Covid Dreams — of Birdsong and Sirens

End to end, our London flat was a modest 32 footsteps. When London shut down, I’d been in the UK four weeks.

At first, when we paused to listen closer, all we heard were random, almost opaque, individual noises, but as we refocussed our attention — maybe as we plodded into lockdown, maybe as we fell into restlessness and insomnia, maybe as the world we knew ground to a stop — patterns of composition, harmony and story took shape. And it was the familiarity of these stories that comforted me, despite having never listened to them before. I found a grounded counterpoint in an emerging world that isn’t mine (or yours, for that matter — it is too much to say here it’s now the virus’s).

For me, lockdown was like sleepwalking though a restless Dream-Wake hybrid world punctuated by fatigue, insomnia and curious dreams that, dull at their edges and obtuse and fractured, create No Time. And I wasn’t alone, lockdown spawned a world-wide epidemic of weird, mysterious and self-contradictory dreams — the remnants of which persist today.

In this soundscape, we explore, and in part decipher, the mental and physical landscapes of lockdown. Through the intricacies and half-spaces of a recurring dream about escaping a house — any house, my house, your house — we attempt to uncover the overlooked stories of connection and home.