Exactly the same thing occurs under the allied conditions of anaesthesia produced by drugs. Thus, on one occasion, when coming to consciousness after the administration of nitrous oxide gas, I had the sensation of crying out aloud, but in reality, as I was informed by a friend at my side, I merely made a slight guttural sound. In the same way we see sleeping dogs making slight movements of all their paws in succession, a faint and abortive movement of running, which in the sleeping dog's consciousness may, doubtless, be accompanied by the notion that he is dashing across a field after a rabbit. In these dreams of failure of movement, it seems to me, the dream process, as the result of an approximation to the waking state, has become mixed with actual sensori-motor impulses, but the threshold of waking life is still too far off for actual movements to be completely and successfully accomplished, and in the case of the limbs the eye cannot be used to guide movements which the muscular and cutaneous sensations are still too dead to guide. It is important to remember that in waking life, under pathological conditions, we may have a precisely similar state of things. In some states of cerebro-spinal degeneration, resulting in defective sensibility of muscle and nerve, the subject sways unsteadily when he closes his eyes, and when there is loss of sensibility in the arm it is sometimes impossible to hold objects in the hand except with the guiding aid afforded by the eye.[81] In a dream, dating from fifteen years back, that I now regard as conditioned by the approach of the moment of awakening, I imagined that I was making huge efforts to copy in a copy-book a capital H, engraved in a rather peculiar fashion, but really offering no difficulties to any waking schoolchild. By no means could I get the proportions right, if, indeed, I could make any stroke at all, and at the end of my painful and ineffectual efforts I seemed to be trying to write on sand, which was merely displaced by my hand. This final impression seems clearly to be that of a dreamer who is already sufficiently awake to be conscious of the bedclothes yielding to the touch. The foregoing dream suggests that failure of movement in dreaming may tend to be associated with an accentuation of that shifting of imagery which is one of the most primary elements in dreaming, both failure of movement and accentuation of shifting imagery being, perhaps, alike due to the approach towards the waking state. Thus, if in a dream one is brushing one's coat, one finds, without any overwhelming surprise, that fresh patches of dust appear again and again, even when one's efforts in brushing them away are successful. Even when we feel able to effect movement in our dream, there may still be a failure of that movement to effect its object.