Saturday, September 29, 2018

Do Dreams Predict Moral Behavior?

The idea that dreams predict moral behavior is far-fetched.  Some believe that those who are reckless, cruel, indulgent, and selfish in their dreams reveals what they are really thinking in such situations as the dream context appears, and how they would act in real life if they were presented with a similar situation.  They predict that in a serious situation, such as the decision to save a child or rob a bank, their actions in a prior dream would forecast their true character as rising to the occasion, rather than successfully suppressing any instincts that would allow them to commit a moral or immoral act.  My question to them is: if one were truly morally corrupt, why would they need a dream to reveal it?  Wouldn't they simply be that way in real life?  The man who represses his evil instincts in light of a conflict is just as moral as the man who believes he is moral but has never been tested in the real world.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud thought of all dreams as being the source of wish-fulfillment: all of our actions in dreams being expressions of wanting what we haven't been able to obtain.  In this context, the dreams in which our self-interests cause immoral acts are only our way of re-enacting what we wish we could do, not what we would do if a similar situation occurred in real life.  You might wish you could yell at your mother sometimes, or grope an attractive person you saw.  You might do this in a dream, but you wouldn't really do it in real life (not without expecting some consequences, anyway).  Desires that are placed in check are not sins by default, as some in the Church would have you believe.  Not acting on your immoral thoughts still allows you to be morally innocent.  Most of the time we aren't even conscious when committing an act of evil in dreams; yet in real life we sure as hell are, no pun intended.  The dream lawyers would cook up an insanity plea, every time!


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