Your sex dreams explained

What the heck did I just dream? The morning after my nocturnal escapades, I’m so astonished that I can hardly pick my jaw up off the floor. I’m just fascinated with the wild storylines my brain concocts while I’m sleeping – something that’s especially true when it comes to dreams of the spicy variety. It’s rare that I understand why I dream such dreams, so I ask expert Dania Schiftan what erotic dreams really mean and how best to deal with them.

Dania, how does having a sex dream at night differ from daydreaming about sex?
Dania Schiftan, sexologist and psychotherapist:
Daydreams are almost conscious scenarios – fantasies, basically. They tend to be closely linked to current situations. Common fantasies include threesomes, sleeping with a co-worker or having sex with someone from the gym. When daydreaming, we allow sides of ourselves to come to life that we otherwise wouldn’t show, or would only show to a limited extent. For instance, if you’re shy, you might display a dominant side in your daydreams. They’re roles we transport ourselves into. However, as is the case with our nighttime dreams, daydreaming about something doesn’t mean we want to live out the fantasy in real life.

So how seriously should I take my sex dreams?
You shouldn’t attach too much importance to sex dreams. They’re not equivalent to suppressed desires. Sometimes we really are attracted to the people we dream about, but not necessarily. So if you dream about doing something, it doesn’t mean you want to do it in real life.

Or that I’m actually physically attracted to the person I dreamed about ...
Right. We evaluate our dreams with our waking mind, so we look at them through the lens of our moral and ethical principles. As a result of this, people quickly ask themselves, what’s wrong with me? We do, after all, dream about things that disgust us when we’re awake. Things we’d never consciously fantastise about.

Sounds like internal conflict.
Not necessarily, though. You’ll only question yourself like this if you’ve ascribed meaning or judgement to the sex dream. If you look at it with a bit of distance, however, you can be grateful for the dream, smile and think, fascinating what my brain’s capable of.

Does that mean my brain’s nighttime creativity can be useful to me while I’m awake?
If you give yourself the permission and freedom to do so, you can enjoy that loss of control of your mind, irregardless of the images your brain conjures up in your dreams. After all, you dream about things that you might never experience in reality. In everyday life, we constantly try to control our thoughts and feelings, which can feel restrictive. Dreams create space for you to let loose. To just be. That’s a beautiful thing – and a break from everyday life.

What does this say about a person’s sexuality?
The ease or surrender you experience in your dreams can enrich your sex life. You might discover a wild or gentle side of yourself you’ve never experienced outside of your dreams. A side you might want to discover while awake. In that sense, dreams can be compared to visions, the aspects of which you can incorporate into your reality as you please.

Provided I can remember what I dreamed about...
Very few people can actually do that, especially when it comes to entire storylines. The memory of our dreams evaporates very quickly after we wake up. Instead, it’s more likely to be smells, feelings, images, individual moments, a tingling sensation or damp, sticky underwear that remain with us once we’ve woken up.

At what age does our sexuality first manifest itself in our dreams?
That’s not really clear. We feel pleasurable sensations in the genital area at a very young age, but it’s hard to say when these begin to appear in dreams. Boys’ bodies, for example, develop a life of their own during the night once they hit puberty, and they ejaculate.

So are wet dreams to blame for that?
It actually tends to be the other way round. It’s not the dreams that trigger a physical reaction such as arousal, it’s our bodies that make the first step. The head then follows and creates fantasies, thoughts and images to match. So it’s the body that leads the way.

Why does it do that?
Nocturnal erections form part of the body’s typical control mechanism to keep its tissues healthy. Adult men have up to six erections per night, something which can be measured using specialist equipment. If someone says they can no longer get an erection, these measurements are used to try to determine whether the issue has a physical or psychological cause. This is because people are usually more relaxed while they’re asleep. If the measuring device records an erection, the next step is to find out together with that person why they can’t have one while they’re awake.

What about women?
In my practice, women regularly tell me that they can’t have orgasms, but that they sometimes have them during sex dreams. I find that very interesting as it shows that our body and brain develop a life of their own during REM sleep. It’s a time during which other parts of the brain ramp up their activity. Suddenly, things that people can only do with difficulty in their everyday lives, become possible.

For the last 15 years, Dania Schiftan has been working as a sexologist and psychotherapist from her own practice in Zurich. She also works as a psychologist for Parship. You can find out more about Dania and her job in this interview:

You can find all the other articles in this series here: