Judging the Id
I posed an interesting question to Justin this weekend as we were driving back to Portland. I pose it to you now:

Dreams can and often do represent subconscious desires. Which of the two dreams below is commonly held to be the "worse" dream? Which holds more guilt? Why?

1) A person dreams about someone he or she knows in real life. The dreamer then graphically and violently murders this person.

2) A person dreams about someone he or she knows in real life. The dreamer then becomes intimately and sexually involved with this person.

Some variables:
- Let's assume that these dreamers have to face the subject of their dreams some time after they wake up.

- How the dreamer "consciously" feels about the subject of their dreams is variable. (I would think this would drastically affect the nature of the dream.) Let's assume that in real life the dreamer in case #1 has a tolerable dislike of the person they kill. The person in dream #2 is friends or acquaintances with the person with which they have the affair.


The questions:
- Is the implication of dream #2 any worse if the dreamer is actively involved in a committed relationship with someone other than the subject of their dream?

- Is dream #2 worse that dream #1 even though the implied crime of #1 is implicitely more "heinous"?

- What if, in dream #1, the person the dreamer kills is their real life lover?

- Does the weight of the dream depend on the dreamer's "gut" reaction (fear, lust, pleasure, anger, etc) to the dream and their waking interpretation of it?

- Weighing these variables, which inherently carries more guilt and why?

It's an open-ended question.... tell me, tell me.