I wouldn’t even dream of it

“I wouldn’t even dream of it” is an everyday denial that becomes, in the discussion of dream morality, evidence against the very distance it claims. The expression casts the dream as the farthest realm from which a person might disclaim responsibility, yet the need to extend a denial that far suggests that dream-thoughts are not wholly alien to waking life.

A phrase that measures moral distance

Scholz uses the expression to illuminate the belief that dreams disclose something of the dreamer’s character despite their disguises. An honest person, in this account, could not commit a dishonouring crime even in a dream without recoiling from it as foreign to his nature. Scholz connects this view to the story of a Roman Emperor who executed a subject for dreaming that the emperor’s head had been cut off: the emperor’s justification was that the dreamer must have entertained similar thoughts while awake. The example makes the phrase more than a casual figure of speech. To say that one would not even dream of an act is to invoke the dream as a test of what lies within the self.

The phrase also expresses a tension. Dreams seem sufficiently remote from waking conduct to provide a refuge from accusation, but they remain close enough to the self that people feel compelled to deny wrongdoing there as well. Its force depends on both claims at once: the dream is not ordinary action, yet it cannot be dismissed as entirely unrelated to the person who dreams it.

Denial and responsibility

Hildebrandt develops this tension by considering why people invoke dreams when rejecting an accusation that violates their deepest convictions. The dream is treated as the remotest territory in which someone might have to answer for a thought. Because thoughts there are loosely connected with a person’s real being, they can seem scarcely one’s own. But the emphatic denial that a thought could occur even in a dream also concedes, indirectly, that a defence would remain incomplete if it did not reach that far. In Hildebrandt’s reading, the expression therefore speaks the language of truth without the speaker necessarily intending to do so.

That implication does not make a dream and a waking deed morally identical. Hildebrandt allows for the dream’s dramatic presentation, its compression of complicated thought into brief scenes, and the confusion or devaluation of its ideas. These features complicate any judgment based on the dream’s apparent immorality. Still, he resists the opposite conclusion—that the dreamer bears no responsibility at all for what appears in a dream.

The waking source of dream material

Hildebrandt argues that no deed imagined in a dream has a primary motive that has not previously passed through the waking soul as a wish, desire, or impulse. On this account, the dream does not invent its original material; it imitates, enlarges, and dramatizes something already present. Its strange or extended action may be disowned as dream-work, but the waking impulse from which it was formed cannot simply be laughed away.

The expression thus marks a boundary that is also a connection. It distances a person from dream-action while drawing attention to the thoughts and impulses that make such action imaginable. Hildebrandt’s conclusion is qualified rather than absolute: responsibility attaches not to the dream in its entirety, but to some share of its underlying material. The saying that evil thoughts come from the heart supplies his final measure: a sinful dream carries at least an obscure minimum of guilt, because its source is not wholly outside the dreamer.