Description: This illustration is inspired by a dream from a student respondent who felt a heightened sense of confusion and anxiety due to COVID-19 and financial constraints. One aspect of this piece represents the dreamer’s concern of being perceived by others as not following COVID-19 safety measures. As a result, the dreamer felt anxiety of being watched and perhaps judged by others. The second aspect this piece represents is the dreamer’s worry over owing tuition the following year, of a consistent amount of $8200 that looms over the dreamer’s mind. This illustration is one of four pieces that was produced as part of UofT’s COVID-19 Student Engagement Award: “Navigating sleep and well-being during COVID-19: How do dreams help us make sense of our new global reality?” Our focus was to study the impact of COVID-19 on dreams.
Why did you conduct this research? The goal of our research was to examine the impact of COVID-19 on our dreams. Our results found that despite what felt like an extremely isolating time to many, themes that many experienced and could relate to were present in most respondents’ dreams. To us, this signified a unifying experience in a time that felt the exact opposite. As a way to produce materials that the U of T student body can engage with, Noor Abbas was hired as both a research assistant and artist to create pieces, such as this one, of dream art during the pandemic.
Technique: Medium: Traditional Art; Graphite, Charcoal, White Acrylic Paint. Image Modification: Applying opacity adjustment to the top half of the mirror to mimic mirror reflection. Paper used: Canson Sketch Paper 9 by 12 in (65lb/96g).
Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge U of T Global for project funding. I would also like to acknowledge Leela McKinnon, Erica Kilius, David Samson, and the Sleep and Human Evolution Lab for their initiatives and work on this project.
Additional information: Further details of our project can be found on our website. Here, we demonstrate more dream art produced by Noor Abbas, and our study results: https://covid19dreams.crevado.com.