Have you ever woken up from a sex dream about someone who is very much not your partner? It’s weird, to say the least. You feel oddly guilty even though you were completely unconscious. So you make coffee, say absolutely nothing about it, and move on with your day while secretly questioning why the hell that happened.
A 2021 study published in Dreaming found that 95% of participants had experienced sexual or erotic dreams at some point. Amerisleep got similarly horny numbers in a separate survey of 1,000 adults: 59% said they’d dreamed about sex or intimacy. Twenty-one percent had dreamed about cheating, while 23% had dreamed their partner was the one doing it.
So if you woke up wondering whether your subconscious has personally betrayed you, you’re most certainly not alone.
Sex Dreams About Other People Are More Common Than You Think
The 2021 study also found that who appeared in the dream wasn’t totally random. People who had sex more frequently, felt happier in their relationships, and reported stronger sexual desire were more likely to dream about their current partner. People in newer or less satisfying relationships were more likely to dream about an ex. That’s not especially fun information to take in as you open your eyes, but a dream is just a dream. It doesn’t have control over or give clues to your actual relationship.
Psychologist Dylan Selterman at the University of Maryland has spent years studying what happens after people have these dreams. His research found that sex dreams, including ones involving somebody outside the relationship, were associated with more intimacy the next day among highly committed couples. In relationships that were already struggling, infidelity dreams were associated with less love and closeness the following day.
Selterman told NPR that someone in a strong relationship might wake from a sex dream about another person and think, “I definitely don’t want to do that in real life,” then put a little extra effort into connecting with their partner.
So, what happens after the dream might be more telling than the actual dream.
Other therapists take a more symbolic approach. Jungian interpretations, for example, might treat sex in dreams as a way of representing different sides of the self coming together rather than literal desire for whoever happened to be naked in the dream. Registered psychotherapist Mark Shelvock wrote in Psychology Today that “a sexual dream can function as a kind of self-portrait, quietly working something out without our ego’s permission and editorial input.”
Most sex dreams can probably stay in the “well, that was weird” category. If the same person, situation, or feeling keeps returning, though, you might want to sit on that for a minute.
The post Why You Keep Having Sex Dreams About Someone Who Isn’t Your Partner appeared first on VICE.
