Specialty Sleep medicine | ||
Sleep sex, or sexsomnia, is a condition in which a person will engage in sexual activities while asleep. This condition falls within the broad class of sleep disorders known as parasomnias. In extreme cases, sexsomnia has been alleged, and accepted, as at least a part of the cause of sexual assault, including rape.
Contents
The proposed medical diagnosis is NREM arousal parasomnia – sexual behaviour in sleep. Sexsomnia is considered a type of non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) parasomnia. Sexsomniacs do not remember the acts that they perform while they are asleep.
Sexsomnia can co-occur alongside other sleep disorders such as sleepwalking, sleep apnea, night terrors and bedwetting and can be triggered by stress, previous sleep deprivation and excessive consumption of alcohol or other drugs. Sleep related epilepsy may be associated with sexual arousal, pelvic thrusting and orgasms. Sexsomnia episodes may be triggered by physical contact with a bed partner.
Sexsomnia, which is a fairly new medically recognized behaviour, has been used in criminal defense cases of rape.
History
The first research paper that suggested that sexual behavior during sleep may be a new type of parasomnia was published in 1996 by three researchers from the University of Toronto (Colin Shapiro and Nik Trajanovic) and the University of Ottawa (Paul Fedoroff). The term "sleepsex" was used in a 1998 case report by David Saul Rosenfeld, a neurologist and sleep specialist from Los Angeles. The term 'sexsomnia' was coined by Colin Shapiro in a case report published in June 2003.
Psychology
Sleep sex may accompany relationship difficulties and feelings of embarrassment. Often the actions of the person who has sexsomnia are reported by his or her partner as the sexsomniac is unaware of the event.
Clonazepam has been used as a first line of treatment for this condition, when other measures are not enough to solve a case of sexsomnia.
Popular culture
Sexsomnia, although unknown to much of the population, is evidently present in much of daily pop culture. The medical drama television series House included an episode dealing with sexsomnia in its first season, "Role Model", in which a woman who claimed she was not sexually active mysteriously became pregnant and found hickeys and other marks on her body. The titular character, Dr. House, eventually diagnosed the woman as a sexsomniac, explaining her strange situation. The condition has also been featured in episodes of many other television shows such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit season 9, episode #2 "Avatar", and Desperate Housewives Season seven, episode #2, "You Must Meet My Wife". It has also been a theme in novels and plays. In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, a farmer claims to have had sex with his daughter while asleep. In the play Yakish and Popcha by Hanoch Levin, Yakish manages to have intercourse with his wife Popcha only while both are asleep, by the end of the play.