great difficulty in translating into language, even when willing to do so.
In other cases it is elaborately dramatic or romantic in character, the
hero or heroine passing through many experiences before attaining the
erotic climax of the story. This climax tends to develop in harmony with
the subject's growing knowledge or experience; at first, merely a kiss, it
may develop into any refinement of voluptuous gratification. The day-dream
may occur either in normal or abnormal persons. Rousseau, in his
_Confessions_, describes such dreams, in his case combined with masochism
and masturbation. A distinguished American novelist, Hamlin Garland, has
admirably described in _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ the part played in the
erotic day-dreams of a healthy normal girl at adolescence by a
circus-rider, seen on the first visit to a circus, and becoming a majestic
ideal to dominate the girl's thoughts for many years.[228]
Raffalovich[229] describes the process by which in sexual inverts the
vision of a person of the same sex, perhaps seen in the streets or the
theatre, is evoked in solitary reveries, producing a kind of "psychic
onanism," whether or not it leads on to physical manifestations.

Although day-dreaming of this kind has at present been very little
studied, since it loves solitude and secrecy, and has never been counted
of sufficient interest for scientific inquisition, it is really a process
of considerable importance, and occupies a large part of the auto-erotic
field. It is frequently cultivated by refined and imaginative young men
and women who lead a chaste life and would often be repelled by
masturbation. In such persons, under such circumstances, it must be
considered as strictly normal, the inevitable outcome of the play of the
sexual impulse. No doubt it may often become morbid, and is never a
healthy process when indulged in to excess, as it is liable to be by
refined young people with artistic impulses, to whom it is in the highest
degree seductive and insidious.[230] As we have seen, however,
day-dreaming is far from always colored by sexual emotion; yet it is a
significant indication of its really sexual origin that, as I have been
informed by persons of both sexes, even in these apparently non-sexual
cases it frequently ceases altogether on marriage.

Even when we have eliminated all these forms of auto-erotic activity,
however refined, in which the subject takes a voluntary part, we have
still left unexplore