This tragedy, with its almost Elizabethan air, was built up out of a few commonplace impressions received during the previous day, none of which impressions contained any suggestion of murder. The tragic element appears to have been altogether due to the psychic influences of indigestion arising from a supper of pheasant.[92] To account for our oppression during sleep, sleeping consciousness assumes moral causes, which alone appear to it of sufficient gravity to be adequate to the immense emotions we are experiencing. Even in our waking and fully conscious states we are inclined to give the preference to moral over physical causes, quite irrespective of the justice of our preferences; in our sleeping states this tendency is exaggerated, and the reign of purely moral causes is not often disturbed by even a suggestion of physical causation. In an emotional dream of similar visceral origin, I dreamed that I was to die--why or how I could not tell on awakening. With the object of putting an end to my sufferings, I imagined that my wife administered to me some substance mixed in jam. I found the taste peculiar, not bitter, as I recalled on awaking, but warm and spicy, and I asked what she had put in it. She replied that it was strychnine. I remarked that that would be a very painful mode of death, and refused to take any more. I debated with myself whether I had probably taken a poisonous dose, and had not better resort to an antidote; the only antidote that suggested itself to me was opium pills. Meanwhile the horror of impending death grew more and more acute until, at length, I awoke. I thereupon found that I had a headache, a faint taste in my mouth, and some general malaise evidently associated with a slightly disordered stomach. The definite images brought forward in the dream had all been fairly familiar during the previous day, but the idea of impending death which pervaded the whole dream so indefinitely and incoherently, yet so acutely, was entirely a theory to account for the massive and widely irradiated messages of discomfort which reached the sleeping brain.