There is pleasure in making love in the middle of the night, but there is none when one realizes that he’s the only one awake in that passionate feat.
Though it has been regarded as a mere sexual behavior in sleep in a 1996 research done by Sleep Research, sexsomnia—or a condition in which the person engages in sexual acts while he’s asleep——has had its precise definition broadened after the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry redefined it in 2003 as a subtype of parasomnia and not a kind of somnambulism.
What makes sexsomnia different from other sleep disorders is that it involves another individual. In the perspective of the sexsomniac, he would end up waking in the middle of his sleep while performing a sexual act with another person. This manifestation made many experts believe that this sleeping disorder happens while the person is dreaming and unconscious, which means that a person can only suffer from sexsomnia if he has experienced sex—or “anything sexual” for that matter—be it direct (an actual sexual intercourse) or not (through heard stories and watched movies).
The latter, however, creates a more alarming fact: now that the younger generation is more exposed than at any other time in history to the explicit contents that are available on the Web, there’s a possibility that sexsomnia would soon blight the innocent population of the youth.
Dr. Kamal Patel is a seasoned internist at the Northwest Medical Clinic in Arlington Heights, Illinois who has expertise in treating people suffering from different kinds of sleep disorder. To learn more about his specializations, visit this Twitter page.
