The Big Question: Should I Feel Guilty About Dream Cheating?

[Fake editor’s note: Alex has a B.A. in philosophy that he hasn’t been using very much. To make his parents feel like they didn’t waste $100k, he’s going to occasionally answer big philosophical questions for us in a way that would make academics and educated people cringe. -Alex (in the 3rd person)]

The other night I didn’t cheat on my fiancee in a dream. I was so close. The girl in my dream really wanted to do it with me and I said “I can’t, I’ve already got a Megan.” And dream-girl was like “She’ll never find out.” That’s not great awake logic, but for a dream that should have been more than enough. I should have done it. Instead, I responded as I would have had the whole thing been real, and I remained unlaid for the rest of the dream.

I believe in ethics based on moral intuition. If something feels bad, that gives me valuable information about how it should be treated ethically. I also subscribe to the unnecessary complex tautology that if something makes me feel bad, abstaining from its opposite is a moral necessity.

Therefore, since I feel guilty for not having sex in my dream, it must be morally righteous to abstain from being faithful while I’m sleeping.

It is a bigger risk to become boring in our imaginations than to have them differ from our real world desires. While I would never want my fiancee to treat me like a thought criminal, she deserves better than to marry a thought square.

As such, any time I go for an entire night without having a sex dream, I need to apologize to my fiancee immediately upon waking.

Since I hate apologizing, I’m going to work on recognizing I’m dreaming while I’m dreaming. When a beautiful woman says “She’ll never find out” I should respond with “You’re probably right. And since I’m dreaming, even if she did find out, she’d probably just turn into my 3rd grade teacher and we’d ride off in a go kart and my mom would be disappointed I’m not a doctor.”