Kant's categorical imperative

The categorical imperative enters Freud’s discussion as a test case in a broader dispute about whether moral character survives the upheaval of dreams. Drawing on an earlier writer’s claim that conscience remains active during sleep, Freud contrasts the apparent continuity of moral judgment with the distortions of dream thought. The issue becomes more complicated than a simple choice between innocence and guilt: dreams may transform and dramatize impulses without inventing them, raising the question of what responsibility remains with the dreamer.

Moral judgment in dreams

Freud cites Hildebrandt’s claim that people do not lose their sense of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice in sleep. Unlike errors of arithmetic, reversals of scientific knowledge, or comic anachronisms, moral distinctions continue to matter to the dreamer. Hildebrandt describes Kant’s categorical imperative as an inseparable companion that follows a person even into sleep, and argues that the moral basis of human nature is too firmly formed to be swept away by the changes imagination, reason, and memory undergo in dreams.

This position makes dream morality appear more stable than other forms of thought. Yet Freud points out an inconsistency: those who say that the moral personality persists in dreams may still resist taking full responsibility for immoral dream actions. If dream morality remains intact, it is difficult to claim that dream conduct has no bearing on the dreamer; if it disintegrates, the existence of immoral dreams cannot straightforwardly prove that the waking person is morally corrupt.

Responsibility and the source of dream impulses

Haffner offers one resolution: because thinking and willing in dreams lack the foundation that gives waking life truth and reality, dream actions cannot be virtue or sin. Nevertheless, he regards the dreamer as indirectly responsible, on the grounds that a person has a duty to prepare morally before sleep. This account denies direct responsibility for dream conduct while retaining a form of responsibility for the conditions that precede it.

Hildebrandt’s argument goes further. The dream’s dramatic presentation compresses complex thought into brief scenes and can devalue or confuse its ideas, so its apparent immorality must be assessed with those distortions in mind. But such qualifications do not, in his view, justify completely denying responsibility for wrongdoing represented in dreams. The familiar insistence that a person would not think of something even in a dream implicitly treats the dream as a remote domain in which thoughts are only loosely connected to the self; at the same time, the need to deny those thoughts even there suggests that the denial is not complete. Hildebrandt takes that tension as an indirect acknowledgment of truth.

His conclusion distinguishes the dream’s expanded dramatic form from the impulse that supplies its material. A dream may imitate and enlarge a wish, desire, or impulse that has previously passed through the waking mind; it does not create that primary impulse from nothing. The dreamer, on this account, need not be held responsible for the full sum of what the dream stages, but remains responsible to some degree for the material from which it was made. The categorical imperative thus frames a qualified moral claim: dream distortion complicates judgment, but does not automatically sever the connection between dreaming thought and the person who dreams.