Confined Dreams. Insights Into dream life at the Time of Covid-19 and Lockdown

During the lockdown of spring 2020, Hervé Mazurel, a historian, and Élizabeth Serin, a psychoanalyst, initiators of the nomadic psychoanalysis laboratory, collected 400 dreams told by men and women of all ages and all walks of life. Their methodology was based on associations of ideas and interpretations as well as sociological and ethnographic data. The impetus of the project was to record this unprecedented moment in our history, but they also wished to make this collection of dream narratives some central material for the resumption of dialogue between the social sciences and psychoanalysis. The primary aim was the articulation of the psyche with social-history. In this paper, the authors make an inventory of the common themes of which these dreams are woven in lockdown and track their metamorphoses over the course of weeks, in an attempt to better grasp the extent to which this collective event has shaken our unconscious psychic life.