本文选自《经济学人》9月5日刊文章。人们一直认为，梦有隐藏的含义，从西方《圣经》中创世纪对梦的解读，到中国的《周公解梦》，再到近代弗洛伊德的《梦的解析》，人类一直希望揭开梦的秘密。弗洛伊德认为暴力冲动和性压抑是梦的根源，而现代心理学认为，梦是做梦者日常经历的偶发再现，或是做梦者想在清醒时付诸实践的一些想法。对大量的梦境报告研究表明，男女做梦的方式不同，梦也会随着年龄的增长而改变，个人生活经历的变化也会影响梦境，然而人究竟为何会做梦仍未有明确答案。通过这篇文章，走进神秘人类的梦境。
选文精讲
Do dreams reflect reality?Computer analysis brings closer an understanding of what dreaming is aboutThat is not true, though, of the latest investigation into the matter. As they describe in Royal Society Open Science, Alessandro Fogli of Roma Tre University, in Italy, and Luca Maria Aiello and Daniele Quercia of Nokia Bell Labs, in Cambridge, Britain, have analysed thousands of reports of dreams experienced by mentally healthy people. Using these, they have tested several predictions based on the continuity hypothesis and found support for all of them.然而，对梦境的最新调查却并非如此。正如他们在《皇家学会开放科学》上所描述的，意大利罗马第三大学的亚历山德罗·福格利，以及英国剑桥诺基亚贝尔实验室的卢卡·玛丽亚·艾洛和丹尼尔·奎西亚分析了数千份心理健康的人所经历的梦的报告。利用这些数据，他们测试了基于连续性假设的几种预测，并找到了所有这些预测的支持数据。And not make dreams your masterThe most common way of assessing dreams is the Hall and Van de Castle dream scale. This uses written reports of the characters appearing in a dream and of those characters’ social interactions, as well as the dream’s emotional content, to yield a set of scores that can be employed to create indices of things like the proportion of friendly, sexual and aggressive encounters in a dream.最常见的评估梦境的方法是霍尔范德堡梦境尺度。这种方法使用报告中出现在梦境中的人物，以及这些人物的社会互动和梦境的情感内容，得出一组分数，这些分数可以用来建立一些指标，比如梦中友好、性和攻击性的比例。Scoring dreams this way is, though, both time-consuming and subject to observer bias—meaning scores assigned by different people may not be properly comparable. The breakthrough made by Dr Fogli, Dr Aiello and Dr Quercia was to automate things using a language-processing algorithm called a parsed tree. This deals with reports by the thousand, rather than the dozen, and does so consistently.然而，用这种方式给梦打分既费时又受观察者偏见的影响——也就是说，不同的人给的分数可能没有可比性。Fogli、Aiello和Quercia博士所做的突破性工作是利用一种被称为解析树的语言处理算法，让梦境分析自动化。它可以处理上千份报告，而不是十几份，而且具有一致性。
