A prestigious museum in Britain and an established university in Canada have come together to undertake a rigorous academic exercise to analyse the significance of Covid-19 related dreams that people are having during the time of the pandemic.

The dreams are being “collected” by the Museum of London which has entered into a partnership with the Museum of Dreams based at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.

The project was set out by the Museum of London, which said: “Covid-19 has brought about many changes to Londoners’ lives, not just in the day to day, but also in relation to how we sleep and dream.”

According to a survey conducted by King’s College London and Ipsos MORI in June 2020, “the anxiety, stress and worry brought on by the global Covid-19 crisis is not limited to daytime hours but has affected our sleep and dreaming minds as well”.

It said that in response, the Museum in London, in collaboration with university in Canada, “is launching a research-based project seeking to collect the dreams of Londoners by recording testimonies of dreams from the pandemic”.

It added that “the project, entitled ‘Guardians of Sleep’, will be the first time that dreams as raw encounters and personal testimonies will be collected by a museum”.

It said: “The project team aims to collect the dreams in the form of oral histories as part of the museum’s ongoing ‘Collecting Covid project’, but also to explore what insight dreams might offer into mental health and ways of coping with external stresses, especially in times of crisis.”

Sharon Sliwinski, creator of the Museum of Dreams at Western University, commented: “The Museum of Dreams is a hub for exploring the social and political significance of dream-life.

This partnership with the Museum of London takes inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s description of dreams as the ‘guardians of sleep’ where dreams are seen as night watchmen helping to preserve the integrity of our mind, guarding over our capacity to articulate experiences in our own terms.

On Thursday night, Sliwinski, author of Dreaming in Dark Times, was interviewed by on BBC Radio 4’s flagship programme, The World Tonight, which gave examples of Covid-19 dreams in America.

One man said: “I looked down on my stomach and saw dark blue stripes. I remembered. These were the first sign of being infected with Covid-19.”

Sliwinski told listeners: “Sigmund Freud thought dreams were a form of thinking; they were just a different form of thinking, not a rational form of thought. He thought about it as a question of the unconscious. But in more simple terms, we might just say, when you fall asleep, and you have a dream, it raises the question of exactly who is the author of that experience.”