Morality in dream content

The dreams that I can remember the next day are rarely concrete enough to describe in words, but last night I had an odd one. It's amusing how, as far as I can recall, the dreams just, like, seamlessly place you into a certain context that makes sense in the dream.

> I ordered a pizza, and for some reason which made sense in the dream, it was supposed to be delivered to the southeast corner of an intersection four blocks from where I live. It was delivered and left on the ground at the intersection. I avoided interacting with the delivery driver because I didn't want to give him a tip, it seems because I just didn't want to pay extra money, so I stayed in my car. My car was parked about (roughly, seemingly) 20 feet from the southeast corner of the intersection, but facing south, and in the U.S. this means it was on the wrong side of the road. But weirdly it seems like the road was a one-way street going south, even though in reality it is a two-way street running north-south. The delivery person left without a tip. Someone was sitting in a car parked across the street, near the southwest corner of the intersection. They saw that I didn't leave a tip for the delivery driver and reproached me for it.

What stands out to me about this dream is that I violated an ethic that I've internalized as good to follow such that not following it is selfish, rude, or entitled. I occasionally have similar ethic-violation dreams that involve common everyday things, such as being pulled over by the police and getting a ticket, or forgetting a deadline for some important event and getting in trouble, or situations in which I made a selfish decision.

I'm not into deep, abstract dream interpretation. I don't think there is some hidden message or any kind of deep symbolism or metaphor, at least from my perspective and in my experience. I do think, like in the dreams I described above, there is some moral quality to some of them, and that it's like, your brain takes your moral anxiety as an input and cobbles some mostly random sequence of events together as some kind of...I don't know, warning, maybe? Like, I'd bet these kinds of dreams are especially common in morally scrupulous people, respective to their moral values.

END

Last updated: 2023-03-12

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