Paris (AFP)

What do we dream of in these pandemic times? Scientists, psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists and anthropologists have launched dream collections, to advance research on dream life but also to better understand the current period.

In early April, Perrine Ruby and her team developed a "one week" survey to "find out what people dream of" while the Covid-19 rages and the French must remain confined.

"We know that we dream of what we live, of our daily life, of what concerns us, and of our emotional memories. So there was every reason to think that the pandemic was going to be incorporated into dreams" , emphasizes this researcher at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center.

The project continues * but the preliminary results already show that sleep and dreams are "turned upside down", she adds.

Many of the approximately 2,700 participants indicated that they "sleep more" but also have "more trouble falling asleep", having "more awakenings" during the night. Many say they remember their dreams more.

"This can be explained by at least two things: waking up more at night and having more emotional intensity," she says.

In the dreamlike stories, she notes "two tendencies": "illness, hospital, death, suffocation, isolation ... all these themes are very represented" but "as a counterweight, there are also many very positive themes: interactions with others , parties, cooperation "and" accentuated eroticism ".

"There is probably a cathartic side - the very painful emotions that we experience during the day are expressed through the dream - and there is also the compensation side: everything that we cannot live during the day, we lives it in dreams, "she explains.

Other projects also seek to shed light on this period of health crisis in the light of dreams, citing in particular as a reference the work of the journalist Charlotte Beradt who had collected, in her work "Dreaming under the Third Reich" (1966), dreams of Germans between 1933 and 1939.

- Farewell, trains, papers -

Psychoanalyst Elizabeth Serin and historian Hervé Mazurel have collected more than 300 dreams as part of their "nomadic psychoanalysis laboratory".

By email **, they ask dreamers to make sketches of interpretations but also to send "a certain amount of information" to "have more sociological and ethnographic data", underlines Mr. Mazurel.

"Like any individual, the one who dreams must be apprehended at the crossroads of his multiple social affiliations, which make him also be what he is", details the historian of affects and imaginations, lecturer at the University of Burgundy.

"This major socio-historical event which is the pandemic obviously shakes our psychic life and, the future will say it, perhaps it will do it durably", he says.

This work continues but Ms. Serin already notes that, since mid-March, "dreams are evolving". "At the beginning, there was notably a tone which revolved around the question of the dead", "farewell stories". Then "there was a huge presence of trains" and "the question of the papers" that we have to "show", then "dreams have arrived with habitats that are changing", she sketches.

Bernard Lahire collected 380 dreams, continuing the work started in his book "The sociological interpretation of dreams".

Aware that he will not have a "representative sample" of French society, the sociologist explains, however, wanting to "see what comes up most as thematic" and the way in which "the situation of both pandemic and containment has echoes in dreamlike productions. "

"I want to try to understand how our dreams are porous in relation to the social world in which we live, and how it works," he summarizes.

"Dreams have incorporated norms, the experience of confinement and the fear of illness," confirms Arianna Cecconi, who works in partnership with artist Tuia Cherici.

This anthropologist, who has notably worked on the dreams of the inhabitants of the northern districts of Marseille, also wants to be interested "over a long period" in how the experience of Covid-19 "can continue to inhabit us". "How long are we going to keep dreaming about this?" she wonders.

* https://form.crnl.fr/index.php/163837?newtest=Y&lang=fr

** revesdeconfins@gmail.com

© 2020 AFP