When quarantine began in March of 2020, everybody in lockdown took a nosedive into new hobbies. Most notably, Dalgona coffee reigned over Instagram, then sourdough, and as people got frustrated with that, they leveled down to focaccia. Those not interested in the kitchen returned to childhood games, TV dramas, and anime. I redownloaded Reddit and tried to teach myself to lucid dream.
My interest in lucid dreaming came soon after the dreams themselves did. When lockdown hit, I started to have—and remember—long, frenetic dreams in vivid detail almost every night; each with its own colour palette and emotional thumbprint. It was so bizarre that I started to draw them, and somewhere in the process of drawing them I looked for hand references on Reddit. It was this particular wormhole that spat me out at lucid dreaming. I was scrolling through a hand subreddit and saw a post about finger tapping. In the title, the original poster alluded to finger-tapping as a lucid dream training technique.
I never thought lucid dream was something you trained for— just something that happened to you.
My interest was piqued. I went into r/luciddreaming and began to scroll. There were posts asking for advice, others giving it out and some with weird and embarrassing stories. I gleaned what I could and wrote down the advice. After all, if the pandemic won’t let me go out, why not go in? And if I was too old for maladaptive daydreaming, why not lucid dream instead?
After a few weeks of practicing I still wasn’t getting anywhere, and I logged onto the Reddit forum again for more advice and stumbled across a post.
“Anyone else switch sexes while they dream?” a user asked.
I felt like I had misjudged a step and fallen through to air. I knew it would make me feel terrible and dysphoric and all the same my cursor gilded across the glowing black eye of my screen and clicked.
The original poster said she experienced flipping into a male body as she dreamt, but alleged she never felt she wanted to be a man and was very pleased with being a woman. She wondered if other cis people felt the same way. A chorus of self-identified cis people assented in the comments, each with a few hundred upvotes.
I closed the post and felt like I had failed. I’m nonbinary and I’d never had “flipping” dreams as far as I could remember. I don’t think I’ve had had dreams where I thought about my gender at all. I felt distressed that my gender dysphoria didn’t manifest itself in my dreams this way, that there wasn’t more evidence of queerness. It may sound gauche, but I resent the narrative that a trans person always knows their gender. In a lot of cases, it simply isn’t true. A lot of trans people, even those who aren’t nonbinary, (I mean trans to be any departure from one’s assigned sex or gender) have struggled with knowing what their feelings of dysphoria mean for them. In my experience, it meant going through life until you realize something about gender was wrong the whole time and you can’t ignore it anymore. But because this experience goes against the narrative most people accept, you have to collect evidence that you always subconsciously knew.
There are a few forms of gender dysphoria:; social, physical, mental, etc. Personally, my mental dysphoria is a never-ending process of gathering evidence for an interminable argument against a bigot-lawyer who never leaves, never wins, and always lurks.
Shortly after I read that post, I started to have dreams where I was markedly perceived by others as a cis person of my assigned sex. This terrified me because for the bigot-lawyer it was proof that I was cis. In these dreams, I was punished for gender nonconformity and haunted by an overbearing fear that stray femininity or masculinity would make me too burgeoning to love. Oftentimes the perpetrators of this fear were straight men, sometimes malignant, sometimes nice. Only once did these dreams have to do with changing rooms. In it, a horde of boys that I went to high school with broke down the door of the shower cubicle I was in and tried to drag me out. I was protected by a friend and when the boys left, he hugged me and helped find clothes. After I woke up, I texted him in thanks.
Still, I didn’t have any “flipping” dreams, even when I was able to lucid dream. Only nightmares about assigned sex. This wasn’t enough: plenty of cis people are stressed by sex and gender too; one need only look at feminist literature to know that much. Who was I outside of my fear of what I didn’t want? When I wasn’t afraid of how I was perceived, how did I want to present?
I thought, if anything, my subconscious ought to know.
I Googled to see if there were any other reports of quarantine dreams. I listened to an episode of the podcast Ten Percent Happier led by a psychologist and dharma teacher who talked about quarantine dreams. They theorized that these dreams are our minds processing the trauma and emotions repressed in our busy pre-COVID lives. It made sense, too: in high school, I slept eight hours every night and operated on a busy schedule through school, sports, extracurriculars and homework.; But in quarantine, I slept 12 hours a night (not inclusive of naps) and lived out the days in a gratifying lassitude. Clearly, my body was doing some deep maintenance work. In those early days of quarantine, I felt anywhere from less dysphoric than I did at school, to euphoric (the opposite of discomfort with gender) so maybe it was the deep maintenance at work.
After I calmed down about the flipping, my dreams about assigned sex dwindled and returned to the subject of water. In this year of quarantine, the key theme to all my deep-clean dreams has been water. Whether it be a flood, tsunami, swamp, lake, or canal, water seeps into my dreams. I’ve joked that this is a sign I am morphing into Shrek, but water is also the element of change and adaptation. Swamps are signs of significant psychological growth; it’s not uncommon for people in their late teens to early twenties to dream about them. In these growth dreams, in which I (ostensibly) unpacked myself, I stopped worrying about who I was and simply existed as an ethereal spectator of whichever watery waste I happened to be in. I filled space as a nonbinary self. I had thought the post-Reddit nightmares unpacked who I was, but instead they attacked it.
Training myself to lucid dream did, in some ways, help promote this sturdy sense of self and gender, but I attribute this to the fact that lucid dreaming techniques are common mental health tactics, rather than supposing that the dreams themselves played a major role. That said, I don’t want to discredit the work our minds do. Dreams are enigmas that we will never really understand—just like our minds, just like gender.
