The Choice
Anne Hosansky
THE SLEEP OF REASON
YOUR LOCKDOWN DREAMS
In April we asked if you had been dreaming weirdly in lockdown. Many of you have shared your unusual dreams with us, and as lockdowns around the world begin to be lifted, we are pleased to share the best of them with you.
Dreams have an interesting place in the history of artistic inspiration. Salvador Dalí famously pioneered a creative method of harvesting his dreams: he would fall asleep in a chair while holding a spoon above a dish – a dish which would clang when he dropped the spoon, instantly re-awakening him and allowing him to recall whatever he had dreamt in that short time.
Dalí must have been very sleep-deprived to have entered REM sleep – during which dreams arrive – as soon as he drifted off. Sleep deprivation is one of the reasons posited for our increased collective memory of what we have been dreaming in lockdown; we may have been waking up during or just after the REM sleep stage. Other theories about why lockdown dreams have been so memorable include that we’re actually getting more REM sleep, that we’re processing additional anxiety, and that we’re dealing with the novelty of the situation. Whatever the reason may be, we hope that the morbid, surreal, and often surprisingly plot-driven dreams we’ve collected serve as inspiration to you, writers and readers alike.
And now for the dreams . . .
Josh Mcloughlin, Toft Monks, Norfolk
The first night I dreamt of lobsters, they were half-boiled and screaming. I rarely remember my dreams, so I was shocked to wake up with pincers on the brain. I had been in a field at night-time. The sable scene was interrupted by a harsh flood light illuminating a whining lobster, coils of steam rising off its middle as it advanced towards me with menace. Fear shook the sleep from me. The following evening, as I lay in my bed, I found myself in that same field, uplit this time with tasteful soft bulbs behind frilly shades. I watched on, marooned somewhere between horrified onlooker and complicit bystander, as a cabal of ruddy-faced gluttons sat around tables in groups of three or four, hacked at the whining lobsters with knives, skewering their heads and cleaving their limbs. The shells cracked and snapped. I thought I could read agony on the lobster’s faces, who remained alive even until the moments the gluttons sank their teeth into their soft white flesh. That same whining, growing louder with each bite, coupled with the slurps of the gluttons, started to deafen me. Again I woke, this time in a panic. I should have been a pair of ragged claws.
Suzanne LaFetra Collier, Berkeley, California
I am in a cave with a ragged, sharp ceiling, and I must crouch down low so that my clothing will not catch on it, so that my head and back will not be pierced, sliced open, bleed. The air is heavy and wet and thick, and I know I must leave, get out, get to my mother, who is outside. There is an urgency—I must get to her quickly, so I stoop lower and make my way out. But when I arrive at the cave’s opening, I am terrified to see that I am in a cave at the bottom of the ocean, and it’s very cold and getting darker every moment. I look up toward the surface, so very far away, and see the silhouettes of sharks and eels swimming above me, and the sun is going down and the dark is coming and the tide is changing but I know what I must do: I have to rescue my mother, who is in a different cave across the expanse of darkening ocean floor. I scuttle out and begin to cross the sand, but the frigid current sweeps me up, and I am tumbling away, and now it is I who must be rescued. But she cannot help me. We are both trapped, separately, underwater, where there is no air, no safety, and no one who can help us.
Mathis Clément, Oxford, England
I button up my jacket, pack up the rifle I used only moments before to shoot my target, and walk towards the car park lift which will take me to the ground floor. As I step onto the pavement, I meet a dark-haired man whom I know instinctively is KGB. He invites me for a drive, which is probably a cover for murdering me, but I go out of curiosity. I want to ride in one of the ornamental cars used by the Russian elite. I get in and we are dragged like a chariot by a sixteen-wheeled lorry pulling us down empty streets. The KGB agent invites me fishing. Of course, there are no more lakes, so we drive to a local puddle. It is only about ten feet across, but is tens of miles deep and the agent assures me there are huge fish in the depths. I am standing on the edge with my line lowered into the water when, as expected, I am shot in the back of the head.
Now I am back in London. I wear glasses; I may be someone else, though I still work for the security services. I have been summoned to a meeting of the commissioners of each of England’s twelve sovereign cities. Nottingham has recorded high rates of people kissing in public – this is an extremely serious crime. The city’s commissioner is pleading that it not be demoted from a ‘city’ with financial and political privileges, to a ‘university town’, which is an object of ridicule. As I head home from the meeting, I notice some men following me. They are wearing police badges round their necks. I start to run and they pursue. Don’t they know I’m an agent? I want to turn and tell them that I haven’t been kissing anyone. But I know if I do, they’ll string me up before I can explain. I run to a hulking gasholder and begin climbing the iron girders, with the police following. Some friends are hanging out at the top and greet me. They don’t seem to care about the police below. Perhaps they’re enjoying their last moments of freedom. I’m trapped. There’s nowhere else to go.
Charlotte Tosti, London, England
I have been cast in a horror film in which I play the wife of a man in a squadron tasked with taking over a warehouse in rural China, under siege by an unknown guerrilla force. The men in the squadron are ‘strategisers’, the women work as de facto suicide bombers and do most of the fighting. The film resembles a reality TV programme: it’s not scripted, but we get instructions from the director through an earpiece.
We are about to enter the warehouse when the squadron is attacked. I manage to escape because my husband is having an affair with another woman. The film’s director tells me to go into the warehouse, where I’m meant to be liberating the workers. I enter to find half-dead workers everywhere. All of them are paralysed and tubed-up with what looks like a catheter. They are forced to drink their own urine. It’s painful to look at, yet I can’t dispel a feeling of immense responsibility as I realise they’re not actors but are genuinely being tortured, and so I rush around this warehouse trying to save them. I then realise that the director’s instructions are wrong, and by removing the tube I’m actually killing these people who have no other means to live and are already dead.
In horror, I try to run away, and get shot at. Just before I think I’m dead, I end up running through a door, onto the stage of a film awards ceremony. The other members of the squadron are on stage in black tie, paired with the director who says ‘Hey! Get over here, you won best actor.’ By this point I’m really confused. I walk to the podium like a rabbit caught in headlights, take the award and make a speech warning everyone that the director is inhumane, that the reason why the film seems so ‘real’ is because it was, and that the whole project was a violation of human rights, and real people were killed. However nobody seems to hear this, everyone keeps clapping. I jump down off the stage and notice that half the audience are tied up with the same tubes as the prisoners in the warehouse. They’re all drinking their own urine and clapping. A feeling of doom descends as I realise that the director is a vile Elon Musk type character who has got everyone hooked on catheters, apart from the members of the squadron in his film. I wake up in a sweat.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Olive Bridge, New York
My son, it seems, is going away on a battleship at night. I have only a short time before it heads out to sea to pack for him the prepared meals someone has given me; I kneel on the dock in the dark hurriedly taking packages of something that looks like aloo matar and trying to mash lids on them without spilling too much of the soupy mess over the sides. Why did anyone think this was the right kind of food to give someone about to take a long journey by boat? I’m thinking he’s going to be bored eating the same thing meal after meal – there is only the occasional waxed-paper-wrapped sandwich, a much more sensible choice for meals-to-go, to intersperse with the soupy mixture, – and I’m wondering if he’ll know these must last him a long time. I have to remember to tell him they must be reheated. He might not realize, since he’s rather naïve. I’m wondering if he knows where he’s going, or why. I’m wondering if it will be dangerous. If he’ll be coming back. In the face of the unknown, all I have to offer is a bag of precariously packed food.
Stephanie Jacobs, Long Beach, California
I walk into an expansive home with amber-colored wood walls. My parents, young for a couple in their seventies, are standing in the living room. There is a massive opening with a sweeping view of a gorgeous canyon with layered rock. The sun is setting. I notice that the opening with the view does not have glass in it. I’m shocked and frantically ask my parents, ‘Why is that open? What is going?’ They look at me with blank stares and say, ‘It’s ok. The glass guy is coming soon.’ I then see that their recliners are backed up to the opening, and should they recline, they would fall through the opening and into the canyon. I start screaming, ‘It’s not safe! This is ridiculous! What the hell are you thinking?’ My dad walks towards his recliner and nearly trips. My mom stands still, no reaction. I wake in grogginess, fearing I’m about to fall.
Nicole Clement-Weiss, London, England
Success, but not a sense of euphoria! All the preparation, effort and planning was worthwhile; at least that’s the impression I had although I had no idea what the event was or what purpose we were working towards.
Now, time to tidy up and return things back to where they belonged. I decided to take the chairs although I had to be guided as to where they were to be returned. I stacked them and was told by one of the men: ‘Take the lift with the blue doors to the fourth floor, you’ll see where to put them. Don’t take any of the other lifts, only the one with the blue doors.’ Strange, I thought, but nodded my acknowledgement. I lifted the stack, walked towards the building and entered.
It was a maze of goings on, a silent cacophony of life, of activity in every direction, products, people, lights, movement. I looked around in an attempt to spot the blue-doored lift but couldn’t see it. I had a sense that I could walk around forever and never find it. A strong urge drove me to get on with the task and get out as soon as possible. My sense of direction was usually very good: I would be able to orientate myself and find where the chairs belonged even if I took the grey lift a few meters away.
When the doors opened on the fourth floor, there was more chaos. It was like the ground floor (I suppose that’s where I had come from but couldn’t be sure), but worse. Workers were rushing everywhere without any task or direction. No one answered when I asked where the chairs belonged. What to do now? Retrace my steps, take the wrong lift down and…
Ruskin Smith, Lancaster, England
My mother was alive and she had moved into a tree-house in the yard. The tree was made of concrete, partly covered-up with sheets of wrapping paper made of bark, and the branches had wet string connecting them. It was raining, had been raining, and she wasn’t there, she was behind me, in the house, moving some dining chairs around. It was to be her choir practice. I was there beside her but she didn’t say hello – she needed chairs, too many chairs, there was no space. It’s numbers Mum, the numbers Mum. She didn’t speak but from the air I heard it: ‘I’d be grateful if you’d sort the clocks out.’ Clocks in every room were filling up with water, water dripping out onto the wall. I had to fix them with a blue balloon. I had the blue balloon and I was rubbing it against the edges of a clock the way I’d seen my brother rub one on his shirt for static electricity. He wasn’t there, he wasn’t anywhere, I hadn’t told him Mum was back. I had the blue balloon and water from the clock was in it, it was dangling in my hand, there were no litter bins inside the house, I pressed it to my throat – a megaphone – and said his name but it was silence, muffled silence, nothing, it was a balloon again and floating up away from me.
Chris Walsh, Strood, Kent
My old lover, a woman I have not seen for many years, arrives at my front door, and tells me that she has incurable cancer. I am very shocked, both by her news, and her appearance from out of the blue. I invite her in and lead her to my lounge. Sat on the sofa is a woman I have never seen before. She wears women’s clothing, but her face is some sort of textile mask, with simple doll-like features. She is permanently smiling. My old lover doesn’t appear to notice the other woman. She sits and begins to tell me about her diagnosis. To try to show understanding, I lightly touch her elbow, but as soon as I do, it is as if the bones in her arm turn to putty. The arm immediately becomes limp and discoloured, and hangs as if deflated by her side. I feel another touch on my other arm, and I turn to see that the woman with the textile mask has moved very close to us. She is staring at me with her fixed expression. I feel trapped between my old lover, who I am now afraid of killing by touch, and the new woman whose face won’t express any emotion whatsoever.
