Education - Dreams

Dreams

If you dream that you're having sex with the butcher's wife, or the butcher, or even the butcher's dog-forgive yourself. Sex dreams, including those that may seem disturbingly perverse by daylight, are an almost universal human experience. The late Dr. Affred Kinsey found that about 70 percent of women, and nearly all men, had sex dreams-often so torrid they resulted in orgasm. In fact, a few women in his study (about 5 percent) actually reached orgasm for the first time in their lives during sleep.

Interestingly enough, Dr. Kinsey also found that the better educated his subjects were, the more often they had sexy dreams. For instance, adolescent boys who later went on to college had nocturnal emissions triggered by sex dreams seven times more frequently than boys who never made it beyond grade school. Dr. Kinsey attributed this difference to the greater imaginative capacities of the brighter boys. Feel free, in other words, to consider your next steamy dream as proof of your superior intelligence. Don't forget, though, that even animals appear to have sex dreams. There have been some reports of sex dreams in a cat (with ejaculation), a shrew (with a teeny erection) and dogs. When they're in heat, some female dogs will moan and groan during sleep, and their vaginas will swell and grow wet.

Women’s Dreams Differ

In general, sex dreams aren't as universal, or as frequent, in women as they are in men. Still, more than two-thirds of the 8,000 women in Dr. Kinsey's sample reported having "overtly sexual" dreams, and 37 percent reported having had orgasms during sleep at least once. The women who did dream to orgasm had such dreams roughly three or four times a year, although a handful of his subjects (no doubt the ones with the biggest smiles) reported having dream-induced orgasms more often than once a week.

The content of women's dreams differs from that of men's dreams: In one study of 100 male and 100 female college students, women were more likely to dream about kissing and petting, men were more likely to dream of intercourse. The women's dream lovers were more likely to be someone they actually knew, but for men, the dream partner was more likely to be a stranger. Also, oddly enough, women often considered pregnancy and childbirth dreams to be associated with sex, and one out of seven of these dreams involved orgasm.

The Older You Get, the Better It Gets

While many things about sex seem to diminish with age, women's sex dreams actually seem to increase m frequency as they get older. In Dr. Kinsey's sample, only 2 percent of girls from adolescence to 15 had sex dreams-but among women in their forties (the peak period for sexual dreams), 22 to 38 percent of women reported having erotic dreams. It’s a little sad to note that men reach their peak frequency for sexual dreams in their late teens or twenties - 20 to 30 years before women reach their peak. The well-known sexual mismatch between men and women, whose responses and life cycles seem forever out of synch, is reflected even in sleep.

The Male Experience

Men, of course, are very often left with physical evidence that they've had a sex dream: sticky sheets. Wet dreams, or nocturnal emissions, tend to begin a year or so after a young boy reaches adolescence and reach their greatest frequency during the teens and early twenties. Still, Dr. Kinsey found a huge variation: About 17 percent of boys never have wet dreams at all, while others have them so frequently it becomes a laundry problem-some have orgasms almost every time they wake up, although they may wake up two or three times a night.

For men and women both, it's a distressingly common experience to wake up moments before the climax of orgasm - even though (in the case of a man) the dreamer may actually be ejaculating when he awakes. Dream lovers, like the rainbow's end, seem ever out of reach.

Homosexual Dreams

Sex dreams are a way of discharging physical urges in a safe, harmless way. And experts say that if some of these nocturnal fantasies are disturbing to our waking sense of propriety-like homosexual or incestuous dreams - it's best not to get too worked up about it.

"It's really not that unusual for a heterosexual man or woman to have an occasional homosexual dream," says Robert L. Van de Castle, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist and dream expert at the University of Virginia. "Besides, a homosexual dream may not be about homosexuality at all. It may simply be about learning to love or appreciate oneself."

It's important to pay attention to the feelings associated with sexual dreams to get a better idea about your subconscious attitude toward their content, Dr. Van de Castle says. Do they make you feel alarmed, guilty, aroused? Even if the dreams depict things you might find objectionable in real life, there may be a comforting message about your own sexuality in them.

"'Normal' human sexuality is not just a simple missionary position-only sort of thing - it's much more varied and diverse, and that's reflected in dreams," says Dr. Van de Castle. "To the degree that we find sexual diversity within our- selves, hopefully it can help us appreciate the sexual diversity in other people."

Everything Is a Penis

To hear Freud tell it, of course, almost everything in a dream (and in life) is sexual. In Freud's view, dreams are the fulfillment of some repressed infantile wish - nearly always a sexual one. Since these wishes are usually unacceptable to the conscious mind, the theory goes, the unconscious mind expresses them in dreams in disguised, symbolic form. The psychoanalyst's task becomes one of deciphering the latent content of a dream (its true, hidden meaning) from its manifest content (its overt imagery).

In Freudian dream interpretation, every image that’s a receptacle (boxes, bowls, houses) or enclosing (rooms, tunnels) is taken to be a symbol representing the vagina. So are mouths, cars and eyes. Everything that's oblong or suggests penetration (sticks, knives, umbrellas, pencils or nail files, which suggest rubbing up and down), along with hands, feet and the number three, represents the penis. (One penis plus two testicles equals three.) Walking up and down stairs or ladders suggests intercourse (bouncing up and down - get it?).

The trouble is, not all sex dreams are about boxes or umbrellas - sometimes they're as blatantly, unashamedly sexual as a naked breast. They're not disguised at all. This poses a real problem for Freudians, who are forced to argue that this sort of dream conceals a still deeper, more taboo sexual urge. But "this argument that nothing is ever what it appears to be is very unconvincing to me," says Dr. Van de Castle. "If, according to Freud, all weapons and tools are symbols standing for the penis, then what does it mean when one dreams about a penis? Does it mean that the person is really dreaming about a gun or a hammer?"

Anyway, all their arcane arguments aside, psychologists and dream experts are generally agreed on one thing: If you have a dream that produces an orgasm, it's a sex dream. And anybody can understand that.