Masks

[grayestofghosts]

I keep having nightmares about not wearing masks. The dream will always start normal and then I will realize that I'm not wearing a mask and nobody else is either. And I'll realize I don't have a mask to put on, and it's just... I don't know, it's worse than being naked because being naked is only embarrassing while not wearing a mask would end up killing me.

I wonder if other people are having these kinds of dreams, if these will be the new kind of nightmares that we'll have after the pandemic instead of dreaming we forgot our pants.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

You're not the first person I've seen having those. I don't think you're even the second.

I've never been prone to pantsless dreams, but I did have a maskless dream recently. I dreamt I went to a grocery store after a hike and realised that--since my original plan was to stay outdoors at a safe time of year--I didn't have a mask on. I was in Northern Ontario (an area with very low COVID-19 rates), so it kind of made *sense* that none of the other grocery patrons gave a shit about anti-disease measures, but that didn't mean I *agreed* with them.

I pulled my last 2010s-made surgical mask out of my belly-bag medkit and put that on. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and honestly a surgical mask used in a grocery store for like 45 minutes would probably still be usable again after however many weeks or months in my bag before I next needed it.

When I woke up I went and put a spare cloth mask in the medkit too. It might help you to do something similar: arrange things so that you always, *always* have the option of putting a mask on regardless of whether you started out with one, and accustom yourself to that idea until it seeps through to your subconscious.

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It's interesting that while I've long been prone to plague nightmares, I seem to be *less* prone to them since the current real plague started. Instead I get a lot of blatantly metaphorical nightmares about fires.

[grayestofghosts]

I mean, I have had spare masks in my bag and coat pocket but I tend not to use them so maybe there wasn't just much time for it to seep in.

But yeah, I mean, the more frightening dreams I had before the whole plague thing were about mass shootings so this might be... an improvement, even? I've had the typical dreams where I forget to wear clothes or didn't show up for a high school exam or something but even while the dream is ongoing I shrug it off because I know these things aren't important. My unconscious mind has to work a lot harder to frighten me these days.

[brin_bellway]

Update: the cloth mask I put into my real medkit *did* make its way into my dream medkit, and I used it in my nightmare this morning. Plenty of *other* things went wrong in that dream, but at least I had a mask.