Summary: The present study reports about the frequency, content and emotional tone of erotic dreams based on dream diary reports of a German college student sample. Four hundred and twenty-five students provided 1612 dreams, of which about 6% contained erotic themes, a figure which is in line with previous research. As for the dream content, kissing was the most frequent erotic activity, followed by intercourse and explicit sexual foreplay. Openness to experience is positively related to the frequency of erotic dreams; neuroticism and conscientiousness are associated with a rather negative emotional tone of such dreams. This supports the continuity hypothesis stating that erotic dreaming experience reflects waking life sexual activity, which is likely to be influenced by these personality dispositions. Further research should extend the knowledge of the aspects and emotional intensity of waking life sexual activity and their reflection in erotic dream content, i.e., whether experiencing unwanted and negatively perceived sexual events are associated with the emotional tone of erotic dreams. To investigate the causality of the relation between waking and dreaming sexual activity and the emotions related to it, an experimental study would be a necessary approach.
Keywords: Erotic dreamsOpenness to experienceNeuroticismConscientiousnessContinuity hypothesisDream emotions
Check also A kiss is not just a kiss: kissing frequency, sexual quality, attachment, and sexual and relationship satisfaction. Dean M. Busby,Veronica Hanna-Walker &Chelom E. Leavitt. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, Jan 31 2020. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2020/02/kissing-frequency-was-strong-indicator.html
Discussion
Erotic dreams occurred in about 6% of the analyzed dreams, with men reporting slightly more erotic dreams than women. The Big Five scale ‘openness to experiences’ correlated positively with the frequency for the appearance of sexual motifs in dreams. As for the dream content, kissing was the most frequent erotic component, followed by intercourse and explicit sexual foreplay. In the majority of dreams, dreamers were actively taking part in the sexual event; those participants solely observing the erotic acts were mostly men. Regarding the emotional component of the erotic dreams, the judges rated the majority of the erotic dreams as emotionally toned (70%) with a small preponderance of positively toned dreams. Moreover, women's erotic dream activities were judged to be emotionally more negative than men's erotic dream activities. The Big Five scales neuroticism and conscientiousness are significantly negatively associated with the emotional tone of the erotic dream.
Before discussing each of the findings, some methodical issues have to be addressed. First, the low number of erotic dreams can cause unrepresentative results regarding erotic content, which have to be confirmed using a larger sample with a broader age range. The study did not focus on specific aspects of dreaming experience and therefore our sample should not underlie any selection bias for erotic topics. Since the majority of the participants were psychology students, the means of the NEO-PI-R scales differed from the norms presented by Ostendorf and Angleitner (2004) leading to higher scores in openness to experiences and neuroticism.
It should also be mentioned that the length of the dream has an increasing effect on the frequency of erotic topics since dream length increases any dream content variables independently of their context or meaning. As Schredl (1999) showed, different content elements (e.g., the number persons or the amount of bizarre or unrealistic elements) are positively associated with the dream's word count. The same effect was found for the analysis of dream emotions, positive as well as negative ones (Schredl, 1999). Therefore, it is crucial for the interpretation of the content analyses to control for the dream length statistically as was performed in this study. In general, the reliability between the raters for dream elements, including emotional tone, was satisfying. For two items, S2 (sexual overtures) and S4 (fore-play), Cohen's κ was considerably lower than for the other categories. It seems much harder to identify these two erotic actions, likely because they are not as explicitly and clearly operationalized as, for example, S5 (actual or attempted intercourse). As a result, it may be harder to interpret findings about these subtypes of erotic dream content.
The ratings regarding the emotional tone of the erotic dreams were conducted by external judges, not by the participants themselves. Since participants might not be comfortable fully expressing their emotions on erotic aspects, they might not record all erotic emotions. Therefore, it is likely for the external judges to underestimate the emotionality of the dream content as reported previously for emotions in general (Schredl and Doll, 1998, Sikka et al., 2014). In consideration of the aforementioned methodical aspects, the findings of this study will be discussed and put into the context of previous research.
The frequency of erotic dreams found in this sample is in line with previous findings in diary studies using college student samples (Domhoff et al., 2005–2006, Hall and Van de Castle, 1966, Nielsen et al., 2003, Rainville and Rush, 2009, Schredl et al., 1998, Zadra and Gervais, 2011). The tendency of men having more erotic dream than women fits with the findings of this study, though the effect size (d = 0.041) is considerably smaller when compared to the mean effect size of the aforementioned studies (d = 0.106). A decreasing gender difference leads to the conclusion that the difference between the findings in older studies as Hall and Van De Castle's (1966) and the finding of the recent study is caused by a cohort effect.
The frequency of erotic dreams is increased for participants with a high score on the ‘openness to experience’ scale. A person scoring high on this scale is described as curious, creative, empathic, and sensitive (Ostendorf and Angleitner, 2004). With regard to sexuality, a person with high openness to experience tends to be younger when having their first sexual intercourse (Miller et al., 2004) and is more permissive with pornography and masturbation (Fernandez and Rodriguez, 2003). High openness to experience is related to a disposition for erotophilia, i.e., he or she generally reacts positively to sexual cues (Natividade and Hutz, 2016). The participants scoring high on this scale reflecting more sexuality in their dreaming experience supports the continuity hypothesis (Schredl, 2003), since being open for experiences in general seems to implicate being open for sexual experiences. Schredl et al. (2003) found that openness to experiences is also positively associated with dream recall frequency, so it is possible for the sample of reported dreams to overestimate the frequency of erotic dreams as there may be more erotic dreams reported by participants with high openness scores. Therefore, dream recall frequency was controlled for in this study.
The content analysis of this sample's dreams differs in some aspects from the Hall and Van de Castle sample (1966). The largest of the differences appears in the frequency of kissing in erotic dreams; more than half of the erotic dreams contained this motif in the recent sample, while it occurred only in 16% of Hall and Van De Castle's (1966) and in 23% of King et al.’s (2009) sample. King et al.’s (2009) study used the Most Recent Dream method, where participants are asked to write down the most recent erotic dream they could recall. In this context, participants might be biased to report explicit sexual behavior and not so likely erotic activities like kissing. As for the comparison with Hall and Van De Castle's (1966) results, no clear methodic or content-related aspect can be identified to cause this divergence.
In order to investigate the differences in erotic dream content of today's college students compared to those in the mid-20th century, it has to be analyzed how waking life sexual activity today differs from that in the late 1940s since waking life sexuality is responsible for the content of dreaming sexuality (King et al., 2009, Schredl et al., 2009). The high percentages found by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) for sexual thoughts and fantasies could not be replicated by King et al. (2009) or the present results. Overall, it is noticeable that explicit sexual events taking place in erotic dreams are more frequent than thoughts and propositions. An explanation for this finding might be that the more explicit activity, e.g., intercourse, is emotionally more intense in waking life compared, for example to kissing, the more often it occurs in dreaming (Malinowski and Horton, 2014, Schredl, 2006).
When being rated for their active participation in sexual events while dreaming in comparison to observing said action, most participants reported themselves directly participating in the erotic events. (Crépault et al., 1977, Crépault and Couture, 1980) showed in his analyses of men and women's sexual (waking life) fantasies that, most of the time, the fantasies included themselves interacting with some part of their environment. This, again, supports the continuity hypothesis for thoughts and fantasies, stating that our waking life thoughts are reflected in the contexts of our dreams (Schredl, 2012). As men dream less often about actively engaging in sexual action than women, one possible explanation might be the frequency of pornography consumption and a higher tendency to engage in voyeurism, which is more common in young men compared to young women (Hald, 2006, Rye and Meaney, 2007). Men could thus be more used to watching others than themselves participating in sexual activity and therefore transfer this into their erotic dreaming experience. It would be interesting to investigate to what extent pornography and the active participation in erotic dreaming activity are related.
Similar to the study of King et al. (2009), erotic activities in dreams were rated by the external raters as emotionally balanced. Both neuroticism and conscientiousness are negatively associated with this emotional valence. A person scoring high on the neuroticism scale is described as anxious, nervous, insecure, and vulnerable (Ostendorf and Angleitner, 2004); with regard to sexuality, men and women with high neuroticism scores show a higher tendency for relationship infidelity, especially in women (Natividade and Hutz, 2016, Schmitt, 2004). Cheating on a partner and participating in sexual activity outside a relationship could lead to more negative experiences, cognitions and emotions about sex, which are reflected in the content of the dreams (Thompson, 1984). In line with this finding, dreams of persons with high neuroticism scores tend to contain more negative emotions such as sadness and apprehension in dreams (Gilchrist et al., 2007).
A person that scores high for conscientiousness, on the other hand, is characterized as reliable, ambitious, self-controlled, hardworking and lives up to moral principles (Jackson et al., 2010, Ostendorf and Angleitner, 2004). Natividade and Hutz (2016) reported a negative correlation of conscientiousness with the erotophilia scale, implicating negative associations with sexual cues and, thus, the erotophobic attitude could transfer into negative dream emotions. It is also possible for a person scoring high in conscientiousness to rate their experienced emotions related to erotic activities during the dream retrospectively, as he or she is more likely to react negatively to that internal sexual cue (Natividade and Hutz, 2016). Apart from that, a person scoring high on conscientiousness is very unlikely to cheat on their partner (Schmitt, 2004). It would be of some interest to measure whether unfaithfulness that occurred in this group fostered negative associations (i.e., guilt) with sexuality that can be reflected in erotic dreams. Just like King et al. (2009), the results of this study do not show a significant effect of the participant's sex on the perception of the emotional tone of erotic dreams. Descriptively however, men's dreams were rated rather positively, fitting with the finding that men tend to initiate the sexual contact while women were more likely to describe the erotic action as at least partly unwanted (Zadra and Gervais, 2011). King et al. (2009) report that nearly 8% of the reported sex dreams contained or mentioned ideas of rape or forced sex; all those dreams appeared solely in women's dreams. Since women have a greater prevalence for being victims to sexual harassment, sexual abuse or rape, the continuity hypothesis explains an incorporation of these negative sexual experiences into dreaming (Blumenthal, 1998, Pino and Meier, 1999, Ullman and Filipas, 2005).
To summarize, openness to experience is positively related to the frequency of erotic dreams; neuroticism and conscientiousness are associated with a rather negative emotional tone of the erotic dreams. This supports the continuity hypothesis (Schredl, 2003) stating that erotic dreaming experience reflects waking life sexual activity, which is likely to be influenced by these personality dispositions. For further research, it would be of interest to extend the knowledge on the aspects and emotional intensity of waking life sexual activity and their reflection in erotic dream content, i.e., whether experiencing unwanted and negatively perceived sexual events are associated with the emotional tone of erotic dreams. In this context, it would be of advantage to let the participants rate their erotic dreams for emotionality themselves as it is likely for them to be more precise in this task than an independent rater. To investigate the causality between waking and dreaming sexual activity and the emotions related to sexuality, an experimental study (Cartwright et al., 1969), such as showing an explicit erotic movie or instructing the participants to engage in sexual fantasies before bedtime, would be necessary. In addition, possible interactions between incorporating erotic material into the dream and openness to experiences could be examined.
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