Sexsomnia

This wikilog article is a draft, it was not published yet.

by: Abassos • June 7, 2011 • no comments

Fascinating read about sleep sex, a variant of sleepwalking, by Jesse Bering on the Scientific American website:

Erections, as I hinted at earlier, complicate matters for the judicial system. One notorious case garnering international media attention, and as reviewed recently [pdf] in Current Psychiatry by a group of sleep researchers from The Cleveland Clinic, centered on a 30-year-old landscaper named Jan Luedecke, who drank far too much at a wild croquet party in the Toronto suburbs one night back in 2003 and fell asleep on a couch. "Some time later," explain the authors, "he approached a woman who was sleeping on an adjacent couch, put on a condom, and began sexual intercourse with her." From her terrified perspective, the woman awoke to discover that her underwear had been removed and a glassy-eyed Luedecke was trying to rape her. She pushed him off, ran to the washroom, and returned to find him standing there bewildered. Luedeke, who had an established history of sleepwalking behaviors, was acquitted after University of Toronto psychiatrist Colin Shapiro testified for the defense that the accused was in a dissociative state when the incident occurred and therefore he was not consciously aware of his actions.

h/t Andrew Sullivan