Depression Talk

If you don’t like the image of Keith Olbermann here, trust me — I could’ve picked something worse. Count your blessings. Yes, I’m still being vistied by Dream Keith and probably will so until the guys I usually have erotic dreams about decide to put a stop to it.

Are Erotic Dreams Normal?

You could have an ice-cold shower right before falling asleep and you probably will wind up having an erotic dream. This doesn’t mean that you are going crazy or are any more sicko than the next person. It is because your nerves have fired in your genetalia. This normally happens when you are asleep. It seems to be the brain’s way of exercising your sexual organs to keep it in shape for the real thing.

This also seems to happen with the fight and flight response, where your brain exercizes your body’s chemical mechanisms to deal with various dream dangers. Perhaps it’s like a fire drill just to make sure everything knows where to go in case of an emergency. But this can produce some pretty horrifying dreams.

And then sometimes you get both systems firing together, making erotic nightmares or nightmarish erotic dreams. Even in the dream, the more you try to fight it, the weirder and more peverted the dream tends to get.

What If The Dreams Are Better Than Real Life?

The problem that I have with erotic dreams is that they are often a lot more interesting, vivid and pleasureable than real life. This can make me feel hopeless, despondent and not wanting to ever get out of bed. I have had one therapist suggest that the Prozac is stimulating some intense dreams, but I’ve had a rich and weird dream life since the womb, so I doubt it’s the Prozac.

It could be the depression. When you’re battling depression, there’s always a little voice in the back of your head saying, “It shouldn’t be like this. It could’ve all been so much better had you not made so many mistakes.” When you wake up from a really good dream (erotic or not, Keith Olbermann included or not), it is as if you got a taste of freedom and then were slammed into a prison cell again.

Try to celebrate your imagination rather than make comparisons between your waking life and your real one. Try to savor the moment to find the pleasures there in front of you rather than overlook everything that doesn’t exactly match your dreams.

And eat a lot of chocolate.