Studying dream content using the archive and search engine on DreamBank.net: Sexual intercourse in dreams

Studying dream content using the archive and search engine on DreamBank.net. G. William Domhoff, Adam Schneider. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1238-1247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2008.06.010

3.3. Sexual intercourse in dreams

Although dreams and sexuality are often closely related in popular culture, perhaps in part due to Freud’s well-known theory concerning the hidden sexual meanings said to be present in most dreams, systematic studies of dream content suggest that there is very little explicit sexual content in dreams. In the Hall and Van de Castle (1966, p. 181) normative sample, only 12% of male dreams and 4% of women’s dreams had as much as a sensual thought or a romantic kiss.

Since our past research suggests that a relative handful of terms are usually used by adults in reporting their sexual activities in dreams, it is possible to attempt generic searches for references to sexual activities in dreams. Such searches will miss some references to sexual activities, and will pick up some false positives, such as ‘‘we decided not to have sex,” but the baselines and samples that are obtained are nonetheless useful for studying sexuality in dreams. The most useful terms for this purpose include the past and present tenses of ‘‘making love,” ‘‘having sex,” and ‘‘kissing.” Exact terms and euphemisms referring to sexual organs also can lead to references to sexual interactions. In studies of long dream series from individuals, it is possible, and indeed essential, to tailor the sexual references word string to include pet terms and idiosyncratic phrases, thereby making the searches even more encompassing.

For purposes of this paper, the focus will be on the frequency of sexual intercourse because terms like ‘‘kissing” and terms for sexual parts lead to many false positives. (The word string used in his study to find references to sexual intercourse can be found in the Appendix A.) When the various tenses of ‘‘making love” and ‘‘having sex” are searched for in the same dream reports that Hall and Van de Castle used to create their normative findings, the results show an even lower frequency of references to sexual intercourse than that found with the Hall and Van de Castle’s coding categories: 2.0% for men (vs. 3.4% in the Hall and Van de Castle normative sample) and 0.4% for women (vs. 1.0% in the Hall and Van de Castle normative sample). However, this result does provide a cross-validation in that the frequency of sexual intercourse is very low and men have more mentions of sexual intercourse than women according to both methods.

As was the case with religious and spiritual elements, the search for sexual elements provides a sample of dreams that can be studied for themes or patterns in sex dreams, from which we learn that sometimes the sexual activity is interrupted by others or is rendered problematic in the dreamer’s mind because the partner is an unexpected one. The findings from this search also raise the same general question raised by the findings on religious elements. Why is thinking about sexuality more pervasive in waking thought than it appears to be in dreaming?