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 accusations.  Dercum, H.C.  Wood, and Rohe had not personally met with such cases; Burr believed that there was strong evidence “that a sexual dream may be so vivid as to make the subject believe she has had sexual congress”; Kiernan knew of such cases; C.H.  Hughes, in persons with every appearance of sanity, had known the erotic dreams of the night to become the erotic delusions of the day, the patient protesting violently the truth of her story; while Hersman reports the case[242] of a young lady in an asylum who had nightly delusions that a medical officer visited her every night, and had to do with her, coming up the hot-air flue.  I am acquainted with a similar case in a clever, but highly neurotic, young woman, who writes:  “For years I have been trying to stamp out my passional nature, and was beginning to succeed when a strange thing happened to me last autumn.  One night, as I lay in bed, I felt an influence so powerful that a man seemed present with me.  I crimsoned with shame and wonder.  I remember that I lay upon my back, and marveled when the spell had passed.  The influence, I was assured, came from a priest whom I believed in and admired above everyone in the world.  I had never dreamed of love in connection with him, because I always thought him so far above me.  The influence has been upon me ever since—­sometimes by day and nearly always by night; from it I generally go into a deep sleep, which lasts until morning.  I am always much refreshed when I awake.  This influence has the best effect upon my life that anything has ever had as regards health and mind.  It is the knowledge that I am loved fittingly that makes me so indifferent to my future.  What worries me is that I sometimes wonder if I suffer from a nervous disorder merely.”  The subject thus seemed to regard these occurrences as objectively caused, but was sufficiently sane to wonder whether her experiences were not due to mental disorder.[243]

The tendency of the auto-erotic phenomena of sleep to be manifested with such energy as to flow over into the waking life and influence conscious emotion and action, while very well marked in normal and healthy women, is seen to an exaggerated extent in hysterical women, in whom it has, therefore, chiefly been studied.  Sante de Sanctis, who has investigated the dreams of many classes of people, remarks on the frequently sexual character of the dreams of hysterical women, and the repercussion of such dreams on the waking life of the following day; he gives a typical case of hysterical erotic dreaming in an uneducated servant-girl of 23, in whom such dreams occur usually a few days before the menstrual period; her dreams, especially