Morality and dreams

Morality is a theme that I seem to visit again and again in my dreaming life. It is only when I examine my dreams that I see just how many of my dreams concern themselves with complicated moral dilemmas or profound feelings of guilt.

 Romantic relationships and morality

There are various different types of morality dream. One connecting feature between the strands is that of the linkage of responsibility and romantic relationships with women. There seems to be a connection between the notion of relationships and transgression.  In one dream I am involved with a lady friend when somebody is murdered in my immediate proximity with a revolver. I was too distracted, however, and not only was I unable to act as a witness but I  also become the prime suspect in the murder. 

In another dream there is a rather moving segment in which while experiencing time slips I use my magical powers to hold the pieces of a broken vase together in mid air and manipulate the pieces till the vase is fixed. I am in a diner when this is going on and the waitress/ a random attractive girl starts to touch my arm in response to whatever energy it took to repair the vase. As she is leaving the table I hold her hand. She looks back with a smile on her face while holding my hand. In the next segment I learn that she has been shot off screen and I am being quizzed by a girl I knew in college as to what this waitress girl looked like. In another segment children are re-upping/ re-supplying flats with drugs. This is like the show the wire. This dream segment is particularly interesting because the magical power that I used to fix the vase is the same magic power that causes the woman to be attracted to me and also the same power that I ultimately know leads to her off screen dream death. The immediate transition to the grim world of the involvement of children in drug dealing in Baltimore is disheartening and serves as another linkage between the concept of romance and the grim everyday world of immorality.


It seems that on some level I have drawn a false dichotomy between the good and the interesting. In my ordinary waking experience I see people pursuing relationships in an overly cynical or degrading way and it seems as though those concepts have fused in someway in my mind. Perhaps all that is needed is for the dream to present an image of romantic relationships that is both good or natural and interesting.

Living by the sword and dying by the sword

The phrase 'hoisted by one's own petard' is a phrase that really captures morality concept that features heavily in my dreams. It particularly appeals to me because of the imagery it evokes. The petard was a small bomb which was used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications and so the phrase implies that one could be lifted or blown upward by their own bomb.To put it another way the notion is that of living by the sword and dying by the sword. It is the sort of idea that plays out in my ordinary waking life too. I feel that whatever that whenever one uses a certain type of tactics to engage others they are opening themselves up to exactly the same sort of tactics being used the same way. 


In one of my dreams a night time gunfight is taking place across the back gardens of my estate. I pick up someone else's gun and fire one shot in the rough direction of the sounds of gunfire. The threatening area is briefly illuminated before I drop the gun. There is an understanding that if I become a person who fires guns I will be killed by a gun. In a later dream I am involved in some sort of military plan. There two units of soldiers on my side surrounding a vast enemy encampment on a vast snowy plane. In spite of all of my cleverness in the formulation of an encirclement strategy I actually do not want to engage the enemy at all. I begin to hear gunshots across this mountainous plane and I suspect that hostilities have begun. The scene begins to shift and I am faced with a bridge over water. 




Atop the bridge is our culprit; the source of the sound of the shots. The man it appears is hunting ducks under the bridge with his rifle. A man passes him on the bridge perhaps a friend or an acquaintance. The hunter fires a shot in direction of this friend or acquaintance. I am disgusted by this and begin to hurl abuse at the hunter on the bridge. He begins to fire in my direction at first in a manner both intimidatory and reckless and then much more focused on actually killing me. One of the shots rebounds off my foot and lands on the bridge near the hunter. I am struck either then or now in my waking state that the bullet ricocheted off of my shoe. I entreaty the hunter and suggest that it is unfair to kill me without giving me a chance to fight back. He tosses down a revolver that he had begun firing with and he anticipates that since he has fired a number of rounds from the revolver that I will not be able to master the mechanism and will fire on an empty chamber. 


I quickly master the revolver, I pull back the hammer and decide not to aim for his head but for the larger target of his torso. I fire and he drops from the bridge. He is now beneath and archway that supports the bridge and I fire the remaining two shots into him. Shooting him at least once in the head. A friend asks me what I want done with the body and I suggest that it be left because it is evidence and it would not be proper to disturb the evidence. In moral terms I am going over what I perceive as a complicated situation. I envisage my arguments of self-defence for when the law arrive and I think to myself that the law can never capture adrenaline fuelled nature of real self-defence. When you are really fighting a threat you will empty all of your rounds into it and that is the force that you think necessary at the time. The detached language of hindsight does not seem appropriate in this context. Another, opposing line of thought occurs to me either now as I meditate on this dream or during the course of this dream. I think that there is a definite feel of murder off of this shooting and that perhaps morality is not meant to be easy that the sway of passions of the movements of other people and forces are not something that really significantly reduces our responsibility for violent or immoral acts.  


In terms of what I can take from this dream there is quite a lot. It would appear that on one analysis I have become like that which I have defeated and maybe it is necessary to become the evil that you defeat. Now if I am being truly honest with myself the hunter that I killed on that bridge could also be taken to represent the sexual hunter. The gun could also represent the phallus. The immediate connections that I form with this altercation with the hunter on the bridge are first of all Sophie's father in Peep Show (a friend helpfully pointed out that he is a cuckold) and the murder of Jimmy in Boardwalk Empire by Nucky Thompson. Now there are all sorts of elements of betrayal captured in these associations. The link to boardwalk empire is significant for a number of reasons. 





First of all the shooting of Jimmy by Nucky is in a sense unequivocally murder. Jimmy is unarmed and outnumbered and shot at close range by Nucky. Jimmy had absolutely no chance. In another sense Jimmy had ordered a hit on Nucky and in the broader political sense it was Nucky or Jimmy and in that broader sense it is a form of self defence.


Now when Jimmy orders the murder of Nucky that is another interesting point and makes it all the more interesting. The killing of Nucky is encouraged by Nucky's brother Eli and Jimmy acquiesces in it to appear to be a decisive and effective leader. A man rather than a boy. He expresses his doubts to his mother who encourages him to act decisively and strongly. We are told there are orders and all the rest is just book keeping. So here we have a moment where Jimmy is supposed to be showing his strength in leadership but at the same time he is giving in to pressure from his mother and the rest of the group. Eli was the one who suggested that the group murder Nucky and he ends up being forgiven while Jimmy is murdered by Nucky. This string of Boardwalk Empire associations taps onto another theme. The greater the persons capacity for morality and self-assessment the higher the standard to which they are held. Jimmy has all sorts of misgivings over ordering the death of Nucky but it is Eli who is forgiven. In the Bible it often happens that Jesus says the prostitutes and thieves will get into heaven before the pious. It is this unusual facet of morality which both my dreaming and waking brain seize upon. We seem to admire minor positive change in those who perennially do bad things whereas we expect impossibly high things from those who know what is the right thing to do. This in turn reminds me of the Inquisitor in Red Dwarf because the person who judges is people is ultimately the person being judged themselves.



  The difference between the actual emotional and instinctive reactions of people that I discussed in relation to the self-defence/ murder shooting at the bridge again appears in the beginning of Cop Land. I really enjoyed the film but I found myself in two minds about the films opening. It starts with a young cop shooting two crack heads in a car in what he thinks is a situation where his life has been threatened. The crack heads bash into the side of his car at high speed and the cop chases them and shows his badge and demands that they pull over. One of the crack heads laughs and says no and points a bicycle lock at the young hero cop. The cop things that the lock is a gun and jams on the breaks at this point his tyre blows out which he takes to be a shot at him and he returns fire killing both of the crack heads. 


It is this situation that leads to a weapon being planted, a staged suicide and a number of murders or attempted murders to cover up this incident and everything flowing from it. So this is the incident from which the rest of the film flows and it is really enjoyable in terms of being a nice high octane, adrenaline fuelled bit of action. However, something about it didn't sit well with me. The shooting seems justifiable, from the subjective point of view of the cop, and surely an argument could have been made quite successfully in court to that effect. Another train of thought, however, arose as with the shooting in the 'bridge hunter dream'. I began to imagine that if I had been in the cop's place and had actually killed two people perhaps the standard would actually be as high as that and the moral opprobrium attaching to this would  have actually been much greater that I had at first anticipated.





If I am being truly honest the shooting imagery in both my dreams and the Tv and film references that flow from them there is a link to romantic relationships. The revolver recurs in Cop Land and in another clip that I mentioned to a friend when I jokingly speculated at how my party might progress at the weekend. I had not remembered when I shared this link with my friend that the line 'morals get in a way of a good dirty time' was used in it.

 
It seemed that beneath the threshold of my conscious I wanted to draw this connection between fun and sexy immorality versus boring goodness. I am reminded of what another friend told me about my choosing of tv references being more revealing of my inner thoughts than any of the dreams that I share and perhaps there is something to that. I shared the following clip from breaking bad which prompted that response and it again seems to deal with the themes of being lost and the tension between judgment and morality and acceptance.

 Acceptance is another theme that plays out in my thoughts about morality and there is a linkage between this and the live by the sword and die by the sword notion. Judgment cuts both ways if you are ungenerous in your assessments and characterizations you must judge yourself by the same uncharitable standards if you wish to be consistent/ sane. If you cannot accept you may end up being lost like Jesse but at the same time you cannot just accept everything there have to be limits and lines drawn at some point.

Guilt

Another feature of morality that occupies much of my waking and dreaming self is the notion of guilt. Guilt has been a driving force for a lot of my action and it has helped me achieve things that I might not have otherwise achieved but it also seriously debilitating. It is an area of much reflection for me and there is a distinction drawn or at least one that I draw between shame, guilt and responsibility. The way that I see it there is shame which seems very much to be the socially mandated need to appear like I am feeling bad aspect. Guilt then seems to be a little better but it is still a self indulgent emotion whereas responsibility for me  is at the top of this hierarchy. It does not allow for self-servicing feelings but accepts the consequences of actions and in a dispassionate and sort of matter of fact way takes itself forward. Guilt on the other hand can be just looking to confess and receive forgiveness from the other whereas responsibility seems to me to be more for the self. 

I have also been interested in the discussion of secondary sociopathy in one paper where it talks about this notion of free floating guilt that arises as a result of punishment in childhood for both pro-social and anti-social behaviour. This interests me because I have seen before the phenomenon of guilt as an imposition. In these cases guilt is not something felt for the transgressor themselves but just another thing that is forced upon them and another reason for them to get angry. This anger and externalization of guilt may actually lead to a sort of self-vindicating criminality which could actually cause some people to do horrible things.


My dreams dealing with guilt seem to use the imagery of crashed cars. In one dream I am in a landscape of endlessly crashed cars and I am responsible in some way for these accidents or perhaps they are not accidents. The skeletal and charred out remains of crushed up cars are on the roadside. I am with the simultaneity that only can occur in dreams both desperately fleeing the site of this crash and at the same time solemnly waiting for judgment and the arrival of the law. In another sequence of that dream I am in a jail cell where I am receiving therapy from Paul Weston the Tv show therapist. This ties in with another association I make between the need for one to bottom out or reach rock bottom before healing can begin. I am reminded of a photo of a man with his head in a urinal with something about hitting rock bottom in the caption and of course In Treatment where it seems that with Week 7 of every patient's therapy poignant piano music is played and everybody recognizes that they are damaged and trapped by patterns but somehow everything is now going to be ok. Paul might say in the dub-iest of accents to Gina that it's alright to be human. An acceptance of being flawed and an understanding of the slow process of healing seems to make people as healed as they could be just for the duration of the melancholic/ heal-y music.

The most interesting feature of these morality dreams for me would seem to be that my dreaming self is not only obsessed with morality but romantic relationships and morality. In every dream situation and under every heading that link is drawn in my mind. I am reminded of something a friend said to me in conversation and it helps me to formulate a message to myself so that the two halves of myself can understand one another. The moral boring part of myself would like to quote the following from Lincoln's first inaugural address to the sexy immoral side of me: -

We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.