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- Your body may have urges that need to be fulfilled "whether
or not you're awake."
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- A small but sizable percentage of men have sex while
asleep and have no recollection in the morning, experts say, just as sleepwalkers
prowl around their unlit homes and sleeptalkers have surreal conversations.
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- "I had a number of patients who realized that a
lot of their lovemaking was occurring while they were unconscious,"
said Dr. David Saul Rosenberg, in an interview from the Kaiser Permanente
Medical Center's Sleep Clinic. "One patient's girlfriend noticed while
they were making love that he was snoring."
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- Rosenberg documented the case in a study in the Archives
of Sexual Behavior, placing "sleepsex" in the category of parasomnias,
a broad group of sleep disorders that also includes bedwetting and teeth
grinding. Like sleepwalking, sleepsex is an arousal disorder, referring
not to sexual stimulation but to a breakdown in the barrier that divides
consciousness from unconsciousness.
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- Sleepsex is "much more likely to occur when there's
sleep deprivation and alcohol," said Dr. Mark Mahowald, director of
the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. "Those are very potent
triggers."
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- Stories to Tell
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- There has been little research into the pervasiveness
of sleepsex, but Rosenberg estimates that perhaps 1 percent of the population
has seen it first hand (he has yet to find any women who are sleepsexers).
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- "You can be assured that it's much more common than
people think," Mahowald said. "Nobody talks about it ... it's
not the sort of thing you bring up at the neighborhood cocktail party."
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- But even though the statistics are lacking, it's not
hard to find people who have stories to tell.
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- "I remember getting molested mid-sleep by a boyfriend,"
wrote Allison (not her real name), 27, in an e-mail from her job at a Wall
Street investment bank. "I kept pushing him away because I was dead
asleep at 3 in the morning. Eventually he stopped ... we didn't have sex,
just touchy feely. I made fun of him in the morning, but he didn't remember!"
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- "I woke in the darkness to feel him gently grasping
for me," wrote Hayley, an editor from New York who experienced sleepsex
once. "At first I thought he was just adjusting, but then I figured
it out. I spoke to him, amused and pleasantly surprised, but he was silent.
It was like he was on a mission." The next morning, her boyfriend
had no recollection of the event, she said.
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- Acting Out
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- The man described in Rosenberg's study, published in
the Archives of Sexual Behavior, was initiating sex with his (conscious)
partner "generally once a night, seven nights a week," with the
sex "lasting as long as 30 minutes" through a variety of positions.
The man was much more sexually aggressive when asleep, playfully biting
her and "talking dirty" " behavior his partner requested
he continue in the daytime.
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- "It would be easy and tempting to say that sleepwalkers
and sleepsexers are acting out behaviors that are suppressed by their conscious
minds," Mahowald said. "But there's just no evidence to support
that " even though the things they do are often very out of character
with their waking personalities."
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- Sleepsexers may be acting out the dreams they are having,
he said. The phenomenon doesn't seem to occur in rapid eye movement (REM)
sleep, the phase where many dreams occur, but people are also able to dream
in non-REM sleep.
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- But if sleepsexers aren't fully dreaming yet aren't completely
awake, who or what is in charge of the body?
-
- "Their unconscious or subconscious," Rosenberg
answered. "It's hard to say who's running the show. It's a split:
One part of your mind is turned on, and one part is turned off. That doesn't
sound very scientific, but that's basically what's going on."
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- "We know that sexual arousal can be automatic in
sleep," said Dr. Allan Hobson, director of Harvard University's neurophysiology
lab and author of Sleep. "Low-level brain mechanisms, like those critical
to sexual intercourse, are activated; higher functions - like judgement
and memory - are disabled."
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- So, the next time you awake to your mate's amorous advances,
better pinch him or her - just to be sure.
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