Is It Cheating to Dream About Being With Another Partner?

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Have you ever woken up from a dream surprised at what you did in the dream? Maybe you were mean to someone you care about, or you hit a person for no good reason—or you did something with someone that would count as cheating in your real-world relationship.

Although these actions may all be wrong if done in the real world, are they wrong when they happen in dreams? Should we feel bad about them, even if it may not really have been “us” doing them? Let’s explore this with some basic philosophical concepts drawn from the fascinating literature on “dream morality.”¹

Who Is Hurt?

One way that philosophers judge the ethics of actions is to look at their effects, as the ethical school of consequentialism recommends. (You may be familiar with a more specific version called utilitarianism, but the difference is not important here.) In the case of dreams, this is easily dealt with: As long as they happen only in your mind—without sleepwalking, sleep hitting, or sleep cheating—your dreams have no direct effect on anybody else, so what happens in them cannot be judged on consequentialist grounds as immoral.

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We should note two important caveats, however:

1. If the immoral actions you dream about lead to performing them in the real world—for example, if you dreamed so much about cheating on your partner that you were inspired to do it for real—you could say they had an indirect impact on other people, and could therefore be considered unethical. (More on this below.)
2. Even if you never act on them, dreams can have an obvious effect on the dreamer, which counts as a moral consequence. Generally speaking, we would be happier if we had more pleasant dreams and fewer nightmares, so any steps we could take to improve the net positive impact of our dreams would be ethically recommended.²

Wrongful Intentions

However, consequences are not the only way to judge morality. Another school of ethics, deontology, focuses on the moral status of actions themselves, aside from the consequences of performing them. For example, consequentialists may say adultery is bad because someone usually gets hurt, while deontologists would more likely say it’s wrong because it is deceitful and disrespectful, whether or not anyone is hurt.

Another way to think of deontology is that it focuses on intentions rather than outcomes. If you try to hurt somebody but fail to, you have still done someone wrong, even if nothing bad (harmful) happened from it. As the saying goes, “It’s the thought that counts,” and what are dreams if not thoughts? This is why some of us feel bad if we fantasize about being with someone other than our partners, even if we never act on it.

One could fall back on consequentialism and argue that, even if we do harbor immoral intentions in our dreams, it is impossible for them to affect anyone in the real world, so it can't be wrong. But the deontologist might bring up the way the law deals with failed attempts at crimes, which have no effect but are still punished. For example, if Alex tries to kill Betty by shooting her with an unloaded gun or feeding her expired poison, it was literally impossible for him to succeed—but the law still holds him responsible for the attempt to do wrong (and to deter him from trying again).³

Who Is the "You" in Your Dreams?

The issue of consequences versus intentions seems to be beside the point, though, because a more fundamental issue underlying both is: who actually does the things that “you” do in your dreams? Typically, we are only held morally responsible for the things we freely intend to do. So the crucial question is whether you are the actor in your dreams or only an observer.⁴

I think common intuition suggests that we are mere spectators in our dreams. Even if the actions “we” perform in our dreams reflect our true desires, we don’t seem to be in control of them. In other words, we seem to have no agency in our dreams, our dream selves being under the control of our subconscious mind, and therefore we are not responsible for what they do.

At the same time, though, our dream selves can seem very close to our real selves, not only acting on our desires but possessing our knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. This can make it seem like a dodge to say “It wasn’t really me, it was my subconscious” when we’re surprised or ashamed of something our dream selves did; in some meaningful sense, it was us, even if we weren't in total control. (Consider also that many of our more routine waking actions are controlled by our subconscious, which doesn’t completely absolve us of responsibility for them.) Because of this close resemblance of our dream and waking selves, dreams can be realistic enough to make us unsure that we’re dreaming at all—as philosophers such as Descartes and Chaung-Tzu noted long ago—and we often have to reorient ourselves to the “real world” after we wake up.

Dreaming Essential Reads

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The Varieties of Dream Recall

In the end, we could agree with our intuitions and maintain that we have little control over our dream selves, but the possibility that we might have some control—similar to when we're distracted or inebriated—opens the door for some responsibility for what we (or “we”) do in our dreams.

What Our Dreams Say About Us

Even if we deny any blame for the immoral actions of our dream selves, they may still reflect on our waking selves to the extent they are based on our true desires—as is well known in psychoanalysis—or our moral characters, who we are as people. A third school of moral philosophy, virtue ethics, focuses not on actions themselves but the character traits that lead to them. Even if you are generally regarded as a kind person, based on your actions in the real world, dreaming of hurting people may cast doubt on how genuine or reliable your kindness is.

This may be the main moral concern with cheating in your dreams: Even if you have never seriously considered cheating in the real world, your dreams of adultery may suggest that you really want to, especially if your dream self enjoys it (or if the waking you enjoys the memory of the dream)—and that you may not be as faithful as you think yourself to be.

But cheating in your dreams does not necessarily imply that you are more likely to cheat in the real world or that you are truly an unfaithful person. Your dreams may simply be allowing you to imagine (and enjoy) doing something that you want to do, but that you realize would be wrong to do in the real world—and ideally this makes you less likely to do so.

Even the revelation that you really would like to be with someone else is not damning in itself. Strength of will reveals itself only in the face of temptation, as reflected in traditional Western marriage vows: After all, we would not need to "forsake all others" if we never considered it! The fact that someone is tempted to cheat, but successfully resists that temptation, is a strong sign of their commitment to their partner.

Still Worth Thinking About

In the end, we can say that we should not feel guilty about behaving immorally in our dreams, unless that leads to similar action in our waking lives. In terms of adultery specifically, you shouldn't feel bad about cheating on your partner in your dreams, unless you find yourself enjoying and anticipating it so much that it makes you neglect your real-life relationship and possibly act on these desires in the real world—which may be the most serious concern about cheating in your dreams, and one that has a definite negative impact in the real world.

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