A three-month-old girl had a mild sleep disturbance consisting of an unwillingness to go to sleep coupled with a startlelike jerk into wakefulness as her muscular system became relaxed when she fell asleep. Pearson considers that both of these disturbances arose from the same cause: it seemed most likely that the little girl dreaded the loss of a new ego pleasure in muscular activity and the emerging ability of her ego to direct her actions for this pleasure in movement. This dread could be the same as that suffered at the beginning of psychosis, in the change of a psychotic state, and sometimes in adolescence—a dread of the dissolution of the ego.