Let’s Talk Sex Dreams
Gettin’ busy behind closed eyelids.
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At 4:45 AM this morning, my alarm clock acted as a brick through the window of a sex dream so vivid that the sudden change between that and being awake sent me ricocheting off reality like a piece of shrapnel.
It took a moment, but as I adjusted to the real world again a viscerally deep sense of disturbance poured like a deluge over the bits of adrenaline and hormones bouncing around my body. This unease was based solely off the fact that, after so many years of not desiring physical intimacy in any way, shape or form, this marked the 3rd sex dream I’ve had this week. And I’m starting to wonder what the pissing hell is going on, seeing as I’ve put deliberate effort into sealing that particular animal instinct of mine shut for good and ever. And now, for no discernible reason, it’s been opened like a tomb and yawns wide, full of need and unfulfilled desire.
It is not a secret that I don’t like sex. This aversion acts as oil spilled down the hillside of my eating disorder and contributes to the reason I will probably never manage to be free of it. With food and nutrition comes the inevitable return of sex drive and menstrual cycle, two things that I successfully starved out of my body years ago and have not missed one bit.
You would not believe the amount of money I’ve saved on tampons.
Prior to that feat, I would deem myself normal to high on the sex drive gauge. I specifically remember a period of about 6 months after I first had sex at age 18, during which I was perpetually ashamed of myself due to a significantly higher motivation to “do the deed” than my boyfriend at that time. Looking back now, I realize this was only because he was so woe-fully bad at it that I was just never given what I needed. Not to mention his raging porn addiction.
Even had I known these things at the time, I was young and naive, and the distinct difference marked by the gap in our sex drives was one of the great shames in my life. You can imagine my relief when I was finally able to not feel it altogether.
All this is to say: I haven’t missed it. There were moments over the years when the normalcy a proper desire for sex would have made life easier for me, but now that I’ve given up on dating entirely and am content to just watch movies every night with my cat, its just not a topic my mind broaches very often.
Until this past week, anyway.
Whenever I feel a twinge of physical desire somewhere in my body, alarms start going off in my head before I even realize what’s happening. This is primarily due to years of being conditioned to believe the following:
A desire for sex translates into too many calories. Too much nutrition off which my body can feed, grow, and come back to life, so to speak. A sex drives means the body has more energy than it needs, and is therefore turning the calories I do give it to cellulite, a shameful substance that is used to fuel shameful parts of being human. And sex is one of those parts.
This current relapse of mine runs deep. I’m an 82 pound, barely functional cave-thing that exhausts from a mere trek across the parking lot. These new dreams of mine are the last thing I expected to be bothering me at this time.
Especially because the dreams themselves have been so vivid and specific, something I hadn’t experienced even when I was living in a normal, healthy body.
The unconscious trysts are uniform in nature — my most recent featured grocery shopping at the Wegmans adjacent to my old high school, and a 6-foot-something Scandinavian man who’s giant frame dwarfed my own 5 foot 5 inch stature. He approached me in the makeup aisle and said my cat had pretty eyes, so I took him outside and fucked him silly in the passenger seat of my old Taurus.
All I can remember aside from that is the feel of rough hands on my sides and the genuine amazement over the fact that this human being was actually attracted to my scrawny lizard body.
The other two dreams were the same: I was shopping, the guy was always supernaturally tall, and my body was as it is in reality - all hairy and frizzy because I don’t take the time to shave or condition my hair anymore, my skin all crunchy from cold air and that general Ugly that runs in my DNA.
In previous such dreams, my body would always be different — more shapely, more attractive, more confident in the way I hold it.
But now? Now I’m the same alien lookin’ basic bitch I am in real life, and I just don’t care.
Which, once I’ve sat with all the shame and disturbance the concept of sex itself triggers in me, is actually quite refreshing.
I’ve spent the last year and a half learning to build a life for myself despite my mental illness. Rather than thinking in all or nothing, recover-or-die terms, I’ve instead learned that this disorder of mine is something I will grapple with forever. And unless I manage a way to live “normally” despite it I’m going to end up living in a box when I’m 35.
I can’t say I’ve been doing a very good job at that for the past 2 weeks, but I digress. Lets not open that particular can of fuckery.
Destined for a box condo or not, these changes have offered me a modicum of independence as an adult and a way to look foreword at a future that may not be as horrible as it was originally.
With this kept in mind, maybe that’s what the dreams are trying to convey — that its possible to live my life despite the disability that keeps slapping me down like a cat with one of those hairy, bloated house flies.
While I’m a cynic when it comes to hippie dippie, literal psychology and everything that entails, I do find myself trying to interpret my dreams. Partially because I really do believe they (sometimes)reflect our desires/issues, and partially because mine have always been so vivid and detailed.
Which is a long way to say that I don’t really think these dreams have anything to do with sex at all.
Contrary to my initial assumptions, I believe that its all just something my brain relates with a normal lifestyle. And putting me into the act of physical intimacy, with a body accurate to reality, is a subconscious reminder that this relapse of mine will not doom me to be abnormal unless I let it.
That’s what I want to think it means, anyway. So that’s what I’m going with.
Take from this what you will, but I’m led to believe that our minds are constantly working behind the scenes in ways we’re unaware of — mine is still fighting to keep me fighting, even if I feel like I’ve given up on the surface.
And again, because I take every opportunity I’m given to preach this to the world:
Do not give up on yourselves just because of your mental illness. Do not take anything at face value, and do not fall for the myth that these things are black and white.
It is always possible to build a life worth living around your mental illness.
Sometimes you just need some weird sex dreams to remind you of that.
