Many people are unwilling to admit that psychic phenomena so tragical, poignant, or pathetic as these dreams may be, should receive their stimulus from a source which they regard as so humble as the stomach. Thus Frederick Greenwood, whose conception of the function of dreaming was very exalted, only admitted this association with reluctance, and was careful to point out that 'if an unwholesome supper produces such phenomena, it does so only in the sense that a bird singing in the air produced Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark."'[93] That analogy really underestimates the distance of the physical stimulus of such dreams from its psychic concomitants. When we talk of dreams we must place ourselves at the dreamer's standpoint. The poet was conscious that his inspiration was stimulated by the bird's song, but the dreamer has no consciousness that the tragic experiences he passes through imaginatively are stimulated by the activity of his visceral organs. He is altogether unconscious of visceral disturbance; if he were conscious of any of these physical facts which occupy waking consciousness, he would no longer be a dreamer. He lives in a psychic world which physical facts, from within or from without, can never reach until they have been transformed. His position resembles, therefore, not that of the poet who deliberately seeks to interpret the song of the bird, but rather that of the bird itself, the poet 'hidden in the light of thought,' sublimely unconscious of the mechanism revealed in its own structure. The explanations devised by sleeping consciousness to account for visceral discomfort of gastric origin are not necessarily tragic. Thus I dreamed, after a somewhat indigestible meal, that I was slowly and painfully eating bread mingled with cinders and mouse's excrement, trying in vain to avoid these impurities, and after the meal was over, finding my mouth full of cinders. On awaking there was no traceable taste or sensation of any kind in the mouth, and the dream was apparently a theory to account for some gastric disturbance. Such a theory seems less far-fetched than that of murder, and probably indicates much less marked and diffused visceral disturbance. Occasionally the explanatory theories of actual sensations accepted by sleeping consciousness are plausible and ingenious, indeed entirely adequate and probable. Thus a lady dreamed that she was drinking glass after glass of champagne, saying to herself the while that she would have to pay for this afterwards. On awaking she found that she was feeling the slight rheumatic pains and discomfort that she was really liable to experience after taking a glass or two of champagne. She had not tasted champagne, or thought of it, for some time previously; the dream champagne was a theory invented to account for the sensations which were actually experienced, though those sensations remained outside dreaming consciousness.