Quarantine Dreams
What happens when dreams are your only escape?


our quarantine dreams
escape from reality
tranquil oasis
What have your quarantine dreams been like?
I like to think that my dreams offer me a respite from both the creeping existential dread of a world careening towards oblivion and the mundane stress of keeping a business and household afloat when nobody ever goes anywhere.
Often, my dreams channel all of my emotions that I don’t have the time to process during the day into lurid nightmares where I am searching in vain for paradise while being hunted by some enigmatic predator.
Rarely, I find myself dreaming about an exotic oasis. But, even these pleasant dreams extract a toll.
With the nightmares, I wake up long before twilight, panicked and juiced on adrenaline, and am unable to fall back asleep.
When I awake from a pleasant dream of some impossibly beautiful promised land, I am filled with a strange nostalgia and painful yearning for a place I’ve never been, that never was, and that I cannot ever return to. And yet these dreams are worth the price.
These singular nocturnal visions also fill me with hope and a determination to create a piece of that dreamworld for everyone else to visit through my inadequate haiku and collage art.
This post was originally published on Medium.
Hi, I’m Jason McBride! I’m a poet-cartoonist, and Weirdo Poetry is a reader-supported publication. You can find my books and zines over at the Weirdo Poetry Shop.
Tips are always appreciated!




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