Repentance and Guilt inside a Dream - is this normal/healthy?

[DL82]

As an unmarried man trying to live chastely, I realise that it’s perfectly normal to have dreams from time to time, and that there is nothing sinful about the body releasing its urges through dreams.

Lately, however, I’ve started to notice that inside these dreams, I feel a sense of guilt or a need for repentance. For example, recently I dreamed that I repeated a sin I used to commit, then immediately had the thought (inside the dream) “shoot, and I’ve just been to confession, now I’ve blown it again and need to go back” and my dream-self felt so guilty and confused. When I woke, it took a while for me to realise it must have been a dream, not reality, then I thought those seemed like very odd thoughts to be having in a dream. On another occasion, the me inside the dream managed to resist the ‘temptation’ (which of course isn’t really a temptation because the will is passive when not conscious) within the dream, which doesn’t seem entirely healthy.

I’m a bit worried that this might be the beginning of a repressed and unhealthy unconscious reaction to sexuality. I’m engaged, and will be married soon, and perhaps it’s just in time, but I hope I haven’t damaged myself somehow with a repressed attitude to sex.

Can anyone else identify with this? Is there something wrong with me?

 

[Barbkw]

In highschool and into my young adulthood I smoked quite a bit of pot.

That ended when I joined the Navy in the 80’s and they instituted a “one strike and you’re out” rule and started routine urinalysis.

I often woke myself out of dreams, in a cold sweat, “believing” that I’d smoked a joint and that I was going to be caught in a random drug test.

Chastity dreams (or unchastity dreams) were the same way for me. However with those, I battled them inside REM sleep. It took a fews months, somehow my mind reoriented off the sex dreams and toward other subjects.

 

[JacquesMaritain]

As an unmarried man trying to live chastely, I realise that it’s perfectly normal to have dreams from time to time, and that there is nothing sinful about the body releasing its urges through dreams.

Lately, however, I’ve started to notice that inside these dreams, I feel a sense of guilt or a need for repentance. For example, recently I dreamed that I repeated a sin I used to commit, then immediately had the thought (inside the dream) “shoot, and I’ve just been to confession, now I’ve blown it again and need to go back” and my dream-self felt so guilty and confused. When I woke, it took a while for me to realise it must have been a dream, not reality, then I thought those seemed like very odd thoughts to be having in a dream. On another occasion, the me inside the dream managed to resist the ‘temptation’ (which of course isn’t really a temptation because the will is passive when not conscious) within the dream, which doesn’t seem entirely healthy.

I’m a bit worried that this might be the beginning of a repressed and unhealthy unconscious reaction to sexuality. I’m engaged, and will be married soon, and perhaps it’s just in time, but I hope I haven’t damaged myself somehow with a repressed attitude to sex.

Can anyone else identify with this? Is there something wrong with me?

Hi DL82:

No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you at all. Of course it is impossible to sin inside a dream, as you are not capable of full consent or the activation of your own free will. It should not be surprising that you might feel “guilt” about sin in a dream, because of all the theories I have read about dreaming (the scientific study of dreaming, in case you’re interested, is called oneirology), one recurrent theme is that we dream to consolidate or integrate the various sensations that we experience over the course of our waking lives. Dreams are obviously necessary in animals; they start to behave strangely and even destructively when they are supressed. It is interesting that dreams occur in REM sleep, so all the neurotransmitters that allow for motor activity are cut off…so the dreamer cannot injure themselves. So as it is clearly an evolutionary advantage (it favours survival), I tend to believe that dreams are a way to organize/integrate/make sense of all of the random uncategorized stimuli you receive over the course of your waking life. If you previously committed an activity, say, it might well show up in a dream; but your mind would look on it from different angles, combine it with different impressions, sense data, memories, trying to “make sense of it all.”

So if you now associate that activity with a need for confession (that is, you’ve become aware the event is a mortal sin) it would make sense this idea of guilt/need for confession will appear inside the dream as well. Some scientists feel dreams are a way for the body to allow repressed urges/fantasies to come forward so that the mind can gain control over them (the Freudian view); but from what I can see, most of the researchers today seem to think that dreams either “clear junk sensory data from the mind” or “organize chaotic sensory data so the mind can integrate it”. I think it’s really a little of both; I find dreaming to be a type of “categorization activity”, where we examine sensory data and organize/store what we can use, and discard the things that make no sense or cannot be integrated. I myself have had dreams where I am doing something that I am aware is wrong, so yes, feelings of guilt or regret in dreams is not that unusual. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your mind, no.

The fact that you are (in your dreams) experiencing both events is significant. That is, in your dreams you are (1) committing the sin and desiring to confess (2) resisting the sin and not needing to confess. This strongly suggests your mind is dreaming to organizing and synthesizing the various course of actions you have in your waking life when you feel aroused; so this is not repression, but rather I think a way for your mind to understand how it will react to your new state of being engaged/married. Your mind, I suspect, realizes that becoming married will represent a fundamental breakthrough in how you have handled your sexual feelings thus far; so in your dreams it is trying out various scenarios to “see what works”. Bear in mind that you might not be remembering a lot of these scenarios; some your mind has not integrated, or has discarded (the “taking out the trash” theory of dreaming). I hope this helps.

Jacques

 

[EmeraldWings]

As an unmarried man trying to live chastely, I realise that it’s perfectly normal to have dreams from time to time, and that there is nothing sinful about the body releasing its urges through dreams.

Lately, however, I’ve started to notice that inside these dreams, I feel a sense of guilt or a need for repentance. For example, recently I dreamed that I repeated a sin I used to commit, then immediately had the thought (inside the dream) “shoot, and I’ve just been to confession, now I’ve blown it again and need to go back” and my dream-self felt so guilty and confused. When I woke, it took a while for me to realise it must have been a dream, not reality, then I thought those seemed like very odd thoughts to be having in a dream. On another occasion, the me inside the dream managed to resist the ‘temptation’ (which of course isn’t really a temptation because the will is passive when not conscious) within the dream, which doesn’t seem entirely healthy.

I’m a bit worried that this might be the beginning of a repressed and unhealthy unconscious reaction to sexuality. I’m engaged, and will be married soon, and perhaps it’s just in time, but I hope I haven’t damaged myself somehow with a repressed attitude to sex.

Can anyone else identify with this? Is there something wrong with me?

that’s perfectly normal, and actually a good sign, it means you have so diligently fought these sins, that it’s become second nature to you, you’ve made resisting sin an important part of your life, and that will sometimes show up in your dreams,
i go through it quite often myself, and i have discovered something that helps, try sleeping with a blessed crucifix(i use a Saint Benedict one) i have never had a bad(impure) dream while holding my crucifix in my hand while i sleep, while on the contrary, sometimes i’ve gone a long time doing that without fail, and upon forgetting just one night to sleep holding my crucifix, i had a bad dream…which has happened that way several times, so i am personally sure it is helping me…so maybe you can try that.

but anyways, don’t worry about it, our dreams always tend to reflect real life things, and at the same time, dreams are always weird and kinda crazy, so don’t put to much thought into it.

alright, hope this helps, take care.