ccasionally be experienced by persons who are, and always have
been, exclusively heterosexual. I could bring forward much
evidence on this point. (Cf. "Auto-erotism" in vol. i of these
_Studies_.) Both men and women who have always been of pronounced
heterosexual tendency, without a trace of inversion, are liable
to rare homosexual dreams, not necessarily involving orgasm or
even definite sexual excitement, and sometimes accompanied by a
feeling of repugnance. As an example I may present a dream (which
had no known origin) of an exclusively heterosexual lady aged 42;
she dreamed she was in bed with another woman, unknown to her,
and lying on her own stomach, while with her right hand stretched
out she was feeling the other's sexual parts. She could
distinctly perceive the clitoris, vagina, etc.; she felt a sort
of disgust with herself for what she was doing, but continued
until she awoke; she then found herself lying on her stomach as
in the dream and at first thought she must have been touching
herself, but realized that this could not have been the case.
(Niceforo, who believes that inversion may develop out of
masturbation, considers that dreams of masturbation by
association of ideas may take on an inverted character [_Le
Psicopatie Sessuale_, 1897, pp. 35, 69]; this, however, must be
rare, and will not account for most of the dreams in question.)

Naecke and Colin Scott, some years ago, independently referred to
cases in which normal persons were liable to homosexual dreams,
and Fere (_Revue de Medecine_, Dec., 1898) referred to a man who
had a horror of women, but appeared only to manifest
homosexuality in his dreams. Naecke (_Archiv fuer
Kriminal-Anthropologie_, 1907, Heft I, 2) calls dreams which
represent a reaction of opposition to the dreamer's ordinary life
"contrast dreams." Hirschfeld, who accepts Naecke's "contrast
dreams" in relation to homosexuality, considers that they
indicate a latent bisexuality. We may admit this is so, in the
same sense in which a complementary color image called up by
another color indicates the possibility of perceiving that color.
In most cases, however, it seems to me that homosexual dreams in
normal persons may be simply explained as due to the ordinary
confusion and transition of dream imagery. (See Ellis, _The World
of Dreams_,