In the further discussion of the subject we find remarkable distortion
and inconsequence in both groups of authors. Strictly speaking, interest
in immoral dreams would cease for all those who assert that the moral
personality of the person crumbles away in the dream. They could just as
calmly reject the attempt to hold the dreamer responsible for his
dreams, and to draw inferences from the badness of his dreams as to an
evil strain in his nature, as they rejected the apparently similar
attempt to demonstrate the insignificance of his intellectual life in
the waking state from the absurdity of his dreams. The others for whom
“the categorical imperative” extends also into the dream, would have to
accept full responsibility for the immoral dreams; it would only be
desirable for their own sake that their own objectionable dreams should
not lead them to abandon the otherwise firmly held estimation of their
own morality.
Still it seems that no one knows exactly about himself how good or how
bad he is, and that no one can deny the recollection of his own immoral
dreams. For besides the opposition already mentioned in the criticism of
the morality of the dream, both groups of authors display an effort to
explain the origin of the immoral dream and a new opposition is
developed, depending on whether their origin is sought in the functions
of the psychic life or in the somatically determined injuries to this
life. The urgent force of the facts then permits the representatives of
the responsibility, as well as of the irresponsibility of the dream
life, to agree in the recognition of a special psychic source for the
immorality of dreams.
All those who allow the continuance of the morality in the dream
nevertheless guard against accepting full responsibility for their
dreams. Haffner[32] says (p. 24): “We are not responsible for dreams
because the basis upon which alone our life has truth and reality is
removed from our thoughts.... Hence there can be no dream wishing and
dream acting, no virtue or sin.” Still the person is responsible for the
sinful dream in so far as he brings it about indirectly. Just as in the
waking state, it is his duty to cleanse his moral mind, particularly so
before retiring to sleep.
The analysis of this mixture of rejection and recognition of
responsibility for the moral content of the dream is followed much
further by Hildebrandt. After specifying that the dramatic manner of
representation in the dream, the crowding together of the most
complicated processes of deliberation in the briefest period of time,
and the depreciation and the confusion of the presentation elements in
the dream admitted by him must be recognised as unfavourable to the
immoral aspect of dreams; he nevertheless confesses that, yielding to
the most earnest reflection, he is inclined simply to deny all
responsibility for faults and dream sins.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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