is a strictly private and intimate experience, not only from its very nature, but also because it occurs in images which the subject finds 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 unexplored an important portion of the auto-erotic field, a portion which many people are alone inclined to consider normal:  sexual orgasm during sleep.  That under conditions of sexual abstinence in healthy individuals there must inevitably be some auto-erotic manifestations during waking life, a careful study of the facts compels us to believe.  There can be no doubt, also, that,