Dreams with sexual pleasure but no genital arousal?

[Photon]

Greetings!

I'm of the female sex and in cases where I'm at least somewhat asleep and dreaming, and the dream has content that I find sexually arousing, I've observed that I can experience what feels like very real sexual pleasure, and that by either continuing to focus on said content or not, I can either instantaneously end the experience of pleasure or bring it to the tipping point of what feels like orgasm from a brain perspective. When I'm feeling this kind of pleasure, though, even all way up through what feels like orgasm, I will immediately wake up after and observe that, unlike sexual experiences when I'm awake, I don't have any physical symptoms of sexual arousal: no vaginal lubrication, no swollen genital tissue, no tense or contracting muscles, etc.

I've heard of wet dreams, but not "dry dreams", so I was just curious how common this kind of experience is and what the biological mechanisms of it are. Is my brain hallucinating the sensation of pleasure without any of the typical neural input and output signals to the rest of the body? Or would I experience a physical, genital response if not for REM atonia? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye ... eep#Muscle) I was just curious if you had any knowledge about this you could share.

Thank you very much for your time and offering this incredible and very important resource!

[Sam W]

Hi Photon,

Thank you so much for your kind words! The tricky things is that how dreams are experienced, both mentally and physically, varies widely from person to person, so that could easily be what's going on here. And the science of understanding dreams is still full of a lot of different theories and explanations for why certain things happen (this article does a good job of illustrating those debates: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -dreaming/ ). Given that this stuff is tricky for dream researchers to understand, it may be outside the realm of things were really able to help with.

That being said, it is possible to have a very strong sex dream without having a noticeable physical reaction when you wake up, so you're within the range of common possible reactions to a sexual dream.

[Photon]

Thank you very much for the thoughtful response, I appreciate it!

[Sam W]

You're very welcome!