A woman spoke on the American podcast titled Healthy-ish and there she told an intimate secret that she has with her husband. According to her, her husband suffers from sexsomnia. This means that your partner is having sex while you are still asleep.
“I was fast asleep and I thought he was too. But all of a sudden he started getting flirty with me. I tried to talk to him and asked him what was going on, but he didn’t answer me. Then I realized that he was unconscious and when I mentioned to him what happened that night the next morning he didn’t remember anything at all,” the woman told Healthy-ish who preferred to keep his name anonymous.
However, she stated in the same interview that her sex life has improved and that her relationships in this state have been successful. “If we’re in a good mood, what’s the harm?” Said the happy wife jokingly.
As published by New York Postdespite the fact that sexsomnia is a very rare state, it really exists. In an investigation involving 16,000 people and which sought to find and collect data on this type of disorder, only 17 reported having symptoms of suffering from it.
Sexsomnia in cases of rape
The Stephen Lee Davis case occurred in 2011, a 43-year-old man accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in the UK caused a sensation at the time by the verdict. Davis was found not guilty because he suffered from sexsomnia, a sleep disorder that mainly affects middle-aged men and causes them to have sex while they are asleep, without their being aware of it.
Although the medical tests proved that the young woman had been raped, the jury agreed with the defendant, who claimed not to remember what happened. Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Center and founder of the British Sleep Society, defended Davis in the lawsuit and showed that he was a victim of this strange pathology related to sleepwalking.
Despite the fact that Davis’s case brought the issue of sexsomnia back to the fore, his is not the first that has come to light. In 2005, Canadian Jan Luedecke experienced a similar situation after a night of drinking. The man, 33 years old at the time, fell asleep and ended up in bed with a woman he had just met and remembered nothing the next day. Luedecke was arrested for rape, but managed to regain his freedom when it was found that he suffered from this sleep disorder and had no control over his sexual behavior.
Normally, people who suffer from sexsomnia have a history of having experienced other types of sleepwalking. In addition, their predisposition to these alterations has a genetic origin, that is, they acquire it by inheritance.
However, there are also other factors that can increase the risk of suffering from it. “Chronic fatigue, alcohol and drug use, stress, lack of sleep, and physical contact with a partner in bed can cause this disorder to appear,” he explained to WEEK Michael Mangan, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire and author of the book Sleepsex: Uncovered.