A TO Z OF SEXUAL HISTORY: W – WET DREAM

A wet dream is basically a freebie: a gift from the orgasm fairy. After all, what could be better than waking up in the night from the sheer force of ejaculation? However, in earlier eras, rather than being the sexual equivalent of a surprise party, they were considered the work of the devil, who squeezed out your semen in a fight for your soul.

There is a Sin Scale, with gangbanging grannies somewhere near the top, and having the occasional wank in the more forgivable spectrum. However, religious folk have always struggled to know where to place the wet dream; there is no act of volition and they are seemingly random. The majority of times I have woken cumming in my sleep I don’t even remember what I was dreaming about, so wouldn’t take kindly to being held responsible for whatever cornucopia of filth was in my sleeping head.

Nonetheless, the hands-free orgasm was often seen as a sign of moral laxity. John Cassian, a 5th century monk, described them as “a sign of some sickness hidden inside… it exposes the hidden fibres of the agitations that we have collected by feasting on harmful thoughts all day long.” An allowance of a thrice-annual emission was given to men, but any more than that would mean you were basically sucking off the devil every night. Demons—who were angels fallen from heaven with the weight of their lust—were blamed for wet dreams. They seduced you in your sleep because, like drunk girls, that’s when you put up least resistance. An incubus is a male demon who “lies upon” girls, and a succubus is the female equivalent who “lies beneath” men. Women were most prone to demon molestation as they were feeble of will and mind, and it was often used as an excuse for “unexplainable” pregnancies. The monks struggled to account for how a demon, being non-human, could impregnate a girl. They came up with this dizzying theory: as demons are transsexual (!) they would take the form of a succubus to collect semen from men during their wet dream, after which they would turn into an incubus and use the stolen sperm to impregnate women. Demons were also blamed for nuns’ penchant for hanky-spanky.

During the height of witch-hunting mania in the 16th and 17th centuries, a witch’s most alarming trait was fornicating with the devil, which brought the female erotic dream under particular scrutiny. Pope Innocent VIII took the matter into his own hands, proclaiming, “It has come to our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid having intercourse with demons, incubi and succubi.” He went on to explain how this witchery would “suffocate, extinguish and cause to perish” pretty much everything we cherish, and if that wasn’t bad enough, wet dreams would “impede the conjugal action of men and women.” So, basically, shagging demons in your head was bad because it stopped happy men and women getting laid. Two German witch-hunters used this edict as justification in their Malleus Maleficarum, aka the witch-hunting handbook to go about burning horny women around Europe.

There has been lots of silliness involving what is fundamentally a rather pleasurable contraction of genital muscles. In order to fend off wet dreams, Graeco-Roman doctors recommended sleeping with a lead plate in contact with one’s testicles or having sex in the dark to avoid mentally registering lust-provoking visual images. The Umeda of Papua New Guinea had a much better attitude towards the whole conundrum. They went to sleep drenched in scented magical perfume, in the hope of a slew of spontaneous orgasms.

CAMERON KING