In yet another dream this dreamer exhibited a curious combination of moral sensibility and criminal indifference. She imagined that, while walking with a man, a friend, she revealed to him a secret of a woman friend's. Then, realising her betrayal of confidence, she decided that the best thing she could do would be to kill the man. On reflection, however, she thought that it would, after all, be unkind to do so since he was a friend, and so told him that if he ever repeated the secret she would have him torn to pieces. It will be seen that the betrayal of a secret was felt as a far more serious offence than murder. The facility with which, in such dreams as this, the suggestion of murder presents itself, even to dreamers who, when awake, cherish no bloodthirsty or revengeful ideas, is certainly remarkable.
It is often said that in dreams erotic suggestions present themselves with extreme facility, and are eagerly accepted by the dreamer. To some extent there is truth in this statement, but it is by no means always true. This may be illustrated by the following dream, the sources of which could be easily traced; two days before I had seen the gambols of East Enders at Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, and the day before I had visited a picture gallery, the two sets of impressions becoming ingeniously combined, according to the usual rule of dream confusion. I thought that when walking along a country lane a sudden turn brought me to a broader part of the road covered with grass, into the midst of a crowd of women, large and well-proportioned persons, mostly in a state of complete nudity, and engaged in romping together, more especially in tugs-of-war; some of them were on horseback. My appearance slightly disturbed them, I heard one cry out my name, and to some extent they drew back, and partly desisted from their games, but only to a very slight degree, and with no overpowering embarrassment. I was myself rather embarrassed, and, glancing at them again, turned back. Afterwards my walk again brought me in view of them, and it occurred to me that women are somewhat changing their customs, a very wholesome change, it seemed to me. But I remonstrated with one or two of them that they ought to keep in constant movement to avoid catching cold. No erotic suggestions were present, although the dream might be said to lend itself to such suggestions.
The idea of moral retribution and eternal punishment may also be present in dreams. This may be illustrated by the dream of a lady who had an ill and restless girl companion sleeping with her, and was disturbed as well by a yelping and howling terrier outside. She had also lately heard that a friend had brought over a python from Africa. 'I dreamed last night I had a basket of cold squirming snakes beside me; they just touched me all over, but did not hurt; I felt mad with loathing and hate of them, and the beasts would not kill me. That, I thought, was my eternal punishment for my sins.' In her waking moments the dreamer was not apprehensive of eternal punishment, and it may be in such a case that, as Freud suggests, an unfamiliar moral idea emerges in sleep in much the same way as an unfamiliar or 'forgotten' fact may emerge.
On the whole, it may be said that while the moral attitude of the dreaming state is not usually identical with that of the waking state, there still nearly always is a moral attitude. It could not well be otherwise. Our emotional states are intimately bound up with moral relationships; we could not display such highly emotional states as we experience in dreams, with all their tragic accompaniments, in the absence of any sense of morality.
CHAPTER VI
AVIATION IN DREAMS
Dreams of Flying and Falling—Their Peculiar Vividness—Dreams of Flying an Alleged Survival of Primeval Experiences—Best explained as based on Respiratory Sensations combined with Cutaneous Anaesthesia—The Explanation of Dreams of Falling—The Sensation of Levitation sometimes experienced by Ecstatic Saints—Also experienced at the Moment of Death.
Dreams of flying, with the dreams of falling they are sometimes associated with, may fairly be considered the best known and most frequent type of dream. They were among the earliest dreams to attract attention. Ruths argues that the Greek conception of the flying Hermes, the god who possessed special authority over dreams, was based on such experiences. Lucretius, in his interesting passage on the psychology of dreaming, speaks of falling from heights in dreams;[100] Cicero appears to refer to dreams of flying; St. Jerome mentions that he was subject to them; Synesius remarked that in dreams we fly with wings and view the world from afar; Cervantes accurately described the dream of falling.[101] From the inventors of the legend of Icarus onwards, men have firmly cherished the belief that under some circumstances they could fly, and we may well suppose that that belief partly owes its conviction, and the resolve to make it practical, to the experiences that have been gained in dreams.