[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, under the same conditions, the
occurrence of the complete orgasm during sleep with, in men, seminal
emissions, is altogether normal. Even Zeus himself, as Pausanias has
recorded, was liable to such accidents: a statement which, at all events,
shows that to the Greek mind there was nothing derogatory in such an
occurrence.[231] The Jews, however, regarded it as an impurity,[232] and
the same idea was transmitted to the Christian church and embodied in the
word _pollutio_, by which the phenomenon was designated in ecclesiastical
phraseology.[233] According to Billuart and other theologians, pollution
in sleep is not sin, unless voluntarily caused; if, however, it begins in
sleep, and is completed in the half-waking state, with a sense of
pleasure, it is a venial sin.
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