asturbated from the age of ten, and continued
the practice, even after her marriage at twenty-four, and at
twenty-nine began to have erotic dreams with emissions every few
nights, and later sometimes even several times a night, though
they ceased to be voluptuous; he believed the case to be the
first ever reported of such a condition in a woman. Yet,
thousands of years ago, the Indian of Vedic days recognized
erotic dreams in women as an ordinary and normal occurrence.
(Loewenfeld quotes a passage to this effect from the Oupnek'hat,
_Sexualleben und Nervenleiden_, 2d ed., p. 114.) Even savages
recognize the occurrence of erotic dreams in women as normal, for
the Papuans, for instance, believe that a young girl's first
menstruation is due to intercourse with the moon in the shape of
a man, the girl dreaming that a man is embracing her. (_Reports
Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v., p. 206.) In the
seventeenth century, Rolfincius, in a well-informed study (_De
Pollutione Nocturna_, a Jena Inaugural Dissertation, 1667),
concluded that women experience such manifestations, and quotes
Aristotle, Galen, and Fernelius, in the same sense. Sir Thomas
Overbury, in his _Characters_, written in the early part of the
same century, describing the ideal milkmaid, says that "her
dreams are so chaste that she dare tell them," clearly implying
that It was not so with most women. The notion that women are not
subject to erotic dreams thus appears to be of comparatively
recent origin.

One of the most interesting and important characters by which the erotic
dreams of women--and, indeed, their dreams generally--differ from those of
men is in the tendency to evoke a repercussion on the waking life, a
tendency more rarely noted in men's erotic dreams, and then only to a
minor extent. This is very common, even in healthy and normal women, and
is exaggerated to a high degree in neurotic subjects, by whom the dream
may even be interpreted as a reality, and so declared on oath, a fact of
practical importance.

Hersman--having met with a case in which a school-girl with chorea, after
having dreamed of an assault, accused the principal of a school of
assault, securing his conviction--obtained the opinions of various
American alienists as to the frequency with which such dreams in unstable
mental subjects lead to delusions and criminal accu