If the flight is a dream, the sabbath cannot be a meeting, and if there is no meeting there is no sect to prosecute. Every writer who wanted courts to try witches as conspirators had to deal with the Canon Episcopi first, and the manoeuvre they settled on is one of the pivots of the whole subject.
The argument, developed across fifteenth century demonology and pressed hard in the Malleus Maleficarum, was that the canon was right about what it described and irrelevant to the present case. The women in the canon, on this reading, were pagans of an older kind, deceived about Diana. What the courts now faced was something new, a sect formed by pact, which the canon's authors had never seen and therefore had not ruled on. Some writers added that God permits the Devil more now than then. Others simply asserted that both were true, that some flights are illusory and some real, which let a judge accept whichever the confession in front of him required.
None of this overturned the canon. It went around it. The text stayed in the law books while the demonologists built a category it did not cover, and the sceptics who came later, Johann Weyer, Reginald Scot and Friedrich Spee among them, kept reaching back for it. The canon is one of the reasons the persecution cannot be read as the simple, inevitable position of the medieval church. The church's own law had said the opposite, in writing, for five hundred years.