Psychedelic dreams are the best thing about lockdown

Ever the contrarian, I’ve been delighted to discover that my five-year stretch of insomnia (or “Extra Life” as I call it) appears to have been cured by lockdown – but pity the poor two-thirds of our population who report struggling with slumber, according to a new survey by Ipsos MORI and King’s College London.

There is apparently “a disproportionate impact on particular groups: women, younger people and those facing financial difficulties” and while it’s totally understandable that the last group find the arms of Morpheus elusive, surely women and the young are less likely to catch coronavirus than men and the old?

I think that what we may be seeing here is yet more of the strange modern desire of some people to be seen as more “vulnerable” than they really are.

Every other celebrity, right up to the younger members of the Royal family, now has which cynics like me see as a sort of souped-up Get Out Of Jail card: “I may be rich and famous but I’m not happy, I’m anxious, so don’t hate me, attack my gated community and steal my stuff!” Could pleading insomnia be the new badge of virtue, proof that we are sensitive souls, a legion of little princesses tossing and turning on the dried pea of pandemic? As opposed to thickskinned peasants like me who sleep tight and wake early to crack on with life despite being over 60 and overweight and therefore in two of the at-risk categories.

Another related side-effect of lockdown has found two in five of us reporting more vivid dreams than usual. I personally haven’t had such nocturnal fun since my epic sex-dream about Gordon Ramsay (taking place over three consecutive nights and featuring lots of rather thrilling swearing) and was interested to find that increasingly we are dreaming of politicians. Earlier this week in the land of Nod, Boris Johnson and myself became secretly engaged but he told me that no-one must ever know as my father was a Communist.

A few years back a Russian web search engine found that Vladimir Putin was the only individual to appear regularly in his people’s dreams; from the half a million requests a week the most common requests for interpretation were fish, children and snakes with teeth, water and pregnancies also making it into the top 20 alongside the Kremlin thug.

Many dreamers may subconsciously be attracted to the politicians who haunt their slumber – but rather touchingly, some of my Tory-hating friends have had dreams in which they are pleasantly surprised by their bête noires. Sian “dreamt that Michael Howard was now PM and visited our local chip shop every Friday and everyone loved him” while Mark “had a dream about Dominic Cummings. I was very rude to him. He said he liked the Wu-Tang Clan. He was ever so nice and funny.”

Laura is no lover of

Trump but was enjoyably taken aback when

“Donald and Melania ordered me to take up lifetime employment on a Japanese whaling ship. I couldn’t start work before the president and first lady had located the highly specific, inordinately expensive roll-up mattresses that we were to use as sleeping quarters on the slippy wooden deck of the leviathan vessel though.”

I’m not crazy about the idea that, yet again, something magical and mysterious can be boiled down to our boring old chum “Disturbed sleep is often caused by stress, and can itself increase stress levels, creating a cycle that is difficult to break”, Dr Ivana Rosenzweig of King’s College gloomily warns us.

I hoped we’d come out of this a tougher people, having seen what real trouble was and proud that we’d survived, but it will have been a wasted opportunity if we’re going to use it as yet another excuse to moan about PTSD because toilet paper ran out briefly in March.

Look on the bright side; now that we can’t go to the cinema, how pleasing that we can see fantastical shows for free each night from the comfort of our own beds. Just lie back, close your eyes and dream for England.