AustLit

'History happens to us in dreams: it is experienced and understood there as much as in our waking lives. Neuroscientists have known this for some time, but these pandemic years have provided a sudden abundance of data, intensive and immediate, and global in scale, for those who work with dreams. Their reports are of dreams about swarming insects, billowing gas, and other transferred contaminations; about shadowed monsters and snipers lurking on the other side of a window or wall. There are more literal dreams about funerals and hospitals, accidental handshakes or hugs; about forgotten face masks, a new variant of that archetypal dream of public nakedness realised suddenly and far too late. In pandemic dreams, the dead speak. The dreamer cannot find their way home, is pursued. All of these are dreams that grapple with upheaval and threat, with fear, with the difficult adjustments to a world unsteadied suddenly, transformed.'(Introduction)