to sleep, perchance to dream

Several of our patients have long running feuds with each other. It helps to pass the time I guess. Neither Louella nor Denis are particularly cantankerous but for some reason they seem to rub each other up the wrong way. The animosity between them seldom gets out of hand, it’s usually restricted to muttered insults and the occasional poke with a walking stick.

Louella has been behaving erratically lately, in elderly females this can often be a sign that they are suffering from a urinary tract infection. Last night she apparently “sleep-walked” down the corridor and attempted to get into Denis’s bed with him. An unpleasant altercation ensued involving two sets of dentures, Denis’s glass eye and Louella’s colostomy bag…..

….. Louella is now on remand at the bigger hospital up the road and Denis will be on a pureed diet for the next few days….

This reminded me of a similar story told to me a few years back by a nursing friend from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital

“Mr Buchanan told the Australasian Sleep Association how a patient of his, who was a respectable middle-aged woman with a steady partner, would leave the house while sleepwalking and have sex with strangers.

The woman was totally unaware of her double life until her partner became suspicious and found her engaged in the act.

“He was aware of some sleepwalking and there was circumstantial evidence, including the unexplained presence of condoms around the house,” Mr Buchanan told the conference.

Mr Buchanan ran a series of tests on the woman and diagnosed her problem – sleep sex.

Californian researchers have studied this phenomenon too. Patients who suffer from “sexsomnia” experience  disruptive sexual behaviour in their sleep, ranging from moaning to violent sexual advances.

Researchers looked at 31 cases of sleep-related sexual behavior. They found that 80 percent involved men. Only males engaged in sleep sexual intercourse while females were more likely to engage in “sexual vocalizations.” People of both genders reported incidents of sleep masturbation.

In one case, they reported, “a 28-year-old woman had nightly sexual moaning and sexual fondling during sleep for 16 years that would appear within 20 minutes of falling asleep and disturb the sleep of her husband and children.”

In many cases, he added, bed partners reported unwanted sexual advances by a sleeping person, but sometimes said they didn’t mind the extra attention.