In the stiff brown pages of an old textbook I found an illustration of a man hanging from a gibbet. A pair of small creatures were drawn clinging to the man’s body. They were dressed in the rough robes of monks, but they had insect heads and long claw-like fingers protruding from their sleeves. One of the creatures clung to the man’s back, and it seemed to be whispering in the man’s ear, but looking closer, I could see that it was actually gnawing at the rope around the man’s neck. The other creature clung to the man’s legs, and it rested its head against the man’s knees as it grinned lasciviously. There were more hands and claws breaking through the ground beneath the man, grasping for his swinging feet. A few inches away a single antenna with sharp spikes was drawn breaking through the soil like an infernal weed.
The caption below the picture explained that back before people knew anything about gravity, it was believed that it was a hanging man’s sins that weighed his body down, that it was the demons trying to pull his soul down into the earth that put the fatal strain on his neck. The counter force of the gibbet and the rope, being applied from above, pulled back and cinched the noose with the authority of divine justice. The condemned man was caught between them, literally made to choke on his own guilt.
The Encyclopedia of Counting Sheep 
Like most of your recorded dreams, this one has a vivid quality, but it goes further, resonating in one’s brain like one of Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious, though personally I’ve gone off Jung.
It could be real, except that the caption goes counter to waking commonsense. Other than in dreams and cartoons of characters hanging in space running without traction before falling down the chasm, every hanging object suffers the fate of being simultaneously pulled down by gravity and pulled up by the hook it is hanging from.
Would the tale be enhanced by an additional viewpoint, outside the dream-frame as well as within it? Such as “When I woke up I was convinced that I’d discovered something important. But then I reflected that gravity always does that . . . ”
I’m not at all sure, just wanted to enter into the thing somehow.
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Well, of course. But other medieval means of divining guilt (or at least our popular modern conceptions of these things) often seemed to have this same baffling quality. All the things you said could be equally applied to the “buoyancy” of witches and how you would think that they would have considered it in the light of the buoyancy of everyday objects in more mundane circumstances.
But apparently they didn’t.
That’s the point.
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In other words, most medieval forms of determining guilt seem to operate on the principal: if water is wet, if the sky is blue, if fire is hot, then you’re guilty just like we already thought.
Very, very convenient in expediting justice, don’t you think?
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And as far the addendum you suggested, I didn’t really think that that NEEDED to be said. Plus, if I start pinning my more rational waking thoughts to the end of my dream narratives I’m betting that would get old, tedious, and anticlimactic very quickly.
STORE POLICY
“…but then I woke up and realized that the stores don’t actually have holding areas in the back where they detain customers, and I started to wonder where everyone would go to the bathroom, what they would eat, etc.”
MUSICAL FENCES
“…but then I woke up and I was confused about the proportions involved. How could the fence be small enough for me to play with my toes but yet also big enough to surround the perimeter of the yard? I kept thinking about this in the shower and when I made my coffee.”
…And so on.
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Ha ha, you’re right of course on all points. So I must have been simply rationalising my horror at the subject-matter itself, by finding ways to object to its depiction. In similar vein, I was reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature recently. His descriptions of medieval execution & torture got to me and I lugged the heavy book back to the library long before I’d done more than skim through the content. I continue to “confuse reason with its evil twin rationalizing”, as you’ve told me “a million times”.
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I picture a praying mantis here, which gives this a completely different context for me. In Mexican culture (as taught to me by my wife’s family), they use the praying mantis to joke that someone is too cheap. To them, the way the mantis rubs his arms up and down is similar to a man checking to make sure he’s got every last coin on his body.
I don’t know how being cheap would cause your death, though.
Also, thanks for teaching me the word gibbet. That’s a new one to me. If that seems sarcastic, since this is the Internet and all comments are by law sarcastic in nature, it’s actually not.
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Yeah, I went with “gibbet” rather than “gallows” because to me “gallows” brings to mind the more complicated contraption with the trap door that you think of from old Westerns, whereas, I believe, a gibbet was more of a simple post that a person was hung from. That may not be an exact distinction, and I think that there is some overlap in the concepts. At any rate “gibbet” also has that dark, blunt, medieval quality. You just think of some poor bastard with pointy shoes left to dangle there.
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