What Dreams May Come

by Theodore Dalrymple (July 2014)

Last night I had an unpleasant dream. Normally I don’t remember my dreams and if this one was anything to go by, it is just as well. Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud said they were, but if so it is a road that I don’t want to go down. I am insufficiently curious about myself, the world containing so much subject matter of far greater interest to me and others. If the truth be known, I have never been much impressed by psychoanalytic dream interpretation, or psychoanalytic anything else, which seems to me a latter-day form of haruspicy, divination by entrails. We may be such stuff as dreams are made on, but I cannot really believe that dreams are such stuff as we are made on.

Oddly enough I woke from this dream philosophising. The dream was as follows. It was a pitch-black night and I was in the driving seat of my father’s car. In my father’s day it was an above average car in design and comfort, even mildly luxurious, but when nowadays (as happens very rarely) I see an example of the same, now vintage model creaking down the road, I realise that even the cheapest and smallest of modern vehicles is infinitely its superior in comfort and convenience. Moral progress in the intervening years there may or may not have been, but progress in engineering there most definitely has.

I digress from my dream, a fact which no doubt would seem significant to a psychoanalyst. I had not yet started the car’s engine, and decided that I wanted some air. I wound down the window a little, and as soon as it was sufficiently open I felt a hand grab me by the collar in an obviously menacing way. I experienced a moment of panic: should I start the engine first, lock the door or wind up the window? I decided on the latter course, and caught by assailant’s fingers in the wound up window. I then fumbled frantically for the keys to start the engine, with the intention of dragging the man (whoever it was) by his fingers along the road, as he so richly deserved. Luckily I woke up before I could start the car and drag him even a few yards.

No doubt there was much possible symbolism in the dream. When I woke, however, I found I was debating in my mind the ethical limits to punishment. That the man who assailed me deserved what I was about to give him I had little doubt, but was that the end of the matter? Assailants must take their chances, but their chances of what, exactly? Being dragged along the road by their fingers caught in a car window? 

It seems to me that mercy and forgiveness are often mistaken for one another. A judge may properly be merciful to those who come before him, indeed he must be so often if he is to keep his sentences within civilised bounds, such being the deserts of most wicked among us (quite apart from the fact that all of us require mercy on many occasions). But he cannot properly say ‘I forgive you for what you did to Mrs Smith.’ Only Mrs Smith can forgive what the accused did to her.

And what if Mrs Smith does forgive the accused, what then? At least once the law is involved, nothing much, at least where due process is concerned: because it has long been a principle that the offence by the perpetrator is not against her alone, but against society as a whole. She has no more right to demand a light punishment than a severe one. When Bacon said that the law ought to weed out revenge, he might also have added that it should weed out forgiveness. Mercy is another matter.

What makes vengefulness so difficult to eradicate from the human heart is that it is so enjoyable to indulge it in the privacy of one’s thoughts. There one can indulge in things whose attraction it would be impolitic to avow, at least if one moves in tolerably civilised society. In the fastnesses of one’s thoughts, but nowhere else, one can visit upon the perpetrator precisely what he deserves. Fortunately, few people have the courage of their sadism.

Like most human traits, vengefulness and forgivingness grow stronger with habit. What starts out as an ideology can thus become a trait of character, good or bad as the ideology might be. Hatred, I have found, needs rehearsal and practice to keep it alive, otherwise it tends to attenuate, like germs passed though guinea pigs. Alas, hatred can so easily give meaning to life, especially in the absence of any other.

The law in England, at least, requires that a person defend himself with a reasonable, which is to say the least, degree of violence appropriate to the situation. It is no defence against a charge of murder, for example, that the victim pushed ahead of you in a queue, even if he shouldn’t have done so. And in my oneiric state, I already heard counsel for my assailant asking me whether I had come to any actual harm because his client had grabbed my collar, how I knew that he meant me harm, whether I had asked him first what he was doing before crushing his fingers (he was a pianist and now he would never play again). Did I indeed plan to drag him down the road by his fingers, in effect amputating them as if indulging in an updated but fundamentally mediaeval form of punishment? By what right did I do this, was I not a brute? My assailant’s life was ruined, in fact he was only attempting to beg, not to attack me. I owed him a substantial amount of damages.

I can’t really say when I had these thoughts, whether I woke or slept, or how long it took me to think them. It gradually dawned on me, in fact, that I required to go to the lavatory, but I suppose that that explanation of my nightmare would not satisfy a psychoanalyst. And though I do not much believe in the deeper meaning of dreams, I cannot help but reflect that the thoughts that this dream aroused were of some slight significance, in that they demonstrated how deeply ingrained has become the fear of litigation in modern man (assuming that I am representative of modern man). Though I have only once been sued, by a man whose suit was thrown out as vexatious by the courts even before I came anywhere near to trial, and who subsequently went on to murder (his mother, I think it was), I clearly have absorbed a fear that the civil law might one day ruin me. I once read a book by a woman who cleverly collected dreams under the Third Reich. How common, I wonder, in an increasingly litigious society, are dreams, that is to say nightmares, of being sued?

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