nervous disturbance, not
arising in the bladder at all, irradiates convulsively, and
whether or not the bladder is overfull, attacks a vesical nervous
system which is not yet sufficiently well-balanced to withstand
the inflow of excitement. In children of somewhat nervous
temperament, manifestations of this kind may occur as an
occasional accident, up to about the age of seven or eight; and
thereafter, the nervous control of the bladder having become
firmly established, they cease to happen, the nervous energy
required to affect the bladder sufficing to awake the dreamer. In
very rare cases, however, the phenomenon may still occasionally
happen, even in adolescence or later, in individuals who are
otherwise quite free from it. This is most apt to occur in young
women even in waking life. In men it is probably extremely rare.

The erotic dream seems to differ flagrantly from the vesical
dream, in that it occurs in adult life, and is with difficulty
brought under control. The contrast is, however, very
superficial. When we remember that sexual activity only begins
normally at puberty, we realize that the youth of twenty is, in
the matter of sexual control, scarcely much older than in the
matter of vesical control he was at the age of six. Moreover, if
we were habitually, from our earliest years, to go to bed with a
full bladder, as the chaste man goes to bed with unrelieved
sexual system, it would be fully as difficult to gain vesical
control during sleep as it now is to gain sexual control.
Ultimately, such sexual control is attained; after the age of
forty, it seems that erotic dreams with emission become more and
more rare; either the dream occurs without actual emission,
exactly as dreams of urination occur in adults with full bladder,
or else the organic stress, with or without dreams, serves to
awaken the sleeper before any emission has occurred. But this
stage is not easily or completely attained. St. Augustine, even
at the period when he wrote his _Confessions_, mentions, as a
matter of course, that sexual dreams "not merely arouse pleasure,
but gain the consent of the will." (X. 41.) Not infrequently
there is a struggle in sleep, just as the hypnotic subject may
resist suggestions; thus, a lady of thirty-five dreamed a sexual
dream, and awoke without excitement; aga