In those dreams I am toiling and toiling through a smooth sea--it is always a smooth, oily, slippery sea--towards something to which I make no great headway.

Sometimes I give up toiling through sheer and desperate aching of body and limbs, and let myself lie drifting into helplessness and a growing sleep.

And then--in my dream--I start to find myself going down into strange cavernous depths of shining green, and I wake--in my dream--to begin fighting and toiling again against my compelling desire to give up.
I do not know how long I made a fight of it in reality; it must have been for hours--alternately swimming, alternately resting myself by floating.
I had queer thoughts.

It was then about the time that some men were attempting to swim the Channel.

I remember laughing grimly, wishing them joy of their job--they were welcome to mine! I remember, too, that at last in the darkness I felt that I must give up, and said my prayers; and it was about that time, when I was beginning to feel a certain numbness of mind as well as weariness of body, that as I struck out in the mechanical and weakening fashion which I kept up from what little determination I had left, I came across my salvation--in the shape of a piece of wreckage that shoved itself against me in the blackness, as if it had been some faithful dog, pushing its nose into my hand to let me know it was there.