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 masturbated 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.