At some point, we have all had a sexual dream. Whether your dream was exotic and wild, strange and unsettling, or gentle and romantic, there is a reason why 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 that you may not be dealing with in waking life.” Sure, you may already know that dreams serve as a portal into your psyche, but you may not realize how dark their implications can be.
Often sexual dreams are just a means to understand one’s inner self, 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 subject for discussion.
Sex dreams can be a means to make up for what is missing in real life. To give an example, there was a saint who had given up everything, followed austerity and shunned women. He began to have recurring erotic dreams and her response confused him. A closer look from a counselor revealed that this was his way of balancing his inner and outer selves. The dreams in question were his way of satisfying his sexual needs and yet managing to remain celibate 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 about 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 a picture, 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 they want to own the car – sex becomes a symbol of ownership. If a dreamer dreams of making love with 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 far from her own sexuality.
The way the dream made you feel and its correlation to some incident in your recent past will help you understand the dream and its message.
Sex dreams are as common and natural as physical sex. Such dreams should not disturb us, but should be seen as a call to introspection and a deeper look at what is being represented. Dreams always come in the service of our highest good, at a time when the subject of sleep needs to be addressed. Dreams are our own private therapists. And they don’t cost us a penny.