parative rarity in chaste women of complete
orgasm during sleep, we may in part attribute the violence with which
repressed sexual emotion in women often manifests itself.[240] There is
thus a difference here between men and women which is of some significance
when we are considering the natural satisfaction of the sexual impulse in
chaste women.

In women, who have become accustomed to sexual intercourse, erotic dreams
of fully developed character occur, with complete orgasm and accompanying
relief--as may occasionally be the case in women who are not acquainted
with actual intercourse;[241] some women, however, even when familiar with
actual coitus, find that sexual dreams, though accompanied by emissions,
are only the symptoms of desire and do not produce actual relief.

Some interest attaches to cases in which young women, even girls at
puberty, experience dreams of erotic character, or at all events dream
concerning coitus or men in erection, although they profess, and almost
certainly with truth, to be quite ignorant of sexual phenomena. Several
such dreams of remarkable character have been communicated to me. One can
imagine that the psychologists of some schools would see in these dreams
the spontaneous eruption of the experiences of the race. I am inclined to
regard them as forgotten memories, such as we know to occur sometimes in
sleep. The child has somehow seen or heard of sexual phenomena and felt no
interest, and the memory may subsequently be aroused in sleep, under the
stimulation of new-born sexual sensations.

It is a curious proof of the ignorance which has prevailed in
recent times concerning the psychic sexual nature of women that,
although in earlier ages the fact that women are normally liable
to erotic dreams was fully recognized, in recent times it has
been denied, even by writers who have made a special study of the
sexual impulse in women. Eulenburg (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, 1895,
pp. 31, 79) appears to regard the appearances of sexual phenomena
during sleep, in women, as the result of masturbation. Adler, in
what is in many respects an extremely careful study of sexual
phenomena in women (_Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des
Weibes_, 1904, p. 130), boldly states that they do not have
erotic dreams. In 1847, E. Guibout ("Des Pollutions Involontaires
chez la Femme," _Union Medicale_, p. 260) presented the case of a
married lady who m