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Re: Multiple wakeups with erection

Posted by Captin Cannuck on July 03, 2008 at 08:08:20:

In Reply to: Multiple wakeups with erection posted by StayPositive on July 02, 2008 at 18:09:33:

There is a passage in the book "The Promise of Sleep". Apparently in most healthy men, it is very normal that an erection takes place during REM sleep. Also, when you come out of REM sleep, you are in a very light phase of sleep, so your full bladder is enough to wake you up.

The following is a passage lifted from the book "The Promise of Sleep", by Dr. William C. Dement, MD, Ph.D. He is the founder of the AHI scale and also the Chairman of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research. You can see his bio on Wikipedia. This is from the Promise of Sleep and in particular from the chapter titled "The Real Life of Dreams" (see p.294-295).

"During REM sleep, our bodies become parylised...the nerve signals for movement which normally travel from the brain to the muscles are intercepted along the spinal cord and blocked....Besides the heart and lungs, another part of the body is not paralysed during REM sleep: the penis. Normal men always have an erection during REM sleep. When one of my colleagues was asked for the umteenth time, where dreams come from, he answered, "I don't know where they come from, but I think that the erect penis serves as the antenna to receive them". This doesn't really violate the rule about paralysis during REM sleep, since erections are not caused by muscle action but by blood engorgement. Since there is usually an REM period right before waking, men often wake up with an erection. In women, other sleep researchers have found there there is increased vaginal blood flow and clitoral engorgement during REM sleep. The increase in blood flow in both men and women during REM sleep is probably an incidental effect of the activation of the part of the autonomic nervous system that controls heart rate and other involuntary body functions."


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