We have now reached a point in our discussion at which we may perhaps profitably pause awhile to consider a group of phantasies, which, on account of their widespread occurrence and curious character, would seem to deserve some very special attention at the hands of the psychologist and anthropologist. The phantasies in question are those which psycho-analysts have found to cluster round the idea of returning to the mother's womb and of resuming there the intra-uterine life enjoyed by the child in the pre-natal stages of its existence,--an idea which is discoverable (usually of course in a symbolic form) in many myths, legends, dreams, reveries and symptomatic actions. It is very frequently associated with the further idea of birth or re-birth, and it is in this form that the phantasy was first described by Freud[46]. In consciousness this phantasy of returning to the womb may clothe itself as an idea of being in an enclosed, dark, solitary or inaccessible place, safe from outside dangers or disturbances. Its influence can probably be traced in the pleasure that many persons find in the retirement to small islands, mountain tops or other places isolated from the rest of the world, in the "cosiness" of small rooms or closets or in the comfort which may be experienced in snuggling under the bed-clothes in the presence of real or imaginary danger[47]. Sleep itself, in its power of withdrawing the individual from the outer world and in its unmistakable approximation to the pre-natal condition of body and mind, may, from certain points of view, be regarded as an exemplification of the same tendency[48] as may also possibly hypnosis. In certain forms of insanity the tendency may show itself quite clearly even in waking life, the patient withdrawing himself as far as possible from all environmental influences and sometimes adopting a characteristically foetal posture,--a posture which, it should be noted, is often adopted even by normal persons during sleep. More moderately and within the bounds of sanity, it may show itself in a relative degree of retirement from the world, as in the life followed in Christian monasteries or nunneries, or--more clearly--in the still more isolated existence of many Buddhist monks and devotees, some of whom will live for years in caves or other dark and secluded spots, almost entirely cut off from human intercourse and from the light and bustle of the outside world. In a more distinctly neurotic form again, its influence may be traced in agoraphobia--the fear of open spaces--or negatively (the reaction against the tendency predominating) in its opposite, claustrophobia--the fear of narrow, confined rooms or places--or in the morbid dread of being buried alive. [Sidenote: Meaning of this desire]