Most of the people reading this will have been in lockdown for weeks now. For many people, this has taken a psychological toll. Some of us have been trying to manage the impossible tasks of working from home with home-schooling and childcare. Others have felt themselves enclosed in a bubble of boredom, and have resorted to jigsaw puzzles and binge-watching television to get some relief. Still others have taken advantage of the slowed-down pace of life to learn a new skill—to make sourdough bread, to tackle a new language, or to become musically proficient. Some of us are enduring the isolation alone, without the comfort of a partner or family, and are paralyzed with anxiety or wrestling with reawakened memories of past traumas. All of us, I imagine, feel suspended in uncertainty about what the future holds.

I want to recommend something else to do during these precarious times—something that is both personally and philosophically enriching and which can ease the burden of existential anxiety that the pandemic has thrust upon us. I want to encourage you to take this opportunity to attend to and learn from your own dreams, and explain how to do this.

Dreams have become more salient for many of us. COVID-19 has not only infected our waking lives. It has seeped into our sleeping lives as well. Researchersreportthat people’s sleep has been disrupted, and that there has been an apparent increase in vivid, powerful and disturbing dreams. I’ve experienced both, and have also noticed an uptick of friends reporting their dreams on social media. This is often done in a jokey “Wasn’t that weird!” spirit, often concluding with the half-serious statement “I wonder what that could have meant!” Comments are similarly lighthearted—often offering intentionally outlandish interpretations of the dream. My social media friends strike me as having mixed feelings about their dreams. They’re fascinated by their dreams, but treat them as curiosities to be kept at arms’ length.

Under normal circumstances, we are largely oblivious to our nighttime adventures. But now, the heightened awareness of our dreaming life provides a wonderful opportunity to fulfill the ancient philosophical injunction to “Know thyself!” Freud taught us how to find self-knowledge in our dreams more than a century ago, and the procedure is much simpler, more useful, and its results are vastly more compelling, than you might imagine. It’s been immensely valuable to me, I want to share it with you.

Some readers may be repelled by this suggestion, either because they assume that anything associated with the name Sigmund Freud smacks of charlatanry, or because they’ve been exposed to silly portrayals of Freudian dream analysis in which every elongated object is interpreted as a penis and every concave object a vagina. If you’re such a person, I invite you to set your suspicions aside for the moment and give me a chance to explain how the method really works. Then, if you’re interested, you can test-drive it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

第一件事是对梦有一种态度，这会让你明白它的意义。要使用弗洛伊德的方法，你必须从一种激进的不可知论开始。放弃你对这个梦的任何假设，即使它似乎已经体现在它的袖子上。你也要抵制诱惑，不要把梦看成一个有待解决的谜题或一个有待解码的信息。此外，如果你认为梦是谜题或编码信息，你可能会把梦看作一个连贯的整体。但弗洛伊德最宝贵的经验之一是，梦是由碎片拼凑而成的松散的故事。叙述只是上层建筑:真正重要的是独立组件。最后，忘掉梦的象征意义——梦的意象“代表”其他事物的概念。虽然在精神分析解梦过程中，符号解释有时也起到一定的作用，但其作用很小，可以忽略不计。

Now, on to the procedure. When you analyze a dream (that is, when you analyze yourself through the medium of a dream, which is what’s really going on) you take each element of the dream, one by one, and see what springs to mind when you think of them, with no assumptions about which details are important and which ones aren’t. Don’t “analyze” the dream. Instead, let your mind wander off from each of its components. Just let your consciousness off the leash and see where it goes. Freud called this processfreier Einfall, which is somewhat misleadingly translated “free association.”

When you do this, you’re likely to notice that the individual pieces of the dream are like snapshots of impressions from the day (or two) before the dream. The dream is like a collage that’s concocted from these snippets of experience. Continue to let your mind wander from these components, seeing what they evoke for you, and you’ll notice that most or all of them are connected, and that this web of connections seems to cluster around raw, emotionally significant concerns—the hopes, dreads, shames, and longings that you’ve placed on the psychological back burner.

如果你能走到这一步，你已经理解了那个梦，也更好地了解了自己。当你熟睡的时候，你或许已经对隐藏在意识帷幕背后的复杂心理过程有了一个惊人的了解，这些复杂的心理过程构成了强大的视觉诗歌。

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