FEMALE SEXUALITY

I wake up in the midst of an orgasm, body shaking, breath coming fast, sometimes moaning. The orgasm spreads through my entire body, and pulls me out of a deep sleep. I'm alone in my bed.

The results of a woman's wet dreams, or nocturnal orgasms as they are called in women, can be more subtle than a man's. I wager the intensity is the same, if not better, however, based on my experience.

If there is a man or woman in bed next to the woman having a nocturnal orgasm, they may wake up to her moans. The shaking of the bed can be another clue. Or she may lift her body up at the point of orgasm, as if pushing harder against the body of a lover. Just because there isn't always an obvious wet spot when a woman has a "wet" dream, doesn't mean it's any less orgasmic.

In many cases, though, the woman can leave a wet spot. In my case, and others, there is lubrication along with the nocturnal orgasm. A true wet dream.

If you're a woman who has wet dreams, you'll know when you have an orgasm while dreaming because it most often wakes you up. Alternately, you realize how wet you are when awakening, and you have a sense of overall well-being. You may either feel satiated or continue to feel excited.

Sex Researcher, Alfred Kinsey, in 1953, found that nearly 40% of the women he interviewed had nocturnal orgasms. We still don't know why it's only 40%, but since Kinsey's method was interviewing, it may be that not every woman who had wet dreams acknowledged them.

Kinsey defined nocturnal orgasms specifically as "sexual arousal during sleep that awakens one to perceive the experience of orgasm."

In other words, you wake up coming. He didn't consider lubrication alone to be a sign of a wet dream, in spite of the wetness that results. Later researchers support that position. It could be that, just as in sex while awake, the woman may lubricate during arousal, but not achieve orgasm.

These nocturnal orgasms in women can, and usually do, happen with no physical stimulation. Blood flow to the genitals increases during REM (dream) sleep, much in the same way it does when a woman is aroused while awake.

Which comes first? The erotic dream or the orgasm?

As usual when it comes to women's sexuality, there isn't enough research on female nocturnal orgasms to know if they are always related to erotic dreams. In my own experience the ones that awakened me have been connected to sex play in a dream.

When there is a sex dream connected to a nocturnal orgasm, we still don't know which came first, the orgasmic response or the dream. Since blood flow to the genitals increases during REM sleep, it might be that the brain interprets that as sexual arousal and provides an erotic dream. How nice of our brains to do that for us if that's the case.

Or it may be that an erotic dream prompts more genital arousal through even more blood flow, which lights up receptors in the brain that create an orgasm. Exactly the way a wide-awake erotic experience increases blood flow to the vulva area and clitoris and creates an orgasm.

Later studies support Kinsey's 1953 report.

A 1986 study by Barbara L. Wells in the Journal of Sex Research, reported that 37% of the women in her sample of fewer than 300 women, had experienced nocturnal orgasm. The predictors she discovered for women who had them were sexual liberalism, positive attitudes about and knowledge of nocturnal orgasms, and waking sexually excited from sleep.

Interesting that sexual liberalism and positive attitudes play a part in which women have, or at least report, nocturnal orgasms. Are dreams less often erotic in women who aren't sexually liberal, and who don't have positive attitudes toward sex? Since that can be true in waking life, it seems plausible.

Testosterone as a contributor to nocturnal orgasms in both women and men

Testosterone appears to play a large part in nocturnal orgasms in boys and men. Higher levels of testosterone in boys are reported to be co-related to nocturnal emissions in studies, which supports all the cultural jokes about tent poles and wet sheets.

How about testosterone in women? As in most things with us women, testosterone production and function are more complicated. To chunk the information down to its simplest terms, we produce the androgens testosterone and DHEA in our ovaries, and androgen receptors help put those to use in our bodies. Part of the way our bodies use testosterone and DHEA includes facilitating orgasms of all types. Obviously, younger women, just as younger men do, produce more testosterone. Younger women produce more hormones overall.

So what causes nocturnal orgasms in older women, especially those who are menopausal and post-menopausal? Those who have nocturnal orgasms in their thirties and forties are most likely still producing an adequate amount of testosterone. Testosterone does, however, reportedly drop approximately in half from age twenty to forty in women.

After the age of forty, all hormone levels continue to drop in women. They decrease to nearly nothing in postmenopause. Does testosterone and other hormone therapy, HRT, increase nocturnal orgasms in older women?

Researchers from Boston University, Susan R. Davis, and Andre Guay, exploring testosterone therapy for women, wrote in the Boston University School of Medicine: Sexual Medicine in 2002:

There is some evidence that testosterone, apart from estrogen, may have a direct function in genital arousal and orgasmic physiology" in women.

Anecdotal evidence says older women do have nocturnal orgasms with or without added testosterone. Women in their fifties through seventies who were not on HRT, Hormone Replacement Therapy, have reported nocturnal orgasms.

So older women not on HRT having nocturnal orgasms is still a mystery. Perhaps older women's wet dreams are precipitated more by the increased blood flow that normally happens during REM sleep. Then their brains create the erotic dream to "explain" the physical reaction to that increased stimulation to the genitals.

I've had nocturnal orgasms both while on HRT and while not. They feel just as good no matter the cause.

My personal anecdotal evidence is that testosterone therapy increases the likelihood of nocturnal orgasm. While previously I might have had one a year or so, I recently had three in one night. Maybe I need to dial back the amount of testosterone, which I'm already using at less than a fourth of the prescription? Or not.

Nocturnal orgasms feel just as good no matter the cause. I think I'll stick with the increased frequency. Ah, "to sleep, perchance to dream."

Sweet dreams.