No doubt many of you, if not most, have had a dream of falling. “They” say that if you actually land in your dream, hit the ground in a messy and fatal way, you’re destined to die, which is a pretty safe bet eventually. In reality, most of us wake up before we have to put that adage to the imminent test. I’m happy with that. Similarly, those super scary dreams where you’re being chased by a zombie, psychotic killer, chain-saw wielding doll come-to-life, wild animal, and you wake before being dismembered and eaten? All good.
Where I part company with the sudden awakening from a dream is where you are in a clinch, as no one says anymore, with an object of your deepest desires and things are getting steamy and squirmy good. But then baam! Before the happy event can unfold as you so wish it would, you’re awake and breathing heavily, to no avail. Sorry, Jeremy Allen White; maybe next time.
As Tom Jones so succinctly put it in a recent post, why, why, why???
Well, guess what! There are hundreds of people all prepared to tell you why, although not specifically about the sex dreams; they tend to focus on all the others. I, however, will break new philosophical ground with my own hypothesis and you are all here for it.
There is no shortage of research into, and theories about, why we sleep. Adjacent to it is theory about the purpose of dreams. We know, for example, that 70 percent of our dreams occur in colour but don’t know why, or why the rest are monochromatic. We know most vividly recalled dreams are the ones which happen just before waking and we know REM and non-REM sleep has very different patterns of activity in the brain.
We also know dreams are like disconnected short stories, rather than chapters in a book, but we don’t know why we go back to that high-school hallway not wearing any pants, over and over again. No doubt it’s a state of anxiety which has rooted itself in a particular time and place where one could, literally, die of embarrassment.
But what is it all for? Antti Revonsuo, in a 2000 paper, speculates that high-stakes dreams might serve as rehearsals or threat simulations. His notion is that dreams serve a biological function in evolutionary psychology. The same might be said of sexual encounters, sort of an undressed rehearsal.
18 years later, G. William Domhoff very politely took the Swede to the cleaners, looked at that theory and largely disproved it noting that the frequency of dreams which feature deceased loved ones obviously has no anticipatory or rehearsal value, and that there is no evidence of implicit learning or learning transfer from what is experienced or witnessed in dreams. He also debunked the notion that young children learn new skills through their dreams by documenting that children’s dreams don’t reach adult proportions until age 9 - 11.
Domhoff was much more persuaded by the neurocognitive theory of dreaming which studied dream journals but also brain damaged people whose REM patterns changed dramatically. Many of them stopped dreaming altogether.
The neurocognitive theory says that dreams are a kind of unconscious mind-wandering rooted in our waking wishes, concerns and realities. He notes, wryly, that virtually no one dreams about the larger political landscape, pipeline routes and construction, or tariffs, but rather sticks to what is familiar: cooking and eating, going to work and, most frequently, interactions with loved ones who are gone. Sexual dreams comprised less than 8% in his study. Colour me surprised.
Freud, of course Freud, theorized that wish-fulfillment in dreams is deliberately incomplete, that our own brains censor the desire without delivering on it. I don’t know that our unconscious is quite that PG14 focused, nor does it care about the ethical parameters of those who sleep and dream but thank you, Sigmund, for once again beating us with the naughty stick.
Dream researchers who have looked at the incomplete action phenomenon posit that high-arousal scenarios which truncate before climax, have a built-in escape hatch. In other words the arousal itself causes you to wake up. You/I wake because the tension is peaking, and not after it resolves. Damn.
Ernest Hartmann’s book Dreams and Nightmares (1998) speaks to something he calls the “contextualizing emotion”, the idea that dreams are built around emotions and not narratives so the emotion is simply to be felt rather than the story needing to be completed.
Last year’s Sleep Study looked specifically at sexual dreams as a relatively mysterious aspect, but they didn’t get around to looking at the unfinished business dimension. Ironic.
Sexual dreams represent an underexplored dimension of human consciousness [1]-[7]. Although dreams in general have received extensive psychological study, comparatively little is known about their sexual forms—how often they occur, what they contain, and how they relate to emotional and physical well-being [1]-[7].
Dreams provide a rich source of insight into our deepest thoughts, fears, and desires [1] [2] [10]-[17]. Sexual dreams, in particular, may reflect one’s psychological state, emotional needs, and societal influences [1] [2] [10]-[17]. ].
Michael Schredl’s study of erotic dreams essentially says that your dreams reflect your waking life preoccupations. He found men dream erotically more often than women, and that the frequency of erotic dreams decline as we age.
No overview of this topic would be complete without wet dreams. Alfred Kinsey’s mid-century surveys found orgasm during sleep, what he termed “nocturnal dreams to climax,” was common, especially in younger people. This means the story does complete sometimes, not necessarily connected to an erotic dream but is, rather, physiological at the source. A more recent study (1983) focused on lucid dreaming, where some people are aware they are dreaming but experience the dream nonetheless. They wanted to see if sexual activity during REM lucid dreaming would show up in physiological responses they could test, such as EEG, respiration, heart rate and vaginal pulse amplitude. No idea what that is but hope mine is in range. Sure enough, the body responded to the dream inputs BUT this was in the case of lucid dreaming, not something most people experience.
Other studies have tallied up sexual dreams with physical arousal: although full or partial erections occur in 80–95% of REM periods, (depending on age and other factors) only 12% of men’s dreams contain sexual content. It’s certainly not a straight-line correlation, even more mysterious.
Bottom line: my question of why sexual dreams fall short of completion does not have a dedicated research stream. If it did there are contributions to be made by the physiologists studying REM sleep and bodily indicators, and the neurologists who claim dreams are just an extension of what we think about while awake.
It would appear to me that the body does what it does in the night and the brain picks up on those subtle cues and turns them into full-fledged dream experiences, but it also pulls the rug out at the most inopportune moment. If it’s about feeling the experience rather than completing the narrative, we’ve all got a shelf of sexy books with the last chapter torn out.
On the other hand, so much of pleasure is about anticipation so maybe we’re getting exactly what we need.
The brain is a tease, specializing in staging desire and not satisfying it.
I would love to know what you think and what you’ve experienced.
So many possibilities for musical selections but I couldn’t subject you to the largely 80s hair and outfits so opted to go back further to a classier era.
Until next time, sweet dreams! Don’t fall. And if you do, don’t land.
PS — Substack has added an annoying AI purity test so you can tell who is writing their own posts. The tool they’ve chosen has been proven to be easily misled so it’s hardly reliable, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I found when I ran my post through the grinder.
Such a relief to know I’m fully human; sometimes I do wonder.
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