There was a knock at my door. I rushed from my home office to answer it.
But wait! I need to put on a mask before answering. It’s the right thing to do.
So I scavenge around our living room and the little box we keep by the door.
No masks.
Shit. More knocking at the door.
I start turning over the sofa, calling for my wife. The knocking, all the while, grew more and more impatient
So there I was, all the while frantically running around and somehow unable to find one of the dozens of masks in our home when I woke up.
It was a dream. And an oddly topical one at that.
Surprisingly, as far as I can recall, this was the first dream since the start of the pandemic that explicitly involved face masks.
I’m not sure why it took so long (8 or so months) before that part of everyday reality finally crept into my unconscious mind. However, what’s more remarkable is the kind of dream where they finally popped up.
I’m no stranger to anxious dreams. I’ve had my fair share of being the only one in the room who somehow forgot to wear pants or realizing I had an imminent deadline that had somehow slipped my mind all week.
Where in high school it wasn’t uncommon to dream, I forgot my locker combination as recess was rapidly drawing to a close, during COVID my anxiety has found new ways to express itself.
Mask anxiety strikes me as just the latest in that series of dreams. Though it is odd that masks are the only element of COVID to have snuck in. Where are all those anxiety-riddled dreams about hand washing, running out of sanitizer, and maintaining social distancing?
I suppose we’ll see. Maybe they’ll be more frequent, but I have a suspicion it was either a one-off or a few and far between kind of deal.
Now that the weather’s gotten cooler and my wife and I have a newborn, we’re not doing a lot of “getting out of the house.” In that regard, a lot of the major bits of the pandemic haven’t really been touching us. I spend more time worrying about washing my hands before handling the baby or after changing a diaper on a daily basis than I do out in the wild.
Now let’s wait and see when those baby anxiety dreams start trickling in.
