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Female Wet Dreams
Yes, women do have wet dreams. Here’s what to know.
All the wet dream jokes are about men. Probably because the results of their wet dreams are obvious. And messy. If you are their partner, and awake, you see, or feel, the erection. If you are their partner and asleep, you might wake up on the wet spot.
The results of a woman’s wet dreams, or nocturnal orgasms as they are called in women, can be more subtle. Although, if you are the woman’s partner, you may wake up to her moans. If you wake up to her writhing, or even her making dream driven moves on you, that’s actually sexomnia, a sleep dysfunction, and an entirely different situation altogether.
If you are a woman who has wet dreams, you’ll know when you have an orgasm while dreaming because it most often wakes you up. Or you realize how wet you are when awakening. In fact, women often do leave a wet spot for their partner or themselves to wake up on.
Sex Researcher, Alfred Kinsey, in 1953, found that nearly 40% of the women he interviewed had nocturnal orgasms. (1)
Kinsey defined that 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.
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 orgasm or the erotic dream?
There isn’t enough research on female nocturnal orgasms to know if they are always related to erotic dreams. We also 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…
