I’m maybe going to miss some mode of transport because I’m being polite about telling everyone I have to leave. (this is a scenario repeated from a dream earlier in the week but with a different plot and with different characters)

JS day 65 (state de-confinement day 5, still in quarantine in Normandy)

After a long dreamless period, I’ve had a series of dreams since the start of deconfinement that have seemingly revolved around me biting my nails, touching my face, picking my nose, being in busy cities, feeling helpless, but I’ve been bad at writing them down and now most of them are gone.

Last night I dreamt I was at some kind of arts festival, it was very cool but in waking reflection, it had something of a summer school fete aesthetic, with sparse dispersed tables in a hall with strange dream dimensions and parquet with those small interlocking squares. Five different boys ask me to hang out with them that evening, I’m giving them all flirtatious looks across the hall, trying to decide which one I will choose. I then remember that I still live in the quarantine house, it is 40 minutes away from Paris by train, and the trains stop early.

The dream becomes frantic, I’m taking various forms of public transport, everyone is sweaty and the spaces are humid and heavy. I have to change trains several times and each time I get out of a train, passengers have to file out one by one as if they’re getting off a plane, but instead of there being stairs, there are long, thick set ladders that are hard to get down, I don’t question why there is such a difficult and slow system in place for disembarking, but I do dread each exit, clenching all my muscles, feeling a sense of exhaustion as the wind buffets me on the way down.

I finally make it onto the last train out to the edge of the Ile de France, it looks like the metro, the station is Roissy, the train is the line 2 train between Jaurès and Stalingrad. It is full of teenagers, they are all kind of milling about, dancing, showing off to one another, the train is full but not packed. I’m wearing RL’s white fur coat and the teenagers are complimenting me on it, giving me that chin up kind of nod of approval as I move through the train. I’m becoming more weary and they let me sit. Some twins stood in front of me start performing a dance routine where they show off that they are double jointed, I sit back on one of the folding chairs and limply follow their dance with my arms trying to show approval

I never seem to make it back and I can’t work out if it was part of the same dream, a kind of non-sequitur if it was, but I then dreamt, with amazing clarity, an alternative ending to a very addictive Netflix show I’d watched a few weeks ago, with a tear-jerker storyline about adoption. The kids were the kids from Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur I think (I watched last night).

RL (more dreams I forgot to write up at the time). Paris, 11 May 2020. The morning of “Déconfinement”, so I dreamt this while still ‘confined’.

Was in somewhere dark, knotted - Cambridge maybe. I got accepted to [insert name of fancy university here]. I call X and tell him, embarrassed, triumphant, I “accidentally replied” to their call for admissions, I say. I feel a lot like a stalker. “Comparative literature”. I think it does feel like an accidental application because I am doing some kind of second rate subject that I don’t feel very passionate about… My Mum is somewhere with a grey parasol, victorian-esque modesty … etc.

Then, T is there, but so is some guy I used to know, Tim, who supported Leyton Orient. We’re all reprobates, rusticated sex workers - me, Tim and a girl called The Tigre. She looks a bit like Kelis. Desire but nothing comes of it.

In my dream, Esmé, my fish who died while I was away from home, came back. She was hiding in the water pump.

RL, Paris, May 12 2020. Second day of déconfinement - outside the streets are busy, people bump into each other with masks and their masks touch. I don’t really go outside, I don’t want to.

At the end of the dream I see my great-grandfather, Poppa. I learn about his film career. I see headshots of him, ghastly and green, in the trenches [IRL he had been shot in the eye and could blow cigar smoke through the hole]. Instead of going by what I refer to in my sleep as his “Jewish name” (Josef Bellam), he chose instead “Bella Tunnadine” - [the second name being the married name of my grandma (his daughter), who changed not only her second name but also her first name]. His eyes stare out at me and I feel guilty for misnaming him. He’s been in lots of films, even cowboy films. My Granny is standing next to me, wringing her hands in the way characteristic of her - but less anxious, telling me about Poppa. Something about when he went away and when he left the trenches. Something about a little boy who killed himself in January - who might have been Poppa. But in any case I start living the story - I go somewhere - across the mountain, across a wooden walkway over a puddle. I buy a packet of cigarettes and roll one but don’t smoke it. I begin to think it’ll be impossible not to smoke it and wonder if I can hold out [my granny Prue was a heavy smoker]. I don’t smoke my cigarette but I’m disappointed in myself for buying the packet. Especially since the packet is grey (French) and I want a (German) blue one. Then I get to the Parker family home (I think) and I tell them the story of the suicided boy who has been flattened, and midway I’m laughing hysterically and they are horrified and I explain and say I’m sorry, I’m in shock, but that’s not why I’m telling it like this, I just wouldn’t be able to explain to them the kind of humour around death in my family…

RL, Paris, May 16th, Déconfinement. Became agoraphobic and panicky about going outside. Then went to see friends for the first time last night - but no bises and sitting at distances.

Dreamed of going to see my friend, who we’ll call QY, in California. It is beautiful there - dense alpine forest, a huge clear canyon. For some reason I think the canyon/lake is artificial. There’s maybe a small, permanent fire raging in the mountains, I see it as if from a drone. Standing next to QY, I say something about the lake, which represents a kind of clear pleasure for me, or maybe I say something about California, I’m not sure. In any case I think what I say, grimly, with QY at my side, is: “No Life Can Live Here”. We swim in the lake together, me Q, and his children Z and M. I feel and see his muscly arm pulling me in, I want him but not in any way that would disrupt his family. His wife, ZH, arrives, I know she’s apprehensive about seeing me, and I try to make light - do we kiss? We dodge in a joke, eventually settling for a distanced embrace. I want both of them, QY and ZH, and I’m desperately trying to be a good guest. We are preparing a large piece of beef on a spit, except it looks like pork, and some kind of couple are coming over. O keeps texting and I somehow think I have enough time to go and see him. I set off in their car - a large black Suburban, or a Subaru - and as I pull out of the  drive I remember that ZH is a nurse and I regret kissing her - although I can’t tell if that’s for me or for her. The movie is clearly Mizoguchi which I articulate as a “Ishoguru” in my head, and it lasts 3 hours. Me and O watch it in a motel, kissing and cuddling, and I describe my desires and apprehensions to him. By the time I arrive back they are clearing away the dishes, and I grab some leftover meat for myself and I feel exceptionally rude. The other guest couple have brought mimosas, which are in a vase.

Second part I watch my Granny Scilla run across the balcony-corridors of a housing estate. She is in the IRA and she is concealing a gun, and then sitting at a small table having tea with someone. Me and my sister find a picture of her and my Aunt F. It is over-exposed and pastel coloured. They are both holding large cameras with huge lenses, pointing downward, and the picture is taken in a mirror, although we can’t see who has taken it. My sister says something about my granny not liking Auntie F (which isn’t true IRL but is true in my dream), and wanting to protect my granny’s image as a kind person I shut my sister down rather meanly and disagree with her for the sake of it.

CW, Jerusalem, night of 17/05/2020, after a week of ‘deconfinement’ and moving around freely in the city:

Morsels of yet another Third Reich dream, perhaps partly prompted by talking about Mussolini’s last holdout in Northern Italy under Nazi protection (the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, 1943-45) the day before (and obliquely informed by Ernst Jünger’s Strahlungen description of being charged with protecting Notre-Dame de Laon [rumoured to be the hiding place of the Holy Grail] and the old city of Laon during June 1940?). I am a low-rank commanding officer (?) of the Wehrmacht forces retreating from Italy. The fact of our retreat is very clear to me without however being contextualized in any bigger explanatory frame. On the empty and nondescript central square of a small rural town, my troop contingent is mounting lorries that will evacuate us. One of the lorries is closely packed with a group of officers who resemble an immobile set of painted pewter figures – I note that their uniforms and Pickelhauben place them in the First World War and wonder what they have been doing here in the last twenty-five years. Inexplicably, their silent chatter is still firmly anchored in the reality of an occupation regime that has just come to its abrupt end. Either before or after climbing onto the lorry designated for me, I become completely absorbed in looking close-range at a foldable, medium-sized sheet in my hands. It is printed with horizontal rows of small images each of which is captioned in even smaller print – the most famous cultural monuments of the area we are now moving out of (?). I am particularly drawn to the partial depiction of a church façade with an arch and two painted glass windows (?), printed in blueish colours. I understand that they symbolize and at the same time directly and immediately cause the spiritual healing of anyone in their presence. I also pore over other images but cannot remember what they depict. The sheet itself is either the essence of a lost cultural landscape we have destroyed or the final portable reduction of all the looted art treasures we are taking with us.

RL. Paris, the Sunday after the Monday of “deconfinement”. More confined than ever since everyone is in the streets. I dreamed of goth barbie stickers, pearlised pastel colours.

May 17, 2020 (Day 62, New Mexico)

SL:  J and I are going to get a haircut up the street.  Later we are walking by the beach. The Santa Fe river runs into the water here. It’s a small amount of water right now but I imagine it gets big and yet the sign that says Santa Fe Rivers still sticks up out of it. I think, people who make those signs do measurements. I tell J that AR named the Santa Fe River it’s Most Endangered River in 2007. She is not very impressed. I say, well you work in media, I guess you hear stuff like that all the time.

Another part of the dream I am sorting my clothes. I am on the road. I realize I have lots of clean, lacy underwear already piled up nicely. Some other clothes I get rid of, some I set aside for laundry.

FM- May 20, 2020 ; Hudson Valley

My partner’s ex is sitting in the rear passenger seat behind me in a Crown Victoria (cop or cab car). He hands me a cylindrical object with open ends the size of a toilet paper roll. The object is soft, comforting. To examine the object, I twirl it and quarter-inch, square tabs of a substance like tissue paper flutter into the air around me. It’s acid, he says.

(the night before, my partner and i made plans to move forward with a music project in Woodstock for the foreseeable future ; the place i will call home this summer now seems clear for the first time since March 15.)

May 21, 2020 (Day 66, New Mexico)

SL:  I am traveling. There are not many cars on the road. There is a road block and a checkpoint ahead for the Bay Bridge. I’m on the phone with my Mom while I’m driving. She says, the bridge is very crowded when you get past the checkpoint, there are 50 cars on it bumper to bumper. I say, 50 cars isn’t that much. I get on the bridge and isn’t bumper to bumper, I drive freely. But then out of the sky Fraggle Rock muppets hurl down one by one toward my windshield and then up into the sky again before hitting me. They are huge and wild, very distracting.

-

W and I visit a island way far out at the end of town. It is far off and we've been there once before, but a long time ago. Cobblestone streets.

-

At my Grandparent’s house. Down the steps outside my Mom is sitting in the dark. A creature that is similar to an ostrich comes up to her and gets very close, is very interested in her. Then it wants to cuddle. It really is desperate for love. She moves and it follows her around. It comes up the back steps and peers through the screen door into the kitchen, and I see it’s face from the kitchen where I am cooking with Grandmom

Grandmom’s house is not as clean as a remember it, especially the bathroom. The toilet has a special higher seat for people who have trouble sitting on a lower seat. Two spiders who are attached to each other by a piece of Kleenex scurry quickly around and I avoid them with my feet. Things are dusty. Her mirror has a plastic advertisement in front of it, I think for Colgate. It is a long plastic bar that sits in front of the mirror and it is yellowing. I dry my hands and think I don’t know my Grandmom as well as I thought I did. Perhaps we’ve grown apart the past few years? My brother knocks at the bathroom door.

-

I have a little pointy face dog and we are on a high balcony with bars in front of us and are looking out at the city. The dog is very affectionate and holds my hands tightly with his front legs and paws. If I move, he holds tighter and puts his head down to my hands as well. This feels good, I love him. He has a weird name, but now I forget the name. It has something to do with roads and travel I think.

-

Cousin M is trying to get me to look at maps that keep falling off the end of the atlas page and disappearing into the margins. I say, this country is so huge and I only drove a piece of it. As soon as you are out driving, you realize how big it is. I think of the terrain I just crossed, the red mountains.

-

I am a guest at a poetry class. It is very awkward because the teacher is asking the students to start reading their lines without calling on anyone and no one volunteers. Then we are supposed to write lines on the covers of LPs, where the teacher already wrote “I Think” in black sharpie and the project is to finish the sentence. People are doing it kind of half-heartedly. I don’t like this exercise and am a bit exasperated. The teacher reprimands me for something. She asks me to look up the notes from last time I was here a few years ago in a big archival notebook. The page numbers to this notebook make no sense to me and I try to figure out the logic, but can’t. I ask J who is sitting next to me if she understands these page numbers. She says no, so I look at the dates instead which also don’t make much sense. I find my page and not too much is on it. Some names, notes, a drawing of a Band-Aid. A lot of space between everything. It is good composition but I think more could have been written about my visit. I think that today the notes would be much fuller.

May 25, 2020 (Day 70, New Mexico)

SL:  A large syringe is hurling down from the sky and pierces the earth causing a huge atomic explosion. This happens in a field that looks like the one at my old elementary school. As the heat and the fire overtake everything I relax my body into it and wake up in a room staring at a variety of Buddhist books. A monk there encourages me to pick one to read.

Bodies are being dragged through the city and ambulances are everywhere. I make my way to the worst of it trying to find the epicenter of the disaster. It is chaos.

RL 21 May 2020 (semi-confinement in Paris - as in I don’t go outside except for the shopping - ‘deconfinement’ was the 11th)

I went to Lille to visit X and there was an extra guest apart from me. X said je suis hyper gené, je vais [lui] prendre une chambre d'hôtel. It was somehow my fault.

I get there, it’s night, I’m tired, but X has to organise a million things, not sure what. Like for example get the key for the hotel/motel room. We get the key and we’re with someone called A, a local Lillois, anti-fa community project type. He wants to get in on some of the good seeds and herbs and plants we got going. X has only been here a short time and has already made neighborhood friends. I resent the way he acts with such swagger, chameleon that he is.

Predictably, he leaves me with A and says, I’ll catch you up. We go to a kind of nightclub with the tray of plants and then we go on a fairground ride but it’s our public transport. The ride throws us up into outer space and I’m terrified and so is he. I clasp on to him and he holds on to the seatbelt of the child next to him and I think, how does this work? Does our centre of gravity become the chair we are sitting in, are our bodies attracted to its mass by our relative, smaller weight? We’re catapulted, flung, and then sent back down.

No sign of X. Me and A are at the door of the nightclub. I stack the plants for better organisation, there are 3 plastic nursery trays and most of the holes are empty. So, redistribution for efficiency.

I say to A, sorry, I won’t continue. I’m going to go back to the hotel/motel and wait for X.

The motel room is one room that leads directly to the street, not attached to anything. But when I wake in the morning it has become a fancy modern, glassy, financial-building like hotel. X is not there. It dawns on me that I’ve made a mistake, the hotel room was not for me and X, it was for the second guest, as we are the guests of the host of X. So now I imagine, I know, that X is mad at me, but why didn’t he come and tell me, why didn’t he wake me, why did he let me sleep all night in this dodgy motel with the door I’d left open for him?

As soon as I realise that I had left my door open I realise there is someone sleeping in the bed, in the gloom next to me. It is Y, my other lover, who has just left me. I am completely freaked! Why has he come here? You emailed me that you were in Lille, he says. I’m amazed by how little he listens to me, I had emailed him that I was in Lille with X, that it was my time with X, at the same time X is characteristically absent so I do seem to be talking of love on shaky grounds.

I’m so groggy I can’t tell if we’ve had sex, while I was asleep, and I’m upset about that, and that he’s imposed the worst conditions on me for seeing me, ones in which I absolutely have to refuse him. I’m trying to seem pleased to see him but I’m also very distressed by the situation. He tells me, Well, take it or leave it, knowing full well I can’t take it, again refusing to listen to my needs.

I remember as I look out of the glassy facade of the building, looking at torrential rain. I remember he has claimed Lille, he was here a few weeks before.

RL. 23 May (semi confinement, Paris).

I dreamt my Dad had four unaccounted for, and previously undisclosed other children besides me and my sister. We lived in a large limestone house which was really just a large atrium with pillars. It was on the banks of a fast flowing, either polluted, or with lots of sand/mud in it, river. There was a special Mercedes boat/raft, which looked like a divan, with upholstery buttons. It was pale blue and dirty cream satin. It was floating downstream and we had to get control of it again. I was angry with my Dad and also afraid of expressing this and making him feel ashamed.

Real life elements, the night before: conversation about the virus with someone I’ve lost, condoms, coronavirus, borders, turnstile jumping, the feeling of proliferation and of losing things, them going out of sight, sadness and mourning, people trying to get you to risk your health to prove your love.

JM. Lille 25 May, old style confinement - in a house, at a distance, with people who take care, and a garden, masks when we are in the same room.

I came home with X, home was a great boulevard in New York in the winter, like in Carol, where there are big department stores, Saks of 5th Avenue and Macys and all that.

We came home and I was eager for X to leave once I realised Z was visiting. Terrible timing.

EJWS - LONDON, semi-permeable pseudo lockdown phase - Morning of May 21st

More of the boring recurring apocaplypse dream except the setting is driving fast through italian countryside at midnight, in a storm; aesthetic and a thrill,

plus more of the squatted office building. the usual stress over who is to sleep where, with the impending legal and or nuclear kaibosh soon to be

visited on the whole situation, hovering in the background conscious. There are views from outside the office/tower block reminiscent of the

'corporate raiders' sequence that opens a Monty Python film, in which the buildings move around like pirate ships.

Then I'm outside a groundfloor residential apartment, Conran-habitat-scandi-style furnished, with large glass wall/window onto a small garden.

A type of place I've never lived in but seems familiar. I am looking through a panel of slghtly wavey glass inset in the frontdoor,

preparing to knock. But I see my mother, sitting on the sofa in a white bathrobe. She looks perturbed, then starts pulling at a roll of

crinkled kitchen foil from a crevice in the sofa. It's charred from smoking heroin off of and it just keeps coming out in great spools.

She sits back down on the sofa, face red as though from crying, completely distraught. Her disgusted face is closer to it was about twenty years ago.

I launch into a tremulous and self-pitying explanation but she doesn't want to know and it's plain

that the door isn't going to be opened, so I give up and at that moment wake up.

May 30, 2020 (Day 75, New Mexico)

SL: W and I have gone to a house in the country. It is big with a large grassy area in front and a stream that runs through. We drive there and then kiss and depart from each other. I am in the house with Aunt T who leaves and goes down to the stream. The house has many spacious rooms. There are used signs from the protests on the dining room table. I walk around, look out the window, see a slow turtle making its way across the grass. I go out the front door down to the stream and stand next to Aunt T, looking at the water. It is very calming to lean on the wooden fence looking down at it and listening to the water move over the rocks. Aunt T says, oh did you close the door? If you did, we are locked out. She looked concerned but not overly worried I say, yeah I did but don’t worry, I’ll just kick the door down. OK, she says. We go back to the house and I kick the door down to let us back in.

Then I am in the city going to Lizzo’s birthday party. Lizzo has a baby in a stroller and is going early to her party at her friend’s house. I go to the apartment where the party is going to happen but decide its too early for me to show up. Lizzo asks me to get her some special meat dish from the specialty meat store. I walk up the block towards the store and call W, who I haven’t seen all day. I’m having a birthday party too, later at the beach with all of my friends. I hope W will come. I get his voicemail and leave a message. I go in the specialty store and order Lizzo’s special meat dish. The person who works there is very pleased, coats it with water and prepares it.  

Then I am back at the big house. I call W again. I am worried he is not coming to my birthday party and am feeling anxious about it. I think, maybe he doesn’t want to come to my birthday party. He answers his phone and sounds cheerful. I have been writing all day, he says very happily. Yes, I’ll be at your birthday party, for sure. I am incredibly happy and see my anxieties were for nothing. He arrives at  the house and we kiss. He is cuter than ever. I am so excited to bring him to the beach and introduce him to my friends.

June 5, Hudson Valley, NY -FM

At a hotel with estranged male friend, (formerly trans-woman) — we are there conducting some business. (When M was a sex-worker we used to call it his work a “hotel job .”) A woman who I worked with on the high-school newspaper  is also at the hotel —She’s a high school principal now. In the dream, I’m attracted to her. Recently my mother told me this woman tested positive for covid.

The hotel is like the galley of a ship — the rooms are open, the ceilings short, lots of compartments, lockers. There is confusion about where to sleep. M and a concierge tell me that the big rooms are taken. I'm concerned about the sleeping arrangements. There is only one bed in the room, and me and M are expected to share it. I become homophobic—

 I start flirting with the concierge asking for a cot in a macho way. The concierge is young, pretty, lots of effort put into her appearance -- eye makeup, lipstick. The concierge and I are looking at the potential bedding together — a couch, the floor. Then she kind of reclines on the floor.  We’re eating fruit. I begin to wonder if she’s trans. I’m getting turned on. She pulls down her blouse so I can see her breasts — they look natural. Then she pulls down her pants, revealing a dick that looks prosthetic. I want to fuck her but can’t get arroused. She’s disappointed. I tell her I have a girlfriend. We talk some about my sexual history ; she’s trying to turn me on.

A man comes into the scene. Young, witty, recalcitrant, smart -- battaile boy, maybe —memorizes Leninist slogans for cultural capital. (Similar to partner’s ex, who I was once also close with. The ex has a gun. He and I have a job to do.  We are supposed to rob a house, steak-out some treasure. Another man, antithetic to our plot, also is robbing the house. We have to get to the treasure first. We do. But as we’re leaving the building on a ladder out of a window, the other man appears on the windowsill as I’m getting ready to crawl out. I smash the bad guy’s foot with a hammer. The ex pushes him off the second story window. I hold on to the bad guy's ankle, making sure the ankle breaks before letting him fall to the ground. The ex and I jump out the window. The fallen man is crippled albeit dangerous. He will bring heat or he will hurt us. It seems my accomplice is going to shoot and murder the man. I run off as fast as I can — I don’t want to witness a murder. The dream ends with me escaping over a futuristic Manhattan bridge during sunrise

(Also, at one point the neighbor / landlord brings in my missing cat. she is angry, complains about fleas. Throws the cat inside. In my waking life, my cat is missing. I’m really torn-up about it. Another point: I’ve been watching the Sopranos for the first time — plenty of Sopranos imagery in this dream.)

June 12, 2020 (Day 88, New Mexico)

SL: I am in a play where I am wearing a silk floral floor-length skirt a friend gave me. It is dark in the theater and all the actors are being wrapped in floral shawls. I am at the edge of the stage-line, on the border of being viewed by the audience and then I step in.

****

25/01/2021 - JS, Paris (almost a year of varying states of confinement/ deconfinement/ curfews. Anticipating France’s 3rd confinement)

I’ve left the house to get cash. I think I had been at the house with Sandra (as I have been in real life on and off for the last few weeks.) Only once I arrive at the cash point, located at Porte de Clignancourt, which in the dream looks much more like Porte de la Villette, do I realise that it is past curfew and I don’t have an attestation. I start rushing to get the cash out of the machine (tiny flimsy bills) and to fill in the perfunctory form on my phone, although I know I don’t have the work permit or a doctored train ticket to ensure its validity if the police stop me. I’m calm enough all the same.

I start to walk home, it’s only a matter of minutes I’m sure, but all of a sudden a growing police presence surges, along the empty street comes one cop car that ignores me, then another, until I try to cross the street and a human chain of cops try to funnel me into the metro. I’m not taking the metro I try to explain, we don’t care they respond. (The police often do this, release you from a kettle for example and then force you into the metro to evacuate the place, even if you have a bike locked within eye line). Beyond the mouth of the metro there are more cops, except these ones are plain clothes and in office wear, their directing line is much more invasive, arms outstretched they push me against the white tile wall, one suited cop pushes so hard against my head that his hand penetrates my mouth and I cry out. There are a number of health workers in the station, they help me up from the floor, they baby me, they assure me they won’t ask me for my papers. I’ve already explained myself once I lie.

The health workers escort me to the metro, we will take you home they say. But the metro doesn’t arrive; instead they have a sort of small vehicle that I can no longer envisage, with a furniture dolly with wheels, towed behind that I sit on (steampunk vibe). We set off and instantly balancing is difficult, it takes all my force to remain upright as we move slowly along the tracks. A woman with a pushchair and two children is walking along the tracks in our direction as we emerge from the narrow tunnel and onto what looks like the petite ceinture, except this is still a functioning metro line in the dream.

I’m wearing a skirt that flies up in the breeze, I look down and see a large cockroach crawling across the front of my knickers, flimsy cheap black ones, in real life recently repatriated by a lover to my great shame. I try to get a hold on the cockroach to flick it off onto the tracks, but the act of balancing atop the dolly is all consuming, I watch a couple more cockroaches climb atop the dolly and scuttle across my thighs.

I’m back at the house, and the cockroaches are still on my skin, they’re moving around but orbiting only my body. Sandra helps me herd them into a small envelope and we throw it down the stairwell.