"daydream stage." It is a period of almost literal waking dreams on the part of the young lady. She is still held lightly by the long preparatory sleep of childhood and early youth, but she is ready to wake. Her head is filled with tremendous plans for herself. These plans usually have a highly maternal and altruistic character about them; she will become a great doctor and serve suffering humanity in darkest Africa, or she will become a lawyer and defend the poor free of charge, or she will become a nurse and, under fire that would daunt a lesser creature, she will tend the wounded among our boys at the front. She has scores of great loves with boys or men whom she considers wonderful—all in her head.
The satisfaction of her now nearly mature maternal and sexual impulses through such dreams is clear. But they serve another function which is perhaps a bit more obscure. She is not quite ready for real love yet. She has still half a foot in childhood, is still reluctant to give herself wholly to the realities of grown-uphood. She needs to hang upon the tree, so to speak, for a few more years, to ripen a bit. The great roles she plays in her daydreams are, in most cases, not achievable. They allow her, by the very impossibility of their fruition, to have her cake and eat it too.
Yes, the dream of young love is a long and lovely one, and it readies the dreamer for real love. Woman will always be a romantic dreamer, a weaver of inner reveries, of tapestries of thought that give her whole personality its richness and flavor. In love, as in life, man is a doer, an aggressive achiever. Woman is the passive one; she is the dreamer who values the man's achievements, who creates the need for his achievement and gives color and glory to it through her appreciation of it. The dreams of adolescence ready her for this role with her man.
Adolescence is a gradual preparation for true sexuality and love. In it the young girl conquers her impulse to masturbate,
