Can we sin via our dreams?

[daeve]

You would need to know when you are dreaming; this is called a “lucid dream”. Do a web search on the term. There are techniques to teach your mind for this. Once you know that you are dreaming, you can control the course of the dreams.

If your dreams are so vivid compared to your waking life, why not use what you dream to improve your waking life? ICXC NIKA.

I don’t usually remember what I dream. Except last night…I dreamed that my sister’s sister-in-law had an affair and was waiting to find out if she’s pregnant. She’s also 65 years old and I haven’t seen her since Thanksgiving. That I can remember. I’ll look it up. Thanks for the information.

 

[daeve]

The last thought that you have before you fall asleep influences your dreaming the most. Someone mentioned lucid dreaming. That is a good way to stop nightmares.

I know I wasn’t thinking of my sister’s sister-in-law when I went to sleep last night.

 

[RCSeminarian]

I am a seminarian and this question has come up from many new seminarians. The truth is that in order to sin we must be conscious. We can not control what goes on in the unconscious. If it were so then we would have complete control over many psychological things that go on in our head.

As a priest told me, you can not sin if you are not awake because sin requires your complete conscious agreement to perform the sinful act.
As far as the dreams go, if they are sexual in content it could be because of hormones within you, I am not sure as to what age you might be, but we were created human and part of that is that we are sexual beings. That means we are wired for sexual intimacy. Now that does not mean that we go around like animals because we were given control over our senses and passions. But, if the hormones in you are racing because you are at the age of extreme sexual development then you will have more lucid dreams then when you are younger or in some cases when you are older.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church Article 1857 states “For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: ‘Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.’”
Therefore, because we do not have control over our unconscious we can not give deliberate consent because we have no true control as to how we act in our dreams.
Think of when you are dreaming a scary dream. There might be a place that you do not want to go because you know that something is going to pop out and get you. In your conscious mind you would never go to that place. But in your unconscious mind you go there anyway. You didn’t do it deliberately rather your mind led you that way.

I do agree that many things affect our dreaming including our eating habits. But as far as it being sin. From what I have learned in seminary and through confessors is, No!
Praise God because we have enough to fight off in the conscious world!

Peace!
RCSeminarian

 

[Whitacre_Girl]

Say we have free will in our dreams which sometimes we do. Say in a dream where free will is executed to commit a sin. If God knows what we dream, which he does, could he possibly take offense to an act willfully committed against him even if it is in a dream. I mean a wife takes offense when her husband dreams of sleeping with another woman and God did make us in his image and likeness so that arouses such an issue. This is a philosophy forum so lets keep an open mind.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know in my dreams I never have access to free will. I am a very very VERY vivid and active dreamer. I sleeptalk, sleepwalk, and imitate the actions of my dreams IRL. Even to the point of thinking my hubby was a wolverine in my bed, and screaming and trying to push his sleeping body out of the bed…he didn’t care for that much…Anyway, I have also had exceedingly vivid dreams where I felt I was in complete control. This is never the case. I usually find myself “choosing” to do things that, when I wake up, I know I would never choose to do. Dream or not. Be it punching my mother in the teeth or sleeping with someone who was not my husband (Yes, I have these dreams…a real pain when you’re married and a sleeptalker I might add…though my hubby thinks it’s hilarious and will usually wake me up hoping to take advantage of the “good mood” and I am fortunate that I always wake up from these before they pass a PG-13 rating)

I do talk to my husband about my dreams though. And I have gained some control in them by fighting those dreams while I am awake. It now bothers my mind enough when someone I am being romantic with in a dream is not my husband. I realize it’s not real (somehow) and 9 times out of 10 my brain will morph that person (either body, or personality (name)) into my husband. More often than not though, I wake up, realize I didn’t want that dream, and push it out of my mind.

I think that if one is having dreams that leaves them feeling guilty when they wake up, to use that opportunity to pray, focus on what is good and right, and rewrite dreams. This is something I have also started doing with nightmares (I have crippling nightmares rather frequently) where you close your eyes after you wake up, allow the dream to come back to you, and imagine a different ending.

 

[LilyM]

Can we sin via our dreams? - If your conscience is uneasy about this matter, I would suggest to you to be rather too severe than too lenient with yourself.

Pursuing this harsh line in setting the matter straight, I would firstly presume that no dream falls from the sky into the head of the person dreaming at night but can only arise because it is already preconditioned in the person’s experiences and expectations. One must not drive the issue as far as Freud in saying that every image of a dream is a secret or openly recognizable realization of a certain desire(and one certainly must not try to be as ridiculous as he preferred to appear in claiming that every such desire is rooted in sexuality). But it is mere common sense to ascertain that a dream often goes in advance of our expectations, that it only amplifies and distorts a kind of material already present in the mind, in the neural patterns, and that it thus bears ressemblance to our own psychic makeup. Indeed, it would be Jungian to believe that dreams could stand in no relation with our ego-consciousness and assault the ‘I’ like some altogether unimaginable dark force. - Someone who has never been in Paris and never heard of Paris simply won’t dream of being in Paris, of visiting the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. And someone whose saintly mind is completely detached from all those base sentiments of human resentment certainly would be quite unable to dream of himself beating somebody else up, or else wouldn’t dream in any other way about it than in the way of an exasperating nightmare.

As a sidenote: I’m a strong believer in the influence of eating habits on dream patterns. For instance, after a family feast(in other words: after an evening of gluttony) when I go to bed with my stomach still rumbling loudly, dreams tend to be more prolific.
Taken as much into consideration, I’d propose you should choose light articles of food in the afternoon and try to abstain from both eating and drinking after, say 4 p.m. Let’s see if you won’t find that the frequency of your dreams is in prospect of declining. Of course, this sounds very much like deprivation, and I would only recommend it if the suffering from nightmares really was untenable. But perhaps it’s worth the try.

Firstly - we know that the angels of God appear, and God Himself speaks, directly to people in dreams in scripture all the time. Who is to say the devil cannot do the same in order to tempt them to sin?

Secondly - we know temptation does not come to us because of any guilt or preconditioning towards sin on our part - since even our sinless and utterly innocent Lord and Saviour was tempted. And Adam and Eve were certainly utterly innocent before they were tempted in Eden. There was no ‘preconditioning’ towards sin for them either, since sin only came into the world when Adam chose it, so sin, whether in thought or deed, did not exist prior to then (ie prior to the temptation by teh serpent).

Taking those two together, I’d say someone who hasn’t had actual training in lucid dreaming would lack the free will and self-control necessary to change or determine the content of their dreams.

 

[diggerdomer]

So my question is, if we commit a mortal sin in our dreams, does the possibility that we have sinned exist?

No

 

[Cristiano]

Well saying that the heart is a cognitive force far superior to the brain, heartmath.org/research/sc…the-heart.html…

I went to the web site and to me it looks more like Scientology than scientific research. I cannot see any info about the people involved and their qualifications. The very first “scientific article” presented is just a web page with no reference to its original journal publication (if any), no data, no bibliography etc. Xenu anyone?