Have you ever had some weird dreams? Maybe you’re back in middle school, or you find yourself on the top of a mountain, or your teeth fall out? Dreams are complex and the way our subconscious minds works is mysterious, and tough to understand.

The exact meaning of our dreams is largely a mystery. But there are many schools of thought on dream interpretation, and there is a lot we can learn from our nighttime reveries. Your mental, physical, and emotional health can creep into your dreams and make them do strange things. Plus, when your dreams get sexual, you can wake up with a lot of confusion, and maybe even a little arousal.

So let’s skip the No-Doze and face our sexual Freddie Kruegers head on! Here are some things your mind might be trying to say to you while you’re sleeping.

What’s up with sexual dreaming?

So you just had a sex dream. There’s no need to panic! It happens to most people who can easily recall their dreams. In fact, a study by the University of Montreal found that approximately 8% of dreams involve some sort of sexual activity. Chances are, the dream wasn’t really about sex at all, and it instead represents an underlying feeling you have that you might not be entirely aware of. 

The way that you personally feel about sex also affects what it means when it shows up in your dreams. If sex is a scary thing for you, then it would make sense that it presents in your nightmares. If sex means love and romance for you, then your subconscious probably uses it as a tool to explore happy scenarios. 

Good Sex Dreams

If it was a good sex dream, there’s a chance that you have some admiration or desire to connect with the subject of the sex dream on a deeper level. In waking life, sex boils down to attraction and feeling good. Your subconscious mind takes those positive feelings and recreates them without the influence of the ego to complicate what the sex actually means in real life.

Bad Sex Dreams

But sometimes, you might have dreams where you are stressed about sexual intimacy. If you are shamed in your dream, someone denies your advances, or you’re caught in the act, that may speak to a deep seated shame you may be feeling about your body, your sense of self, or the relationship you may be in or pursuing. 

The way that you personally feel about sex also affects what it means when it shows up in your dreams. And sometimes, your sexual dreams can stem from trauma. If you have a complicated relationship with sex, not all your sex dreams will be positive or strange, they’ll be downright re-traumatizing. It’s important during this time to wake yourself up, and tell yourself it isn’t real. By doing therapy during conscious hours, or evening going to a hypnotherapist or a psychologist who specializes in dreams, you’ll be able to get back to having sexual adventures on the beach with the man, woman, or dancing snake in your dreams. 

Let’s get into a few sex dream specifics.

Taboo Rendezvous

Are you dreaming sexually about your teacher? Your brother? Or your aunt? Your dead dog Sparkles?  

These ‘taboo’ dreams may indicate that there’s something you need to figure out with this person. Your brain is repairing neural pathways at night, so sometimes it’s firing at ‘random’ along all the thoughts you had that day. Maybe your brother helped you out earlier that morning, and your brain is firing ‘thank him’. It’s entirely possible that your dream self started to thank him a little too much!

These dreams can feel awkward, but know that it doesn’t mean that you’re actually sexually interested with that person. It could be something as simple as you saw them that day, or even something deeper like you really miss them and want to talk to them more. 

Abstract Dreams

Have you ever had this relatable dream – you wake up. You’re a peacock wearing a cape, and you fly to the moon and have a tantric sexual evening with a cartoon of eggs, and you wake up and the bed is soaked? 

Probably not, but I’m sure you’ve had a dream or two that was totally surreal and way to weird to wrap your head around. Sometimes your sex dreams can be abstract too. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy, it just means that you are probably looking to discover something. Maybe your subconscious is traveling to other worldly realities in search of clarity? You might be stuck in your current job or your current relationship and you’re looking to break out. You’re needing something spontaneous, and your body is telling you to try something new. 

Soaked

Sometimes a sex dream is so good that it ends in a wet dream, or a flooded basement. It’s when you have a dream that causes you to involuntarily ejaculate or orgasm in your sleep. This is totally normal. If you have a penis, you already naturally have several erections a night. If you don’t ejaculate regularly, sometimes the body will expel the excess and will do so by triggering a sexual dream. It’s like that old adage – if you don’t use it, you will unconsciously use it at night probably while visiting your parents. Wet dreams can also occur due to hormonal changes, or even something as simple as sleeping on your stomach. 

Lucid Cream

Now this is an advanced technique. Have you ever been in a sex dream and realize that you can control everything in the dream? You can run your hands down that famous pop star’s body and then invite them into your spaceship?

This is called lucid dreaming. It’s when you become aware that you are dreaming and can control your own actions in your dream with your conscious mind. There have been a ton of studies about how to harness lucid dreaming, and one of the easiest ways is to create a trigger. Something as simple as telling yourself ‘whenever I dream about sex, it is a dream.’ By realizing in your dream that it is a dream, your brain will sometimes hand you the reins to act out your deepest sexual fantasies.  It takes practice to learn, but the payoff is well worth it. 

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Dreams can tell us a lot of things, but like a lot of things, there are no hard and fast rules with dream interpretation. Take note of the things that apply to you, and not the things that don’t. Everyone’s brain is a unique and complex machine and no two people’s subconsciouses will interpret information in the same way.

So sleep well, and may all your sex dreams cum true!

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Lumi Park is a writer, foodie, and Capricorn, from the cornfields of Ohio. He once won a NYC bartending award, a Brooklyn-wide comic book Trivia Bowl, and went to nationals two years in a year for the sport of jump roping. He is oddly not competitive.