Perchance to Dream

There's been a fair amount of chatter in the media lately about how people are apparently dreaming more during this lockdown.  Whether they are, or not, I don't know - the media is currently so desperate for copy to fill their pages and air time that they will grasp at anything for a story.  Anyway, many of these dreams allegedly involve insects.  I'm sure that there is some deep Freudian meaning to this -- or it might just be subconscious mind making literal with the idea of the Covid-19 virus being a 'bug'.   Personally, I haven't noticed any difference between my pre and post lockdown dreaming.  As I've discussed before, since I've been taking a cocktail of medication for my blood pressure and diabetes, I've been experiencing very vivid, cinematic even, dreams on a nightly basis.  So vivid, in fact, that I often remember details of them long after waking up.  As I've mentioned before, they are usually so enjoyable that I look forward to going to sleep.  In fact, I don't even seem to go  into a particularly deep sleep in order to start dreaming - even light snooze on the sofa or a doze are sufficient for me to slip away into the land of dreams. 

Exactly what the link between the medication and the dreaming is, I don't know.  I assume that it is down, at least in part, to the fact that by lowering my blood pressure by relaxing and unfurring my blood vessels, the blood pressure medication ensures an increased and steadier flow of blood to the brain, even when I sleep.  Certainly, when my blood pressure was dangerously high a couple of years ago, I suffered the classic symptoms of mental confusion - in retrospect, I couldn't think straight, my reasoning and judgement were impaired and my memory was affected.  One of the clear signs that the medication was working was the fact that I became more rational and my judgement calls improved.  But to get back to the point, the dreams I experience these days are also hugely varied - I recall a fragment of one from the other night where I was discussing the musical score for a feature film I was apparently involved in making.  I suspect that this might have had something to do with a conversation I had some time previously about Giallo movie scores - it obviously lingered in my subconscious for some reason.  Some of the recurring themes of my dreams still turn up: I still occasionally dream about having a second property I haven't lived in for years, or my existing property having extra rooms, (there's a variation where there are modern flats built on the site of this terrace of houses - I live in one one of the ground floor ones in the dream), and my car is still never parked where I left it, (but if I walk away, then back again, there it is.  But these themed dreams are far less common now and I've stopped having the one about being unprepared for imminent exams altogether.  Nowadays, there's far more variety in my dreaming - but I think that I can safely say that they never involve insects.