Stoke Newington, London, June 16, 2020
Now that the end of the Coronavirus Diaries project is nearing, it has finally dawned on me that I have yet to write on dreams, or on nightmares, or on how hard it has become as of late – since the world has changed – to differentiate between dreams and nightmares, which seem to be more real than ever.
Even today, like in many other days over the past three months, I woke up at 6 a.m. as if someone pulled me out of some dark well. My heart beats like a war drum, like tribal calls of lamentation, and frankly, you can drop the word "like." It's very real. I have pure fear that has hit me because of the shock the body feels, which demands all of me even when I am awake during the day until it finally subsides until I realize that nothing has happened, and my body returns to its normal state.
This process of restoring equilibrium was quick this morning. I needed only several minutes, unlike the first few months of the lockdown when sleeping was very different. It was a maze of passion, yearnings, and horror, filled with dreams of touching, hugging, and kissing. Of being drawn into a crowd and losing my way, at a party, at a club, on the streets, on trains, on enemies lurking inside the crowds, who run after me in hallways, who burst out of my body.
During those first few months, sleeping was a trap, a tempting invitation to find a way out from the horror that quickly becomes a cage that cannot give you rest. But still, it's not the nightmares that caused me horror; it was the waking up part to the real world, which is very much like a nightmare you cannot wake up from. "Are there good news?" I would ask Ravid every morning, as we drank coffee, with the heart still beating rapidly, and he would shake his head and show me the latest graphs on the COVID-19 data.
Now the world is more familiar and the nightmares have become less frequent, but the borders that separate reality and dreams are still very much blurred. Every time I think the world has returned to its former state, I understand just how much everything has changed: schools reopen and then close with every new case; every transaction in a local store leads to long lines; the people in the supermarkets look like creatures from the past; they scrutinize me with their penetrating eyes above the black beak that has a valve at the end.
And during the nights I binge watch a series. The characters hug, kiss, sit at restaurants without any fear and with uncovered faces. In literary theory, there is the term "suspension of disbelief", in which we can identify with a fictional work because during our reading we accept fiction as truth rather than doubt it as an imaginary thing.
And here, just in order to feel solidarity with the series I am watching, I find myself doing the exact opposite. I suspend my own reality in order to identify with a fictional world that does not reflect the experience of life, from a dream on normal days that will return, hopefully, but might not return ever.
