At some point, we have all had a sexual dream. Whether your dream was exotic and wild, strange and haunting, or gentle and romantic, there is a reason you had this particular dream at this particular time.
“Sex dreams reveal your desires and anxieties,” says Gillian Holloway, PhD, author of Erotic Dreams. “Your subconscious uses these raw, lustful situations to work out emotions you may not be facing in waking life.” Sure, you may already know that dreams serve as a portal into your psyche, but you may not realize just how dark their implications can be.
Often sexual dreams are just a means to understand one’s inner being, desire or even passion, which is absent from the conscious level of the mind due to external factors such as repression. In our society, the biased perspective on issues of sex makes it a taboo topic for discussion.
Sexual dreams can be a means to make up for what is lacking in real life. For example, there was a saint who had renounced everything, followed austerity and shunned women. He began to have recurring erotic dreams and his response confused him. A closer look from a counselor revealed that this was his way of balancing his inner and outer being. The dreams in question were his way of satisfying his sexual needs and yet managing to pursue celibacy in real life. Applying morality to dreams would, of course, be unfair.
These types of dreams can also provide the dreamer with a neutral space where she can go beyond her inhibitions and overcome her fears regarding sex or certain behaviors. Certain behavioral changes that a person is skeptical about adopting in waking life will sometimes manifest in dreams, and in most cases are a precursor or sign of changes to follow.
Sex dreams are rarely literal. Although you might expect last night’s dream about you and Drew Barrymore to be a precognitive dream, a vision of future events, it probably isn’t. Sex dreams, and most dreams, are metaphors, or perhaps similes, and highly symbolic. They give you an image, an image, of what a situation is like or how it can be compared. If, in your dream, you feel pressured to have sex, take a look at your waking life and see where you feel pressured or by whom.
You must remember that dreams must be understood in their context. If a person dreams of having sex in a car, it could imply that he wants to own the car – sex becomes a symbol of ownership. If a dreamer dreams of making love to a stranger in an unknown place, this may be suggesting that she is looking for something new to introduce into her relationship, or that she is detached from her own sexuality.
How the dream made you feel and its correlation to some incident in your recent past will help you understand the dream and its message.
Sexual dreams are as common and natural as the physical sexual act. Such dreams should not disturb us, but rather be seen as a call to introspection and a deeper look at what is being enacted. Dreams always come in the service of our greater good, at a time when the subject of sleep must be addressed. Dreams are our own private therapists. And they don’t cost us a dime.