"Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or imitates his manner.
"Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child pretends to be asleep, that it may be able without fear or punishment to experience all sorts of forbidden things, because it cannot be held accountable for what it does 'unconsciously in its sleep.' The same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it.
"The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this, these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, sadists and hysterics, with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus.
"Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy; yet they are found frequently in conjunction with the former.
"The moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic colouring.
"It seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently cured through the psychoanalytic method."
Every one has heard relations of prophetic dreams which seem to imply a sense of unconscious sight going far beyond the limits of our conscious visual perceptions. It may be that, even as certain vibrations can be sent and received without any transmitting medium except the atmosphere, by wireless, certain visual information can be received, at times, under certain conditions, without any perception of such phenomena reaching the consciousness.
At the same time, this is a field on which one must tread most carefully, for telepathy has never been studied very scientifically and the telepathic dreams which have been related to me or which I have read about had been recorded rather carelessly and the circumstances surrounding them had not been noted with the regard for accuracy which must characterize scientific research.