Sex while asleep
This fairly common dreaming experience demonstrates powerfully how dreams are an expression of a self regulatory or compensatory action in the psyche and body. Charles in the example below says he had been restraining his sexual activity. This shows the enormous gulf which can exist between what we will to do as a conscious person, and what our being needs to do or wishes to do outside of conscious decision making and cultural or religious morals. The ‘glamour and fantasy’ Charles describes are regular features of how these deeper needs make themselves known, or attempt to coerce the conscious mind, into fulfilling the need. If we reject the fantasy, the unconscious processes will attempt a more radical approach, as in actual physical movement while we sleep. This may have given rise to ideas about possession or devils in past ages, when it was not understood that we can split our mind and urges by such conflicts. Fear of the ‘possessing’ influence actually heightens its power through suggestion. Much better to understand what your needs are and seek an acceptable fulfilment. See: Abreaction.
‘Many times in my adult life I have woken to find I have made love to my wife while asleep. Or I wake to discover myself in the middle of the sexual act. At such times I have usually been avoiding my sexual drive and it has burst through to fulfill itself while I was asleep or under the sway of dreams. For instance most times this happened I have been in the middle of a dream in which there is a sense of absolute imperative that I must make love/have sex. It is like being lost in a storm of glamour and fantasy or vision in which I am totally involved. The whirl of the ‘dream’ is towards the wonder, totality of the need to have sex. As this imperative is expressed in my still spontaneous, dreaming physical action, the experience of sex is also visionary and enormous.’ Charles W.
Wikipedia reports this quite differently and treats it like an illness:
Those who suffer from sexsomnia have confusional arousals and are more often than not amnesic of the event. People who have a history of doing other sleep activities such as sleepwalking or sleep talking are more likely to exhibit sexsomnia episodes. Factors that may increase episodes of sleep sex are alcohol, sleep deprivation or even sleep apnea and other sleep disruptions.[1] Sexsomnia episodes could be triggered by the contact with bed partner.[2] In some cases sexualised movements during sleep could be caused by sleep related epilepsy which results in sexual arousal, thrusting and orgasms. Simple sexualised movements could be also associated with REM sleep disorders.
This seems to make it a difficult thing when the people like Charles and his wife find it a way to extend their experience of sex.
Researchers are struggling to understand a rare medical condition where sufferers unknowingly demand, or actually have, sex while asleep, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.Research into sexsomnia — making sexual advances toward another person while asleep — has been hampered as sufferers are so embarrassed by the problem they tend not to own up to it, while doctors do not ask about it.
As yet there is no cure for the condition, which often leads to difficulties in relationships.
“It really bothers me that I can’t control it,” Lisa Mahoney told the magazine. “It scares me because I don’t think it has anything to do with the partner. I don’t want this foolish condition to hurt us in the long run.”
Most researchers view sexsomnia as a variant of sleepwalking, where sufferers are stuck between sleep and wakefulness, though sexsomniacs tend to stay in bed rather than get up and walk about.