We find first in the foreground a family disposition to sleep walking and moon influence. The brother significantly always wants in his wanderings to get into the sister's bed, while our patient herself openly plays the part of mother, especially the mother of the earliest childhood. It is interesting also that when in her married life she had to give up her pleasure in light and air, the disturbances of consciousness set in, from which she could free herself only through fixing her attention upon a point of light. She had the distinct feeling that from this point of light things would become clear to her. One can easily think of occasions of being dazed by sleep when perhaps the mother came with the candle in her hand to see whether her child was asleep and the child awoke. The whole remarkable occurrence would then be simply a desire for the mother's love, which she all her life long so sorely missed.
Now for the last case, a twenty-three year old married woman suffering from a severe hysteria, who clung with great tenderness to her parents, but received a reciprocal love only from her father, while the mother preferred her sister. The patient told me of her moon walking: “I always wanted to sleep by the open blinds so that the moon could shine upon me. My oldest brother walked about in the night, drank water, went to the window and looked out, all of course in his sleep, then he went back to bed and slept on. At the same time he spoke very loudly, but quite unintelligible things and one could actually observe that the moon exercised an attraction over him. My younger healthy brother said that it was frightful, the many things that he uttered in the night. I also climbed out of bed one night when sixteen or seventeen years old, because I could not find the moon, and sought it and met my moon haunted brother. I immediately disappeared again going back to my bed and he did not see me.
“I was ill once, about the same time, with influenza, and continually repeated in my feverish phantasies that they should take down some one who was hanged and not punish him; he could not help it. There was moonlight at that time and moreover a light burned in the room. I took this for the moon, which I could not see but wanted to see. I strove only all the time to see the moon. The windows must be closed because I was afraid, but the blinds must remain open so that I could see the moon. Some one roused me then from my phantasies and there I saw that my cousin sat near me. He was not however the one hanged, it was some one who was first dragged out by another man, a warden in the prison. The face of the one who was hanging I did not see, only his body.”—“Of whom did he remind you?”—“I do not know definitely and yet it was the cousin who sat near me. And as I awoke, apparently I called his name for he answered me, ‘Yes, here I am!’”—“What about the warden of the prison?”—“A man is first locked up before he is hanged.”—“Do you see also in phantasy something that hangs down?”—“Yes; when with my cousin I always had the desire to see his membrum stiff, as it could be felt and noticed outlined through his clothing.” I will add likewise that behind the cousin and her sexual wishes toward him analogous phantasies toward the father were hidden. That which hangs down (pendens, penis) is also the phallus. Her adjuration that the hanged person should not be punished, he could not help it, is a demand for mercy for sexual sins (see also later).
“Upon the wedding journey my husband did not want to sleep by the open blinds, and I wanted to sleep nowhere else so that the moon could shine upon me. I could never sleep otherwise, was very restless and it was always as if I wanted to creep into the moon. I wanted, so to speak, to creep into the moon out of sight.[15] Recently I was out in the country with my sister and slept by the open blinds. The light from the heavens, to be sure not the moonlight, forced its way in and I had the feeling as if something pierced me,[16] in fact it pierced me somehow in the small of my back, and I arose with my eyes closed and changed the position of the bed, upon which I slept well. I knew nothing of it that I had arisen, but something must have happened because I now could lie comfortably.
“Something else still. About two years ago I observed the moon in the country, as it was reflected in the water, and I could not tear myself from this spectacle until I was suddenly awakened by my husband and cried out. Five or six years ago I went out in a boat upon the Wolfgang lake. The moon was reflected in the water and I sat there very still. Suddenly my brother, the one who is well, with whom I do not have much to do, asked, ‘What are you thinking of?’—‘Nothing at all.’—‘It must be something.’—‘No, nothing!’ As we climbed out, I was still quite absent minded. Also at night I always had the moon before me and spoke with it.”—“Consciously or in a dream?”—“I believe I was more asleep than awake. For if any one had come upon me then I should have felt it very painfully. I have incidentally noted the words: ‘Oh moon with thy white face, thou knowest I am in love only with thee. Come down to me. I languish in torture, let me only comfort myself upon thy face. Thou enticing, beautiful, lovely spirit, thou torturest me to death, my suffering rends me, thou beautiful Moon, thou sweet one, mine, I implore thee, release me from this pain, I can bear it no longer. Ah, what avail my words and my complainings! Be thou my happiness, take me with thee, only pleasure of the senses do I desire for myself. Thou Moon, most beautiful and best, save me, take my maidenhood, I am not evil to thee. Draw me mightily to thyself, do not leave off, thy kisses have been so good to me.’” As may be seen, she loved the moon like a lover to whom she would yield herself entirely. The grossly sexual relationship is evident. It is after this fragment doubly regrettable that a penetrating psychoanalysis was not here possible.
The early sexual content of the moon desire and its connection with the parent complex is shown by her further statement: “Last summer in the country I had only my mother-in-law with whom I could talk. It was the time of the new moon and I could not bear complete darkness in my room. It was frightfully lonely to me thus and I could not sleep. I had the idea that in the lonely darkness someone was coming to me and I was afraid.”
It soon came to light that she and her sister in their early childhood and again between the ages of eight and thirteen shared the parents' sleeping room and had repeatedly spied upon their sexual intercourse. Her present fear is also evidently the wish to put herself in the place of the mother, to whom the father comes. She recalls yet one more episode: “When I was nine or ten years old, the healthy brother was ill with typhoid and the parents were up nights on his account. We sisters were sent to stay elsewhere, where we had opportunity to play with a boy who carried on a number of sexual things with us. I then dreamed of him at night and phantasied the sexual things which I had done with him in the daytime. Apparently I had also at that time played underneath with my genitals. At the same time, while my brother had typhoid, I was unwilling to go to sleep and could not, because I could have no rest while my brother was ill.” It is clear without further discussion to one who understands these things that it was not anxiety for the brother but secret, yet insistent sexual wishes which caused the sleeplessness. It is finally significant that, when later she dreamed of a burglar, he always came after her with a knife, or choked her, as her cousin and mother had often done to her.
As we consider this third case of moon affectivity we find again familiar phenomena, connections with early sexual dreams and the parent complex. Especially noteworthy is further her direct falling in love with the moon, to which she addresses her adoration in verses and to which she even offers her virginity. It is as if she saw in it a man, who should free her from her sexual need. One is reminded how in the first case, the one cured by psychoanalysis, the four-year-old girl sought continually the moon's face on the ground of a students' song. It could not, we regret to say, be ascertained, in the absence of a psychoanalysis, whether in this case the heavenly body represented to the moon walker some definite person or not.
Case 6.—I add here three autobiographical reports, which I have gathered from literature. The first originates with the famous anatomist and physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach, who from his tenth to his thirtieth year had occasional attacks of moon walking, although he apparently “enjoyed the most perfect health.” “I have during these periods,” he himself relates, “undertaken actions which I had to recognize as mine, merely because they could have been carried out by no one else. Thus one day it was incomprehensible to me why I had on no shirt when I awoke, and it remained so in spite of my utmost efforts to recollect myself, until the shirt was found in another room rolled together under a press. In my twenty-ninth year I was awakened from a night wandering by the question, What did I want? and then the consciousness of the somnambulistic state passed over in part to the awaking. First I found the question strange, but since I thought the reason for it would become plain, I need not betray it. Immediately, however, as I began to waken, I asked myself in what that consisted and, now that the somnambulistic state was over, the answer must be due me.”
One cannot help finding this self revelation exceedingly interesting. The hiding of the shirt, although the affair is so incompletely reported, especially in its motivation, points unmistakably at least to exhibitionism. The second sleep walking appears much more difficult of explanation. In this Burdach sought plainly a definite goal, which seemed so clear and transparent to him that he could not at all understand why anyone should question him about it. If we consider that his first thought on waking was that he need not betray this purpose, that moreover there enters at once a repression and causes him completely to forget it, there remains then no other possibility than that we have to do with a strongly forbidden wish, which the conscious censor will not allow to pass. It is easy to conceive a sexual motivation in this second instance if we remember that in the first sleep walking something sexual surely took place.