Utterances like those of Schopenhauer, that in the dream every person
acts and talks in accordance with his character, form the sharpest
contrast to those mentioned above. R. P. Fischer[N] maintains that the
subjective feelings and desires or affects and passions manifest
themselves in the wilfulness of the dream life, and that the moral
characteristics of a person are mirrored in his dream.
Haffner[32] (p. 25): “With rare exceptions ... a virtuous person will be
virtuous also in his dreams; he will resist temptation, and show no
sympathy for hatred, envy, anger, and all other vices; while the sinful
person will, as a rule, also find in his dreams the pictures which he
has before him while awake.”
Scholz[59] (p. 36): “In the dream there is truth; despite all masking in
pride or humility, we still recognise our own self.... The honest man
does not commit any dishonourable offence even in the dream, or, if this
does occur, he is terrified over it as if over something foreign to his
nature. The Roman emperor who ordered one of his subjects to be executed
because he dreamed that he cut off the emperor’s head, was not wrong in
justifying his action on the ground that he who has such dreams must
have similar thoughts while awake. About a thing that can have no place
in our mind we therefore say significantly: ‘I would never dream of such
a thing.’”
Pfaff,[O] varying a familiar proverb, says: “Tell me for a time your
dreams, and I will tell you what you are within.”
The short work of Hildebrandt,[35] from which I have already taken so
many quotations, a contribution to the dream problem as complete and as
rich in thought as I found in the literature, places the problem of
morality in the dream as the central point of its interest. For
Hildebrandt, too, it is a strict rule that the purer the life, the purer
the dream; the impurer the former, the impurer the latter.
The moral nature of man remains even in the dream: “But while we are not
offended nor made suspicious by an arithmetical error no matter how
obvious, by a reversal of science no matter how romantic, or by an
anachronism no matter how witty, we nevertheless do not lose sight of
the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice.
No matter how much of what follows us during the day may vanish in our
hours of sleep—Kant’s categorical imperative sticks to our heels as an
inseparable companion from whom we cannot rid ourselves even in
slumber.... This can be explained, however, only by the fact that the
fundamental in human nature, the moral essence, is too firmly fixed to
take part in the activity of the kaleidoscopic shaking up to which
phantasy, reason, memory, and other faculties of the same rank succumb
in the dream” (p. 45, &c.).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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