A not-so-wet dream has me pondering both the predictive power of our sleep-time show-time,
And the waning power of my libido
Wet dreams are of course most readily associated with the hormonal holocaust of adolescence. When a fortysomething like myself wakes up in a damp patch it’s far more likely to be an early visit from the incontinence fairy. But, though they are something of a rarity for me in these days of my dotage, I will admit to still waking up from time-to-time to find that I’ve shot my load in my shorts.
The trigger is always the same; a dream in which I’m having sex which suddenly feels partly real, in which the mental division between pure fantasy and physical sensation short-circuits and pretty quickly jolts me awake. Not always though, quickly enough.
Wet-dreams are rare enough to have just some novelty value for me now and I’ve been round the block far too many times to be embarrassed by them. They’re somewhat “as-per”.
Only I recently had one which was not “as-per.” A wet-dream in every single respect bar one, a sexual dream which suddenly seemed real and jolted me awake, only it wasn’t a wet dream but a dry one.
I didn’t come in reality because I couldn’t come in my dream.
Can come
I’ve never had this problem in real life (no, honest!) I get sex far too rarely to be in any way jaded by it and I’m a long, long way from pestering my quack for some Viagra or one of its bathtub variants. Hell, I’m still working on stopping myself from finishing too soon, let alone not being able to finish at all.
Which makes me wonder where this dream came from (no pun intended). Our dreams are a by-product of how our brains work; using its night-time down-time to take stuff from its inefficient short-term memory and mapping it into its long-term memory. It’s a process where our mind hunts for patterns, rules and relationships between our entire life’s experiences and the events, preoccupations and worries of our immediate experiences. It throws up some bizarre images, but when you look into the few you might be able to hang onto the following day you can usually find some logic and sense to them if you dig deep enough.
So, as a man not especially preoccupied with my aging, not suffering from an obviously waning libido, who’s only problems with sex are getting it and keeping it going long enough to have a chance of getting more of it, and who hasn’t had any recent conversations with friends about sexual inadequacy or read about it or seen films or TV shows relating to it, I am at something of a loss to explain why I would be dreaming about humping a hot eighteen year old for two straight hours and tapping the mat only when she’d fallen asleep and wouldn’t know that I didn’t get off.
Where the hell did this come from?
Unfortunately I can only find one credible explanation.
And it isn’t a comforting one.
Won’t come
More romantically disposed people than myself (i.e. idiots) may believe in a certain mysticism surrounding dreams; that they can predict the future or that they hold messages for us from beyond this world. To a realist like me this is total horseshit. Dreams are a by-product of our experiences, both near and far. They may reflect back to us aspects of our reality that we’re consciously ignorant of, and in this regard they can surely have some value, but they are firmly rooted in who we are as a person and where we’ve been as a person.
I hit puberty in the eighties, well before the sex-everywhere days of near-pornographic music videos and easily accessible Internet smut that we live in now. When I hit puberty, I was totally and utterly naïve; my knowledge limited to a single sex education lesson at high school that I didn’t remotely understand.
Yet, before I detected puberty happening to me and well before any experiences sprung from it to fuel my dreams, I was nonetheless having sexualised dreams. I didn’t understand why I was suddenly obsessed with girls and fantasising about seemingly bizarre situations with them, yet I was. My dreams became sexualised before I consciously became sexualised myself.
Don’t come
So it would seem then that our dreams do reflect more than just our experiences; they reflect our nature and our instincts too, even before we’ve acquired any experiences from following those instincts. Dreams can’t predict the future in the crystal ball sense of that phrase but they can act as harbingers of the future by reflecting changes in the natural life-phase we are in, even if we don’t yet know we’re in it.
If so, if this is a case of a dream that is ahead of the curve, I hope it’s a long, long way ahead of it!