covid

COVID-19 Dreams (originally posted on Substack on July 10th, 2020)

At least the door is closed now.

Annie Nazzaro

Annie Nazzaro

— 5 min read

This is normal, right

A few weeks ago, I dream that I have to attend another year of high school. I’m escorted to a new building on campus, far from the others. The building is still unfinished, the electrical wiring isn’t done. The hallways and classrooms are all in shadow. So when I enter mine, I don’t see at first that the other students are all ex-friends and ex-crushes of mine. I’m the last one to arrive, and they all look at me. It’s a creative writing class, and I’m going to have to share my most personal writing with all of these people I was looking forward to never seeing again, and the worst part of it all is that the teacher is a writer of some renown that I respect, and she’s looking at me and asking me what I’ve prepared to share for that first day, and oh no oh no oh no –

But it doesn’t even end there. In another part of the dream I’m someone else entirely, a blonde fighter pilot who’s about to crash her plane into a cliff over a stormy ocean. When I do crash, I’m in one piece, but I’m myself again, alone on a rainy beach. The only civilization I know is the school, where social anxiety awaits, but I run there anyway. As I’m running I pass by a cozy house. Through a bay window I see my uncle seated at a piano. I stop for a moment at the window to watch him play.

When I get back to the school, class is over; the building seems to be empty. I enter a bathroom to get changed, since I’m going to a concert later. Except the bathroom isn’t a school bathroom, it’s the bathroom from my great-grandma’s house with flowery wallpaper and tiny lamps on the side table and countertop and carpeting, of all things, on the floor. I’m struggling into a leather skirt when someone walks into the bathroom – a parent from a PTA meeting. I push them out the door but the whole time they’re insisting it’s fine for them to be in there with me. I try to lock the door but every time I do someone opens it again. I’m desperately trying to keep the door blocked with one arm while I pull on this skirt over my feet on which for some reason I’ve got high-heeled combat boots even though it would be so much easier if I could do this without the boots on and then all of a sudden the whole bathroom is full of other girls getting changed into the exact same clothes so we can all go to this concert. At least the door is closed now.

Last week I dream I’m on the roof of a high-rise apartment building in Chicago which is also the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore. This is strange to me, because the Seminary Co-Op as I remember it is a two-story building in Hyde Park, but I accept this. On the roof of the building is a black-box theater owned by the bookstore. I’m a criminal, I’m with fellow criminals, and we are going to steal something. We’re also employees of the store. This isn’t just a heist, but a betrayal. We break into the theater and someone leaves behind a cloth on fire. They think it will go out. We get out without what we came for and disperse into the city for an hour. When we return to find the theater a charred, ruined husk of itself, I know it was our fault.

 There’s an open-air bar on the roof of this building, and we reconvene there to plan our next move. But the place swarms with other people, the audience for a show meant to play at the theatre tonight that no one is ever going to see. Detectives mingle with the audience members, too – they’re not in uniform, but I know they’re there. I hide in the kitchen, I grab a drink and go back out to the bar, I wait for someone to ask me who burned everything down. Now that I think about it, I don’t see a single book at this bookstore.

A couple of days ago I dream that I’m in the Edwardian era. I have been invited to the mansion of an elderly couple whose housekeeper looks like my mother but isn’t my mother. The housekeeper invites me to explore the grounds, so I go through French doors to the Versailles-style gardens in the back of the house. In this dream, I have super-jumping powers, and I use them to scale hedges, fountains, sculptures, and even clouds, collecting purple coins and batting away purple Koopa shells as I go. In the clouds I find a purple monster which looks like the Piranha Plant Dino from Super Mario Galaxy. It spots me and roars, and I quickly make my way back to the ground. The housekeeper says the monster is the true form of the daughter of the mansion, and that we need to get away before she hurts me. I think she could have told me this earlier if she really wanted to.

The housekeeper waits with a girl who looks like my sister but isn’t my sister in a car on the cobblestone street outside the mansion. I run through the mansion, but I have a very heavy suitcase, and I’m slower than I need to be. The girl who becomes the monster spots me. She’s wearing a lacy white high-collared floor-length dress, but she’s still fast, which I find unfair. I run through a glass-paneled conservatory where the elderly owners of the house sit at a metalwork table and sip tea. They don’t seem to see me. I crash through one of the glass doors to get out of the house, but just as I reach the car with my very heavy suitcase, the car pulls away. I’m left in the dusty street with the girl who is a monster. She smiles at me. She wants to play tag. I always lose at tag.

Today, I’m in my apartment, as I’ve been every single day for the past four months. Is it four? It could be forever. There’s a terrible illness waiting outside the door; I know that if I leave, it will catch me. I sense life coming back to the streets, but I can’t see it. I hear fireworks. I can’t see them either. If I listen closely, I can hear them all the time.

Reading/listening recommendations for the week:

And don’t even get me started on that Harper’s letter.

Til next time.

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