CNN Health - Sexsomnia: An embarrassing sleep disorder no one wants to talk about.

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A 38-year-old man repeatedly tries to force his wife to have sex in the middle of the night but has no memory of his actions when he wakes up.

A married woman in her mid-20s often tears off her clothing and masturbates but remembers nothing when her partner rouses her.

For a dozen years, a 31-year-old man masturbates while asleep, at times injuring his groin. Embarrassed due to his unconscious behavior, he avoids relationships for eight years.

These are all clinically documented cases of sleep sex, or sexsomnia, part of a family of sleep disorders called parasomnias that include sleepwalking, sleep talking, sleep eating and sleep terrors.

While it may seem as if people are acting out dreams, many parasomnias occur when the brain is not in a dream state, said Dr. Carlos Schenck, a professor and senior staff psychiatrist at the Hennepin County Medical Center at the University of Minnesota.

“These are disorders of arousal,” said Schenck, who has studied parasomnias for decades. “They most often occur during the slowest, deepest stage of sleep, called delta sleep. It’s like an alarm or trigger goes off in the central nervous system, and you go from your basement to your roof in no time flat.

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Sexsomnia can ruin lives
The episodes first began in 2005, according to one woman’s husband. About twice a month his wife would moan sexually and engage in “dirty talk,” words she never used while awake, he told Schenck, who treated the woman and published her anonymous case in 2021.

At times the woman would fondle her husband during the night, and they would engage in sex until she became conscious and accused her husband of forcing sex upon her.

She also masturbated while calling out other men’s names, including that of a male coworker, leading her husband to believe she was cheating on him. However, partners should not assume people with sexsomnia are allowing a secret to escape from their subconscious, Schenck said.

“The sleeping brain is wired very differently from the waking brain,” he said. “You’re not conscious when you’re asleep, so you can’t reach any valid conclusion about so-called lying or truth-telling in your sleep.”

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