He’s Out Like a Light and Suddenly Very Much in the Mood
You might say the man--a sedate, heavy-set, 48-year-old administrator from San Diego--was enjoying an unusually rich sex life. For four years, he’d been having pleasurable sex with his girlfriend nearly every night, then again upon waking in the morning.
But she’d noticed that their nighttime sessions had gotten wilder. He was more aggressive than usual. It was good for her until the night he fell asleep right in the middle of it all and the next morning claimed he didn’t remember a thing.
“She said, ‘I can’t believe that during intercourse you were snoring!’ ” recounted the administrator. “I said, ‘When did I have intercourse?’ ”
His girlfriend documented the nocturnal canoodling for the next week. Soon after, the couple visited a sleep doctor and learned that he is a “sleep-sexer,” used to describe people (mostly men) who get randy as they sleep.
Sleep sex, like sleepwalking and sleep-eating, is a behavior that occurs while the brain is in transition between sleep and wakefulness. Just how many sleep-sexers are out there is not known, but experts estimate it is equal to the 10% to 15% of men who sleepwalk.
And while it might seem like double happiness--combining sleep with sex . . . well, honey, you snooze, you lose.
“I don’t think it is all that much of a good ride,” said Dr. David Saul Rosenfeld, director of the Kaiser Permanente Sleep Clinic in Los Angeles, who recently published a study of sleep-sex after treating the San Diego couple and others. “He didn’t like it because it was something that was out of his control and he was amnestic the next morning. I think . . . that she didn’t really like it because sleep-sex is a little like necrophilia.”
Perhaps what is so strange about the phenomenon is that sex, a fairly complicated dance between two people, could be carried out so deftly in sleep. But Dr. Mark W. Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Clinic, likens sleep-sex to a chicken running around with its head cut off.
“Maternal behavior, grooming behavior, eating and sexual behavior are all genetically hard-wired into the brain,” said Mahowald, an expert on parasomnias, activities that occur during sleep. “They are normally under control of higher center structures in the brain, but when you are half awake and half asleep, you have these motor-patterned behaviors acting on their own without direction from the higher brain structures.”
Memory in this state is like a “10-second, self-erasing tape,” Mahowald said. If you don’t wake up mid-deed, you won’t remember doing it. Sleepwalking, sleep-sex, and sleep-eating occur in non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep during which memory shuts down. “There is enough wakefulness for the behaviors but not enough consciousness for the person to be held responsible for what they are doing,” Mahowald said.
Tell that to the Orange County man Rosenfeld treated after he sleepwalked into his stepdaughter’s room, got into her bed and touched her breasts as he spooned her, which he often did with his wife. The girl awoke screaming. The wife came in and screamed. The police arrived. The man was arrested.
Although he was not charged with a crime, he was ordered to sleep elsewhere until he received treatment. Rosenfeld prescribed medication that stopped the behavior.
“The spouse was suspicious there was real intent, but there was not,” Rosenfeld said.
None? “There is really no evidence that sleep behaviors are the acting out of the unconscious brain,” Mahowald said.
Meanwhile, the San Diego administrator tried medication, which failed to dampen his sleep sex urges. His girlfriend doesn’t really mind, he reports, except she finds it difficult to feel intimate with someone who is unconscious. He is more accepting: “It doesn’t really bother me that much because I am asleep.”