In Reality, Sex Dreams Are Rare--and Not Always About Sex
The woman was in the middle of a dream about an old boyfriend when her husband’s voice--like a pin to a balloon--pierced it. “Don’t wake me up,” the Santa Monica woman told her husband. “I am having a sex dream and you are not in it.”
Her kindly husband decamped to another part of the house, and the woman slipped back to sleep, back into the diaphanous folds of a dream where she and her old boyfriend were together in an erotic way. “If I have a sex dream, I generally have one about this old boyfriend who represents real sex, the best sex,” she said. No need for a psychoanalyst to interpret this dream. “It’s pretty basic,” said the woman, 45, whose husband has a severely flagging libido. “I need more sex than I get.”
Best to enjoy sex dreams when one can. Dreams about sex are rare, according to psychologists and sleep scientists. “The best evidence we have suggests only one in 10 dreams have sexuality in them,” said William Domhoff, a research professor of psychology and sociology at UC Santa Cruz, whose https://www.dreambank.net is a vast library of documented dreams. “A sex dream could be anything from being physically attracted to someone, to kissing or fantasizing.”
Of the 1,221 dreams kept over a period of 40 years by a woman named Emma, about 175 dreams were about “kissing, love or sex.” Out of 900 dreams kept by another woman, only two were sex dreams, said Domhoff. Sex dreams are more frequently reported by men: Their partners are usually attractive women who are strangers. Women usually know their partners and the dreams have a more romantic quality. As women gain more sexual experience, Domhoff speculates, they have more sex dreams. But most sex dreams are frustrated attempts at connection.
“When we look at the emotions in dreams in general, which isn’t much different for sex dreams, 80% are negative, sad, confused or angry and 20% are positive, happy and joyful,” said Domhoff. Take a dream from Emma’s diary: “I am riding a bicycle over deep ruts in a heavy traffic, very dangerous--Shift: We are riding on a ferry. I am with M. [ex-lover] and his pregnant wife. Excited by M.’s presence. But we have no privacy and Edward comes in and I realize I have a husband and child. Feel lost.”
Dreams express our daily fears, wishes and preoccupations, hypothesizes Domhoff, and they act as a record of past traumas, upsets and untended psychological business. This may explain the appearance of old lovers with whom there were once deep connections, great joys and painful wounds.
Of course, some sex dreams are satisfying. One Pacific Palisades woman said one of the best, most vivid sex dreams she ever had featured President Clinton. (For more dreams about Clinton, see “Dreams of Bill” [Citadel Press, 1994, edited by Julia Anderson-Miller and Bruce Miller.) The woman is flummoxed, she said, because it’s Vice President Al Gore, “the cute one,” she has the crush on.
“I was at a political function--and I saw this guy across the room and it didn’t register that it is [the] president of the United States, but it was definitely Bill Clinton,” she said, adding that the dream followed a political rally where Clinton had appeared. “There was major eye-lock--there was conversation. The next thing I knew we were in the garage doing it. It was intense. I was covered in sweat when I woke up.”
The woman’s interpretation of her dream is that she was frustrated over an inability to connect with her husband.
Sometimes sex dreams are not about sex at all, according to Ellen Y. Seigleman, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at UC San Francisco. A sex dream may be about power, a forgotten part of oneself, a wish for a different kind of tenderness or connection with someone we are cut off from, Seigleman said.
On the question of whether to share a sex dream with a mate, Seigleman suggests a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The 45-year-old woman who asked her husband to leave her to her dream would agree. “A sex dream is my own private fantasy,” she said. “They’re mine, mine, all mine. There is absolutely no reason for me to discuss it with my husband.”
And he never asked.
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Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached via e-mail at kellehr@gte.net.
