THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 731 



take the body up to the moor, among the stones, remove the brown 

 paper, and people would think the murdered man had killed himself. 

 He drove off and soon returned with the empty cart. " What's this 

 blood in my cart? " asked the man to whom it belonged, looking 

 inside. " Oh, that's only paint," replied the husband. But the 

 dreamer had all along been full of apprehension lest the deed should 

 be discovered, and the last thing she could recall, before waking in 

 terror, was looking out of the window at a large crowd which sur- 

 rounded the house with shouts of " Murder! " and threats. 



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 in- 

 fluences of indigestion arising from a supper of pheasant. To ac- 

 count for our oppression during sleep, sleeping consciousness assumes 

 moral causes which alone appear to it of sufficient gravity to be the 

 adequate cause of 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 disturbed by 

 even a suggestion of mere physical causation. 



There is certainly no profounder emotional excitement during 

 sleep than that which arises from a disturbed or distended stomach, 

 and is reflected by the pneumogastric to the accelerated heart and 

 the impeded respiration.* "We are thereby thrown into a state of un- 

 inhibited emotional agitation, a state of agony and terror such as we 

 rarely or never attain during waking life. Sleeping consciousness, 

 blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from be- 

 low, and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at 

 the idea that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the 

 guilty consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense 

 emotional uproar. Thus the dream is suffused by a conviction which 

 the continued emotion serves to support. We do not — it seems most 

 simple and reasonable to conclude — experience terror because we 

 think we have committed a crime, but we think we have committed 

 a crime because we experience terror. And the fact that in such 

 dreams we are far more concerned with escape from the results of 

 crime than with any agony of remorse is not, as some have thought, 

 due to our innate indifference to crime, but simply to the fact that 

 our emotional state suggests to us active escape from danger rather 

 than the more passive grief of remorse. Thus our dreams bear wit- 



* Other pains and discomforts — toothache, for instance — may, however, give rise to 

 dreams of murder. 



