Corona Dreams
Sekhmet - Feminine Power. Daughter of the Sun God Ra, Goddess of War, Plague, Destruction of Evil and Healing.
Freedom is a primal desire. Death is a primal fear. Primal desires and fears have the strongest influence on dream content.
There has never been a more excellent time to improve your sleep hygiene and work on your dreaming skills.
My sleep hygiene checklist is at the end of this article but…
TOP TIP: Don’t check death stats just before you get into bed.
I LOVE dreams, and right now is one of the most interesting phases of collective dreaming I’ve seen in my lifetime. With a common focus, our dreams are taking on a particular hue, we are sleeping more, we are waking up later, we are remembering the ecstasy — and sometimes the horror- of our night journeys.
Are you having especially vivid dreams during the Covid-19 lockdown? I’d like to hear about them, I’m collecting information about dream adventures during this time and there are strong and useful themes emerging. You can email your dreams to me at: sarahjanes@hotmail.com
This could be a hugely transformational time for us as individuals and collectively. Dreams offer us an opportunity to get to know ourselves better, to counsel ourselves and even heal ourselves. Good quality sleep and enriching dreams are revealing themselves as vital tools for all of us.
Dream Programming
Language and visual stimuli are dream-programming and right now our attention is for the most part directed towards a more narrow field of information than usual. Infection, death and imprisonment (and Tiger King). We are seeing those we cannot see in real life more vividly in our dreams, our anxieties about infection are rising to the surface, the invisible threat becomes visible in dream realms. Covid-19 manifesting as a tangible enemy, a monster, loose tigers, creeping slime.
We try to make sense in our dreams, to recalibrate with this new reality forced upon us.
“Dreamed ‘Corona’ in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs meant — she who overwhelms. But I couldn’t see the signs in the words, I thought of Sekhmet desiring the blood of her enemies and being duped with rye beer. The five days of plague and pestilence are upon us, but they always pass.” — SJ
Sekhmet — Feminine Power of Egypt. Daughter of the Sun God Ra. Goddess of War, Plagues and Healing.
“I have had two different dreams on different days where a card game (different games, one puzzle building and the other more of a trick taking game) revolves around the COVID-19. The first was about attacking the virus and the other about avoiding it (old maid?). However both games were novel, not at all like any games I have played (novel coronavirus?). The first one also featured hevily that pearls were key to fighting the virus.” — CA
“I had been sent to interview a David Koresh type religious leader in a big, very rundown villa type complex, we were doing the interview in a courtyard with a broken fountain in it. One of my questions upset him and the atmosphere turned a bit threatening. I needed to get out but I needed to get my elderly grandmother out as well and there was nobody to help.” — TC
“Dreamt I was in Los Angeles in lockdown. It was beautiful. I was listening to an excellent album by Julian Huxley, thinking ‘who knew such a square could play the piano so well’. A friend who is schizophrenic arrived at the airport. I worried about his health, and his luggage. He said he’d left his suitcases in ‘the buffet’, which perplexed me. We walked along the seafront and looked at the ocean.” — JE
Sleep Hygiene and Dream Incubation
Click the links in these tips for online resources.
𓁹 Make sure you get plenty of sunlight and fresh air. Go on walks in the countryside and experience nature, look and listen at birds and insects. Remind yourself of the patterns in nature — study things close up. Be slow and curious. Learn about things, like the names of butterflies, the shape of different tree leaves or types of shells found on the beach.
𓁹 Make your bedroom into a perfect sleeping space, this means excellent ventilation, tidy, fragrant, organised, silent, dark, ideal temperature. Generally harmonious, think feng shui.
𓁹 Stop using any light-emitting devices as long as possible before bed, ideally have the blue-light filter setting on all the time, but do not use them at all for at least a couple of hours before going to sleep.
𓁹 Do not eat a heavy meal late in the day.
𓁹 Make your bed every day and do not get into bed until you’re ready to go to sleep.
𓁹 Keep a notebook and pencil by the side of your bed.
𓁹 Do not watch a TV/Laptop or use any devices in your bed.
𓁹 Create a bedtime ritual, ideally with relaxing bath, herbal tea, book, a short yoga session to help your body relax, diary writing.
𓁹 Light candles in your bedroom. Contemplate what you would like to dream about and write it down. Turn this into a little ritual if that’s your cup of tea.
𓁹 Read novels before sleeping. The more escapist, magical realist and exotic, the better.
𓁹 Write down what you can remember of your dreams first thing after waking, if you wake up in the middle of the night, write down what you remember then, without turning any lights on.
𓁹 If you suffer from insomnia and have real trouble getting to sleep try a sleep hypnosis track and have an afternoon snooze. Try to limit daytime sleeping to no longer than 30 minutes or so.