Sex and Dreams

“Then my body gradually contracted into the prenatal position, constantly feeling my genitals as the centre of my whole nervous system, and realising their entanglement with each pain and pleasure of life.”

That is from the report of a man experiencing his childhood pain. It shows so clearly how our centre of pleasure in sexual feelings is tied up with almost any pains we feel. It seems as if we could do a whole course of therapy around sexual pleasure and its blockages through pain. But sex, pain and pleasure are not to be separated, as shown by this example.

 Example: In this sparkling black we transformed into one Rodin sculpture after another. Now we were The Iris and then L’Emprise… L’Emprise which was no longer painful or cruel but ecstatic, yes, it was ecstatic to be the woman pierced through by the man in an act of love… and now we were the Mary Magdalene embracing the crucified Jesus as if the heat of her body and sex could bring him back to life… and now we became Les Ocean ides, two creatures dissolving into a cos­mos of rock at the climax of their love.

 Then the Rodin sculptures disappeared. And I became Rodin himself who knew that sex encom­passed all delight and all perversion, all good and all evil: simultaneously I felt the pleasure of a man’s body and the pain of being pierced by a red-hot poker and the distress of a full bladder and the merging into cosmos and all this was a part of sex which comprises good and evil intermingled and I was large enough now to encompass this knowledge and ecstasy which remained and remained – Without the climactic moment of release.

 “Coming to terms with our sexual realities is a more important task than it may at first appear. All the joking, prudery, and steamy media presentations of the subject often camouflage and oversimplify the harsher truths about sex. Most people still act as if only other people can be killed, or infected with chronic disease, or rendered forever contagious by sexual encounters. Sane people can act crazy when it comes to sex. Intelligent, assertive, and brave people act like timid wimps when it comes to talking about protecting themselves from disease or foolish emotional risks in sexual relationships. Honest people lie about their sexual health and behaviour. Good people break hearts and break up marriages and families for dimly understood sexual discontents and attractions.” Quoted from Sexual Dreams by Dr. Gayle Delaney.

But remember that sexual drive is not something that has developed as our own for it is an instinct and is controlled by your reptilian brain. This brain within us carries our genetically transmitted ‘instinctive’ behaviour such as suckling at the breast as a baby, aggressive response as with and including territorial defensiveness, the courtship and mating behaviours in reproduction. One of the best known expressions of this brain is the ‘flight, fight, freeze or faint’ response in survival situations and of course panic attacks. See Brain Levels and Dreams

Although sex is symbolised in many dreams, where it appears directly, it shows that the dreamer is able to more easily accept their sexual urges and hurts. What is then important is to attempt an understanding of what setting or drama the sexual element occur in. Our psychological and sexual nature, like our physical, never stands still in development unless a pain or problem freezes them at a particular level of maturity. Therefore, our sexual dreams, even if our sex life is satisfactory, show us what growth, what new challenge, is being met. Sex in a dream is an intimate relationship, a deepening of union between yourself and a facet of yourself not yet fully integrated or accepted. See Context/Theme

 Example: ‘My lover was standing behind me, and John, my husband, was standing in front of me. I was asking John to have sex with me and at the same time thinking, ‘Oh, hell, if he does he will think we have something going between us’. I felt no flow towards John but felt somehow I was trying to tell my lover that I was desirable.’ Sally A.

Sally’s dream needs no interpretation. Such clear dreams show that Sally is ready to be directly aware of what she is doing in her relationships. If the sex in the dream is deeply symbolised, it suggests the dreamer is less willing to be aware of their motivations or connected painful feelings. Even though Sally’s dream was clear, it was still dealing with an area of her sexuality she was not clearly conscious of. If she had been aware, it is doubtful whether she would have dreamt it.

 Example: ‘I was in a farmyard. A small boy climbed all over the bull. It became terribly angry. It had been chained without attention too long. Now it tore away and sought the cows. The gates were closed, but the bull smashed through the enclosing fence. I rushed to the fence and sat astride it, but on seeing that the bull smashed it like match wood, I looked around for some safe place. The bull charged the first cow to mount it, but so terrible was its energy and emotion that it could not express as sex. It smashed the cow aside as it had done the fence. Then it rushed the next and tossed it over its head, charging and smashing the next. I climbed into somebody’s garden, trying to get out of the district.’ Arthur J.

Although this dream depicts Arthur’s ‘chained’ sexual drive using the bull, it is still fairly obvious. If we consider the setting and plot of the dream, as suggested above, we see that Arthur is desperately trying to avoid responsibility for, or trying to escape, his own sexual drive – figuratively ‘sitting on the fence’.

Example: My exploration started and my hands moved to my genital area and I had the strange and awful feeling my hips were not mine – that I was touching someone else’s body. The thighs and waist were my own, but in between was a dead, wasted area. I knew my sexuality was this stagnant, dead area. It was my manhood that had been wasted so many years of my life. My body felt such a stranger I took my trousers off to feel myself more easily. Gradually I felt the area connected and my own again. I felt that I had dealt with the causes of my dead sexuality in the past, but I had never felt the actual deadness quite like this.

Example: ‘My husband and I were walking down a road. We were going in the same direction together. I started to sing with a very happy feeling but then felt I should stop because he would say the happiness was because I had had sex. I sensed he knew what I was thinking as I walked along. He then quietly began to sing and the dream ended with me smiling to myself. We had sexual cut off for four weeks but had made love that afternoon.’ Joan W.

In talking about this dream Joan said she felt it slightly embarrassing to admit that sex gave her feelings of happiness. She liked to believe she was perfectly happy without it. It is probably out of the slight conflict between her conscious attitude and her feeling of well being after sex, that the dream was produced.

Occasionally people report a dream of having sex with someone they don’t like and this puzzles them. One such dreamer, on examining her dream, found that the man was a great liar, and recently she had been lying. So the dream was suggesting she was being intimate with a part of herself she didn’t like.

Here is an interesting quote from Dr Gayle Delaney’s book Sexual Dreams.

 “Because the students at our dream centre and the clients in my dream consultation practice are largely heterosexual, I have not worked with enough sexual dreams of lesbians and homosexuals to say very much about them with much confidence. Therefore I have decided to organise this book around the sexual dreams of heterosexuals, with which I have a good deal of experience. I would like to note, however, that the dreams of homosexuals with whom I have worked do not seem to differ markedly from those of heterosexuals except in the predictably greater frequency of the appearance of a partner of the same sex. Both heterosexuals and homosexuals dream of having sex with same and opposite sex partners, both groups dream of being naked in public, of being interrupted while having sex, of having sex with surprising and famous lovers, and of being terribly in love in romantic sexual dreams. Both groups use sexual dreams to explore sexual and non-sexual conflicts, and both tend to be upset if they dream about sex with someone who is not of their sexual orientation.”

A great many of us have sex without any care or love involved in the sex act. This can be detrimental to the core self.

Example: I lay with my back to my wife, but I couldn’t sleep. I had to get up and wash my penis. It felt dirty with the stain of an awful thing. I had to wash it off. I got up and did this. It felt better but not really clean. Gradually the reason for all this clarified. It was that I was experiencing the awfulness of sex without love, the dirtiness of using somebody else’s body. All my recent dreams fell into place. Yes, I was using my wifes body to get an infantile thumb suck. This was the “no handed wank” in someone’s body. How many of us do this to each other? What must it feel like if you have done this to and with umpteen women or men? How unclean which you feel then? Pak Subuh was off the beam when he said we pick up their depth. We don’t. We simply see the awfulness of using somebody else like a thing – an object.

Or here is a report of someone’s fear of sex.

 Example: This morning I was talking with my wife and was defining a situation that occurs at the acme of intercourse. Over the past few weeks I have noticed I very much remain in control and in a conscious, localised self-possessed condition. I feel this is a problem, and it stands in the way of plunging deeply into self abandonment. As we talked I felt fear beginning to arise in my body. I felt, without having an explanation why, that if I opened to that fear, I will scream and scream. It has something to do with losing control of the situation, also with experiencing the released outflow of a woman’s sexual dance. Perhaps, like the dream, I am frightened of losing my soul. The fear is like that experienced after finding the void – the fear of losing everything. It is the fear of discovering everything is a shadow, an illusion, and losing all. As I feared it then, it felt like seeing my involvement with my wife, the family, work, friends, the whole phenomenal world, as a huge illusion I was beginning to see through. And if I saw through it all I would leave it all, dropped it as one does a piece of tin one has picked up thinking it a shilling. That is something of what I am frightened of finding.

Here is a dream and also a detailed exploration of the dream.

Example: I used to walk this footpath a great deal. In the dream, as I neared the field I saw a black car moving about randomly in the field. Nobody was driving it. I also realised that I had committed a murder in this place in the past, and the car was some sort of evidence of the murder. I got on the bonnet of the car and reached through the windscreen to pull the brake on. Then I was in the car guiding it down the gentle slope of the field. It was now more like a bubble car, smaller than the other shape. As I was guiding it with my right hand on the steering wheel I realised the body of the murdered person was on the floor. It was just bones now, and I reached down with my left hand and started throwing the bones out onto the field. I did this because I felt this would scatter the evidence of my murder so I wouldn’t be find out. There was leaves and earth mixed up with the bones.

In exploring the dream the dreamer says, “In brief, the black car represented the drive I have to break through rules and regulations, shoulds, musts and should nots. This was developed out of the feelings I got from the cars I used to hire when I was with my wife. I would go to London to meet a woman friend. To do so I would forcibly break the moral controls which usually held me. So this relates to how I feel with my present wife – I hold myself in check such a lot in relationship with the opposite sex, because of how I feel afraid of her reaction. In the dream I am putting the brake on – exactly what I was doing all the time with a woman I fell in love with but never showed what I felt. This immediately led to the realisation of my implication in murder, and the car turning into a bubble car. The fact is I murdered my own feelings by always denying them.

Example: Truly one of the big lessons in this life was my falling in love with S. and making myself ill by expressing none of what I felt. In this life I have been growing out of, or cleansing, the moral poison of that sort of lifestyle and morality. We meet that sort of poison and know it in sayings such as you mustn’t love that person, you mustn’t love like that, being like that is a sin, have nothing to do with those people, and so on. It even poisoned me in the sense of my spiritual life by connecting sex with sin, and flowing love with wrongness. So sex and love and spirituality were like a time bomb in me ready to explode.

I believe this is because in repressing my feelings it puts me right back to the old way of murdering my natural sexual feelings. But this time I am not going to murder myself, but I am faced with the old feelings and the bones of my past actions. I still feel guilty about having love and affection for people. This is the point of the dream. The policeman is the investigative attitude I have in trying to understand what is going on inside myself. I swing from one attitude to another over this issue. The man at the top of the hill who phones the police, for instance, is the attitude of feeling guilty and as if I have done something wrong.

The bones are what is left of the experience from the years of meeting my loved woman. They represent my fantasy of a woman who would love me. I created her right on that footpath. My sexual feelings and desire for a loving contact were so strong I would often flee down that path with a bursting erection. I would walk with feelings of fantasy of meeting someone whom I could passionately love and be loved by. I made her piece by piece out of my longing. She was created out of lots of women I saw or met. Why could I not put my fantasy love into contact with my wife? Perhaps because she found it difficult to share her emotions and her passion. I would not with another woman because I feared the consequences of an affair – it might tear me away from my family. A real fear because it eventually did.

The writhing intestines are the most powerfully emotive aspect of the dream. They are a depiction of how I had disembodied my sexuality, and still do in the struggle with this situation. I disembowel myself in trying to be free of the sexual side of myself. In meeting the living thing, I realise I must trust myself. Even if that aspect of myself does not live by the social morals I was reared in, I need to trust myself – the alternatives are too awful”.

There is pleasure in sex that can transform you and can lead to knowing your core self.

 Example: I often, when going for a walk in the evening, go into out local church and sit. This evening as I sat I was thinking about sex, that it must be something that in human lives is an expression of a universal process. I tried to imagine this but could not reach it.

Then, on returning home and getting in bed with my wife I was lying quietly beside her as she was already asleep. As I was relaxing into sleep I noticed that my body was vibrating, something I had never experienced before. Then I had an urge to make love with my wife. The result was extraordinary. I was not longer a man separated from my wife, but I knew myself as a power of Life itself, expressing as two parts, which in our act was the bringing together of these two wonderful and matching halves. It felt as if I as a person was no more, instead I was sunlight and power falling and entering into the wonderful dark world of the earth and planting a wonderful possibility only made whole by the earth. And this making of love never ended, yet was at the pinnacle or feeling, and went on and on without an end.

Here is a view of the beauty of sexaul development in a young woman.

Example: I had a very clear dream of seeing a young woman’s legs, slim, perfectly hairless and well shaped. Then I saw her again with very tight tights on. She had a very beautifully shaped vagina that was not flat but like a new bud, with the crack well defined.

It is Saturday today and so I lay in bed a bit longer, and despite trying to understand the above dreams several times, today the answer came easily. As usual it seemed as if a voice explained it to me. I was told that the young girls legs were representing my feelings of beauty, and the shaped vagina was what I felt deep within was developing womanhood. With it came feelings of seeing a young girl opening to womanhood, and how beautiful it is. I saw that it was a beauty for me without any sexual feelings, but was a wonderful act of nature or life in the development of a young woman. Previously such views always had sexual overtones for me. Such a development in a young woman was almost holy, and invited love not sex. Sure love could lead to sex, but usually sex that is called love.

But sex can also be a terrible pain, giving wounds that are hidden.

Example: My loved partner had said with a voice full of pleasure and intimacy that it could be like the string of pearls. I didn’t understand and when ask she said, “You know, when you rub your penis between my breasts and in cuming you leave a string or pearls with your cum.”

It was as if I had been stabbed and the knife carried on turning in my wound. For it opened up the horror of pain I had felt for years of me life. The image of a man who so easily spent his cum without a thought or regret tore me – me a man who felt he had never been a man because every time he ejaculated he felt as if he had been left dying. A man who wept because a friend told him he had sex with is wife that morning and was going back to do it again; this man who would try to stop his sexual hunger for fear of facing once again the awful pit he would fall into – the pit of being stripped of his very life. Yes, the man who having struggled for years to be a ‘man’ for his wife, broke down in front of her and could barely say the words to her, “I am inadequate.” And then, in what he felt was an act of love told her to find another man who could satisfy her. And she mistook this as him saying that he had no love for her – love and sex being so mixed in people’s mind. And her angry turning from him was yet another wound, so much that he struck her as she turned away, so much was his pain. See Tiredness after sex

 General information about sex in your dreams Whenever a healthy man dreams, he experiences an erection, no matter what the subject of the dream. Women also experience such stimulus while dreaming.

While dreaming you can safely allow any form of sexual pleasure you desire. Don’t let the useful morals of waking life intrude into your dreams. If your sexual dreams are frustrating, or do not lead to deep pleasure, drop the fears and limiting attitudes that are blocking the full flow of your excitement. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

Your longing for sexual partners that isn’t openly expressed, will attempt to become real in your dreams. It doesn’t mean that you are dissatisfied with your present partner if you have sex with other people in your dreams. All of us have such secret longings, and it is healthy for them to be allowed as we sleep.

 Example: A young woman was there, not particularly good-looking, but okay. I suppose I would describe her as a fairly plain young woman, neither highly intelligent nor stupid. Almost immediately we were in a sexual relationship. I was sucking her breast. It was very beautiful and warm sweet milk was coming out into my mouth. It felt very satisfying, both for me and for her. Then my hand was on her vagina. It felt incredibly rich and deep. It was fully wet and inviting. I put my hand up inside her and could feel her orgasm as wonderful muscular movements of her vagina around my hand.

Sometimes sexual pleasure is depicted in dreams as a tidal wave, or a snake, or something you may be resisting. This is because full sexual bliss floods the whole body, releasing tensions, bringing peace and a healing action physically and psychologically. To achieve this, learn to let go of rigid self control and be ready to be emotional. See Being in Control – Arm Circling Meditation

The wave of pleasure can, if allowed to flow up the body lead to an illumination, a great release into freedom.

Example: This is certainly about the energy exchange between a man and a woman. But somewhere here there were a mass of realisations coming from the act of trying to understand what I was experiencing. As far as I can define it, my query was when the whole act revolves around fertilisation – planting seed and receiving the seed. So part of the question was, does one actually need the sexual act, the physical genital process? What I arrived at was that in the end, all it amounts to is the achieving of satisfaction. For instance a woman might achieve satisfaction by becoming pregnant. But that alone might not satisfy her, because there may have being a lack, in the sexual act, of the excitement, tenderness and flow of enormous feelings and uplift that she deep down seeks. So if there were a way of her feeling that flow of energy, those feelings, being impregnated with something, then this could be satisfying without the genital act.

 Women’s feelings about sex: Watching films that were sexually stimulating and then fantasying about them. The measure of genital arousal was vaginal pulse amplitude (measurement of vaginal stimulation). Waking VPA scores showed highly significant changes from the baseline level for both the film and fantasy responses. There was no significant correlation, however, between the self-rated levels of arousal and the physiological levels of arousal as measured by VPA. What women reported they were experiencing was not what their bodies indicated they were experiencing.

 Enjoying sexual pleasure with an animal, such as being kissed or licked by a dog or cat, is the way dreams describe your own sexual urges at their most uncomplicated and basic level. It doesn’t mean you are weird. In such dreams you are dropping the complicated social rules that usually direct how you express yourself.

Example: My husband was making love to me and our dog was in the room. When my husband was finished I was still lying with my legs open and our dog began to lick my vagina with great tenderness. It felt wonderful and blissful and I and my husband allowed the dog to carry on.

There is a less mentioned side to sex in the following examples.

Example: I have been having erotic dreams of my father since adolescence. The dreams are elaborate, long and highly arousing and end with intense and multiple orgasms. The dreams are often of me seducing my father and my father willingly being seduced or of my father and I having passionate sex. The context of these dreams is that my mother is looking on and we are ignoring her or she is preventing us from being happy and having sex together and being in love with each other. Needless to say, the dreams are disturbing when I wake up and I feel really bad about them.  

Example: Suddenly I remember that while my father was away I had sex with my mother. I remember the explicit scenes and experience of this. The sex was good. But now I have feelings of guilt, which had not bothered me previously.

Example: The terror Deborah felt in this dream was so great that it led to her recall of incest with her father thirty years earlier. When she told her sister about the dream and the memories, her sister refused to talk to her. But later her sister confirmed that she had experienced similar nightmares and memories. Both had worried that they might be falsely accusing their father of incest, but after a few months of therapy, they decided to confront their parents and found solid confirmation of the abuse.  I have written about it because there are so many adults who have been abused as children and do not yet know either what to do about it or that they have plenty of company among others who were abused and are still ashamed.

The energy behind the sexual drive is enormously important. It can flow in many different ways. It not only expresses as genital sex, but also in caring for others. If it is blocked illness can result often leading to neurotic urges or disastrous sexual urges. Your dreams show in detail just how you are dealing with this most important area of your life, and what is standing in the way of satisfaction and health. Do not accept the ready made formulas of popular sexual norms. Your dreams will show your own intimate and unique needs. Remember your dreams and be enriched by them.

See: Summing Up; animals; adolescent; affair; devil; Christ; archetype of the shadow