More on dreams (moron dreams?)

All you need do is peruse some of my other postings with this label to gain a general sense of what I think dreams are and aren't useful for. But just as sometimes some of our dreams - I am skeptical of the words "all" or even "most" here - can be analyzed to reveal some of our own unconscious feelings about ourselves, sometimes they can also uncover attitudes of which we might otherwise remain unaware.

So this morning's dream featured people I really know, or used to, and a situation which never happened. In real life, our circle of high school friends was more than a little casual when it came to dating one another. The fact that we'd previously dated someone's friend didn't keep us from dating them. My marriage is evidence of this; early in my high school sophomore year I "went with" my wife's best friend for a while. It never became very serious, though, and we "broke up" before very long. Soon my wife and I started going out, and our relationship would be on-again-off-again through high school. My best friend dated the same girl through most of our sophomore and junior years, though. She was a year ahead of us, and they broke up at the end of the year as she prepared to graduate. In the ensuing summer we had a group trip to Fort Miles, DE, which my best friend couldn't attend, though his ex did. My future wife and I were off-again, and I made a play for Sue, which she gently rebuffed with a kind suggestion that she might have been interested were circumstances different.  

In my dream, though, I was confessing to my wife in the present that we had in fact been together intimately back then. She asked why, and I explained that the only reason I could give her was the only one a teenaged boy would ever need: she was willing. In my dream, there was a recollection of our intercourse, or at least of the occasion and setting of it. 

But the thing that was really revelatory for me in this dream was the underlying attitudes about sexuality which I long-ago internalized.  I still carry around so much of society's approach even as I still strive to consciously reject it in favor of what I say that I believe to be a better and healthier way.