Lust Life: Erotic Dreams

My ex’s new girlfriend is seducing me. She pulls off my pants and plunges into my crotch. Other women appear out of nowhere, and suddenly I’m surrounded by a harem in my ex’s room. I am about to cum when he shows up, pissed. “But she seduced me,” I say. “Don’t you want to share?” Strangely, I only want her, not him. I leave them and go to a public restroom where I start masturbating with my back to the door. Still no orgasm. So I fly to my grubby apartment (not my own, more like a house), where I go into the bathroom and stand facing the door, masturbating while a pot-bellied light-skinned black man with dreadlocks spanks me with a leather strap. I think about her with every slap. It’s arousing, but I don’t want to cum this way. “Go,” I command. He packs his stuff and walks away with the paddle hanging ostensibly over his back. “Hide the paddle!” I scream inaudibly. He insists no one will notice. Before he’s even off the property, he crosses paths with the brunette who seduced me. She walks up, and we embrace in the front yard. “Was he pissed?” I ask. “Yes, but …” she stops her words with a kiss.

David Lynch scenario? No, just something I dreamt a few nights ago. Normally my erotic dreams are not so graphic; they’re usually not even sexual. They tend to be vaguely erotic, where I’m rolling around with someone but no sex is happening, or I’m pursuing someone who keeps eluding me or I’m running through a field in vintage clothes à la “Little House on the Prairie,” feeling the need to pee. Any one of these scenarios may produce the same result: on the cusp of awakening, I orgasm. Yes, it’s true—I’ve experienced this often since an age when I hardly knew what an orgasm was. No manual stimulation, just waking up to waves of pleasure. I thought I was an anomaly of my gender, but according to the Kinsey reports, nearly 40 percent of women have nocturnal orgasms by age 45. And recent studies conclude that unlike the wet dreams of male adolescence, women’s erotic dreams peak after 40. I’m ahead of the game.  

I’m also beyond hormones and age, sinking my erotic insight into more intriguing dream relativity. If you’re not having sex in your life, you’re probably having it in your dreams. At the same token, if you’re a very sexual person who never complains about not getting laid, sex is most likely a primary preoccupation of your slumbering self. I’ve been having a lot of overtly erotic dreams lately. What does this mean? I’ve been out of town for a week and away from my lovers. Since I haven’t been actively seeking erotic experiences on my trip, I’ve been getting off in my dreams, erotic dreams that mostly involve women. What would Freud have said about that? I have unfulfilled Sapphic desires? I’m a repressed lesbian? In love with my mother?

The women who enter my dreams are usually inventions of my dream-self, celebrities or fictional characters. One night I went from Shane in “The L Word” to a 1940s motel, lying in bed with Lolita. Does this mean I have a major crush on Katherine Moennig? Yes. Does it mean I desire pubescent girls? No, although I can’t deny that a youthful-looking lass often appears in my fantasies. This dream was of the vaguely erotic sort in which sex is implied, but not clearly experienced. In my vaguely erotic Nabokovian dream, I played several roles: Lolita lying on the bed with her skirt up, Humbert Humbert hovering lasciviously at the bedside, myself as a witness a few feet away. Before I woke up, I became all three characters at once, experiencing the thoughts and sensations of each one in a transcendental trinity of desire, fascination and taboo. 

Move over Freud! Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt therapy, deemed that all characters and elements in dreams are aspects and projections of the dreamer. Incidentally, the dream reminded me of a past relationship with a man who was 19 years my senior. Although I was much older than 13, I felt like a sort of Lolita with him, and we often made joking references to Lo and her aging paramour. When the relationship started to fall apart, I perceived him as Humbert Humbert: an older man losing himself in me, trapped in his thwarted desire to possess someone un-possessable. 

So am I also my ex? His temptress of a dream girlfriend? The pot-bellied man with the paddle? There are no right answers in the ambiguous art of dream interpretation, only suggestions. Regardless of meaning, erotic dreams can be a source of profound pleasure, especially if you consistently remember them. Waking up with an orgasm is one thing, but to awake in the haze of a story you created, involving characters with shifting identities, feeling what they feel in their hearts and loins and then some, is a little bit like magic. Imagine … no hands! Just go to sleep and surrender, dear reader, to the seduction of a dream.

View, rate and review my vaguely erotic short film “Julie and the Clown” online at http://films.thelot.com/films/25597