re dreams and out of body incidents dt cs hub ucsb edu david e goggin writes i m fairly new to these groups tho some have heard from me before welcome i d like to get your comments on a question that has been on my mind a lot what morals ethics apply to dreams and out of body incidents in normal dreams you can t control anything so obviously you aren t morally responsible for your actions hm i get a little queasy around the phrase aren t morally responsible perhaps because i ve heard it misused so many times i remember in college some folk trying to argue that a person who was drunk was not morally responsible for his actions in general most folk can t control their dreams but perhaps what you do all day and think about has some impact on them hm and i m not sure what actions are in a dream but i will note that jesus does seem adamant about the fact that our thought life is at least as important as our actions go lightly with this argument we are all morally responsible for who we are and dreams might well be an important part of that now there seem to be alternatives dreams and oobes are totally mental phenomena in this case no morality applies beyond what might be called mental hygiene that is not trying to think about anything evil or indulgining in overly sexy or violent thoughts i don t know a thing about out of body experiences i ve had dreams some fairly vivid ones is an oobe just a very vivid dream i would argue that extreme interest in this sort of phenomena is a tad risky it is probably much better to think about who jesus is and who we are in relation to that than to cultivate a strong interest in dreams unless you feel plagued by dreams that are painful and out of control then pray about it and or get help dreams and oobes have a reality of their own i e are another plane evidence for this is that often dreams and oobes are sometimes done in common by more than one person what on earth is your definition of often i know exactly one case of two people who had substantially the same dream at the same time and as they were brothers who had spent the day doing the same things i could see why their dreams might be similiar anyway the only other plane i know of is the spiritual realm i don t think anyone s dreams perhaps outside the occasional prophet s represent actual actions on an alternate plane if they were real actions or conscious thoughts then yes they would have direct moral significance like but here we assume that garbled text because the dream occurs in a different environment then different moral laws apply is my guess of what you said i don t see the slightest hint in christian writings that ones environment changes the way a person determines what is moral for a christian won t it always come down to what jesus would have us do so there it is is one of these cases the truth or does anyone know of another alternative respond by post or email truth i don t claim to be an expert in dreams i ll note that the bible doesn t talk much about dreams outside of the realm of god using them to speak to us with the caveat that such messages are not always very clear as it warns somewhere in the ot given that i would not give them a lot of attention unless you feel your dreams are trying to tell you something i would discount talk of alternate planes though the only places such concepts are commonly bandied about are for the most part hostile to christianity though i ve run into the occasional exception if you are or want to be a christian you want to be very careful about ideas like this
