On sleep related erections

 

It is funny how much of the continent of human biology can be overlooked.

Here’s an example. Men, even brain damaged men, have erections during REM sleep. Women have engorged clitorises and vaginal lubrication during REM sleep. But as Peter Martin puts it in his book on sleep science, Counting Sheep, this fact about our sleep life was not noted by scientists for a “disgracefully long time.” Martin claims that the first observation in a scientific journal about this was published in German in 1941 in an article by Ohlmeyer, Brilmayer and Huelstrung, entitled, banally, Periodische Vorgaenger im Schlaf, Periodic Processes in Sleep.  OB and H did not know, I should say, that the tumescence was connected to REM sleep because REM sleep was only discriminated in 1953. Indeed, the continent of sleep, from the scientific point of view, was not really mapped until the late twentieth century. Interestingly, just as the American continents were discovered and explored by Europeans who were fundamentally contemptuous and murderous of and in regard to the indigenous inhabitants, sleep has mostly been investigated under the aegis that we need to figure out how to do with less of it. After all, work work work is what we should be doing until we drop. Along of course with buy buy buy and fun fun fun.

My own utopia would be one designed to fit our real biologies, so that the people who want 9 hours of sleep – in one form or another – would get nine hours of sleep. In the dysutopia we live in, children soon learn that they must go to be early so they can get up early, since early is when they have to absorb large portions of the corpus of all things to learn. Even your average dog knows this is the wrong way to go about things.

How could the arousal of our members have escaped scientific notice until then? Or even folkloric notice? In Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,   A. R. Ekirch cites a part of Pepys diary:
“Leering husbands, spouses suspected, committed adultery without once leaving their sides. Such visions Pepys cherished all the more dearly during the height of London's Great Plague in 1665. After dreaming of a liaison with Lady Castlemaine ("the best that ever was dreamed"-"all the dalliance I desired with her"), he reflected: "What a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves ... we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this." "Then," he added, "We should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague-time. So suspicious of his visions was Pepys's wife that she took to feeling his penis whi'le he slept for signs of an erection.”
I have my doubts that that suspicion of Pepys’ wet dreams was the sole motive for Pepys’ long suffering wife, but she surely came upon the thing itself, if not asleep herself, while Pepys was REMing. In Sleep Related Erections Throughout the Ages, Mels F. van Driel contends that our history is distorted. However, van Driel has a very expansive sense of evidence. Plato, for instance, is quoted as saying “in males the nature of the genital organs is disobedient and self willed, like a creature that is deaf to reason”, not exactly conclusive grounds for the assertion that SREs – sleep related erections – were studied or known to the Athenians. Much of the article has to do with the knowledge of erectile dysfunction, and erections during sleep, not the invariability of erections and vaginal arousal during sleep – a much different thing.
Neurologists have traced the control of male and female SRE to the same part of the brain that controls yawning: the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus where, like the officials in Kafka’s Castle, the neural bureaucrats are continually dealing with stimulus and output as the paper piles up on their desks and they themselves fall asleep or wonder about how they got there and where they are going, pushing buttons all day, the frontal lobe, now that is where its at, those neurons have it so easy, where is the secretary and who is the boss and are they all going to see God someday – to give you some idea of what is going on in there.
Myself, I am interested in the fact that “sleep-related” seems to grammatically subordinate sleep to sex. But what if the direction of subordination is the other way, and sex, that waking pleasure, is really a form of sleep? And all of us are simply vehicles for the Great Sleep – or to quote Schopenhauer: 'It is Maya, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller from afar takes to be water; or the stray piece of rope he takes for a snake'.
All those stray pieces of rope, all the sleepers in bed, or outside of bed, joined in the universal hypothalamus, sleeper cells all of us, reproducing to expand the kingdom of sleep, not that we  know it – this is at least as plausible as any waking explanation of universal ends.