[239] Loewenfeld has recently expressed the same opinion.  Rohleder believes that pollutions are physically impossible in a real virgin, but that opinion is too extreme.

[240] It may be added that in more or less neurotic women and girls, erotic dreams may be very frequent and depressing.  Thus, J.M.  Fothergill (West-Riding Asylum Report, 1876, vol. vi) remarks:  “These dreams are much more frequent than is ordinarily thought, and are the cause of a great deal of nervous depression among women.  Women of a highly-nervous diathesis suffer much more from these drains than robust women.  Not only are these involuntary orgasms more frequent among such women, but they cause more disturbance of the general health in them than in other women.”

[241] I may remark here that a Russian correspondent considers that I have greatly underestimated the frequency of erotic manifestations during sleep in young girls.  “All the women I have interrogated on this point,” he informs me, “say that they have had such pollutions from the time of puberty, or even earlier, accompanied by erotic dreams.  I have put the question to some twenty or thirty women.  It is true that they were of southern race (Italian, Spanish, and French), and I believe that Southerners are, in this matter, franker than northern women, who consider the activity of the flesh as shameful, and seek to conceal it.”  My correspondent makes no reference to the chief point of sexual difference, so far as my observation goes, which is that erotic dreams are comparatively rare in those women “who have yet had no sort of sexual experience in waking life.”  Whether or not this is correct, I do not question the frequency of erotic dreams in girls who have had such experience.

[242] C.C.  Hersman, “Medico-legal Aspects of Eroto-Choreic Insanities,” Alienist and Neurologist, July, 1897.  I may mention that Pitres (Lecons cliniques sur l’Hysterie, vol. ii, p. 34) records the almost identical case of a hysterical girl in one of his wards, who was at first grateful to the clinical clerk to whom her case was intrusted, but afterward changed her behavior, accused him of coming nightly through the window, lying beside her, caressing her, and then exerting violent coitus three or four times in succession, until she was utterly exhausted.  I may here refer to the tendency to erotic excitement in women under the influence of chloroform and nitrous oxide, a tendency rarely or never noted in men, and of the frequency with which the phenomenon is attributed by the subject to actual assault.  See H. Ellis, Man and Woman, pp. 269-274.

[243] In Australia, some years ago, a man was charged with rape, found guilty of “attempt,” and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, on the accusation of a girl of 13, who subsequently confessed that the charge was imaginary; in this case, the jury found it impossible to believe that so young a girl could have been lying, or hallucinated, because she narrated the details of the alleged offence with such circumstantial detail.  Such cases are not uncommon, and in some measure, no doubt, they may be accounted for by auto-erotic nocturnal hallucinations.