I can’t stop dreaming about Keir Starmer – help!

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I I have a strange confession to make. I can’t stop dreaming about Keir Starmer. Over the past few months, and particularly since the general election was called next month, the Labor leader has appeared in my nightly imaginings on a semi-regular basis – as much as any real person I know. He stalks my psyche like Freddy Krueger, if Krueger were less interested in cutting up teenagers and more concerned with winning the approval of “Stevenage Woman.” Turns out I’m not the only one: after mentioning this phenomenon at work, a colleague admitted to also having Starmer dreams. You too may have spent the last few weeks dreaming of Starmer, or Ed Davey, or Nigel Farage. Regardless, this is a safe, judgment-free space.

My Starmer dreams are not violent. And no, before you ask, they’re not hot either. In fact, dreams are pretty mundane. In these documents, Starmer does nothing remarkable, he does not even say “my father was a toolmaker”. The dreams take the form of a prosaic scenario – I’ll be at a house party with friends, for example – and then he’ll just be there, and I will spend the entire duration of the dream shouting at him, reprimanding him, transforming myself into a veritable imaginative froth. (It might be worth pointing out here that I’m actually not Starmer’s biggest fan.) They say you should never go to bed angry. But what happens if you keep waking up angry?

It could be worse, of course: better to be hounded by Starmer’s face than, say, Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. At least there’s also a kind of typically British modesty, as if my dreams were curated by a third-rate, uninfluential talent booker. (“Count Dracula is a no… would you take John Prescott?”)

But what exactly is the cause of this personal nightmare in Downing Street? I suspect it’s a matter of political impotence. Perhaps I’m unconsciously channeling my frustration at how voiceless I – and many other pro-immigration, pro-LGBT+ rights and anti-privatisation people – currently feel when it comes to the Labor Party. If I can’t yell at the real Keir Starmer, this mental facsimile will have to do.. Perhaps it’s something more abstract: Sigmund Freud might have suggested that this imaginary Starmer-shaped punching bag is actually a substitute for my father, or my mother, or has something to do with penises . But Freud, as we all know, was coked up and is probably best ignored. (Also, my father would never be caught dead in the Arsenal crowd.)

In the end, the how and why don’t matter. The crux of the matter is that I want these dreams to stop. I need Starmer cut from the cast of my nocturnal fantasies, written abruptly like David Caruso in the second season of NYPD Blue. So I asked chartered psychologist Dr Mark Rackley to shed some light on my dreams, in the hope that I could, in the words of Labour’s manifesto, “change”.

“Dreams remain one of the great mysteries of psychological science,” he told me. “And there is no common consensus on why we dream or what purpose they serve.” As everyone probably already knows, dreams, he says, can be “illogical,” have a “first-person perspective,” and can “contain elements of waking life.” So far, everything was clear. But where does Starmer fit into all this?

“As the general election approaches, this can create anticipatory anxiety about what will happen and cause strong negative emotional reactions such as anger, fear, frustration and despair,” continues Dr Rackley . “We may fear that elections will bring negative changes to our lives and that we will be powerless to prevent that change from happening. This real reality can then manifest in the dreams we have and produce strange experiences in our dreams.

Politicians like Starmer and Rishi Sunak are, he continues, “characters in our lives”, even if we don’t know them personally. “As dreams are involuntary experiences created by our unconscious, we can dream about politicians, talk to them and argue with them and it can seem real, because when we dream, the resulting feelings stay with us,” he said. he declares. adds. “This type of dream is linked to our reality and is triggered by events that are familiar to us. »

That said, is there any chance of stopping the dream? To rid my mind of Starmer via some sort of dreamlike deep cleansing? It turns out it’s not that simple. “Because dreams are involuntary experiences, we cannot predict or control them,” says Dr. Rackley. “You cannot force the brain to produce or stop a dream; it’s out of everyone’s control. The best we can do is seek to understand the process and not let the dream destroy our minds too much!

Maybe that’s not what I wanted to hear, but hey, maybe it’s not the end of the world. If I was tormented by Sunak’s dreams, I’m not sure I’d be able to sleep again.