I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately. Nothing unusual for me since I never seem to have “normal” ones but lately they seem to come in non-stop succession. Not surprisingly, some of those dreams have been sexual in nature.
I am hardly a psychoanalyst but I would guess that is simply the result of a frustrated libido (months of unwanted singleness will do that to you). Oddly enough, that and reading a C.S. Lewis essay got me thinking about the place of sex in our society. Today I was reading Lewis’ essay entitled “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness” and I can across this interesting analysis:
When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, ‘Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.’ I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is ‘four bare legs in a bed’. It is like having morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong–unless you steal nectarines.
This struck me as just as true today as it was in Lewis’ time. If someone does not control their eating habit they are called gluttonous. If they sleep too much they are called lazy. If they are too aggressive they are called violent. If they are too passive you are called a coward. Even if any of those things happen to make a person happy they are still seen as vices.
We treat sex completely differently. We act like it is our right to indulge nearly every sexual impulse we have. Only in the most extreme cases do we even begin to treat it as a vice. Why is that? Why is that the only natural impulse that we don’t feel obligated to regulate and control. Sex and sexual urges aren’t bad. They’re perfectly natural but like all of our natural impulses they need to be controlled the same as eating and sleeping.
On another note: have you ever had a dream within a dream? It’s very disorienting.
Restless Ones 