Sexual Fantasy as Dream Work

Finding the story in search of an ending.

“Your fantasy life is the ultimate secret code. Your prevalent fantasies reveal your deepest needs because a good fantasy states the problem and offers the solution.” Esther Perel

“We all live in a story in search of an ending.” NT Wright

A couple nights ago I took a walk with two buddies by an apartment complex on the edge of town. The fog and the dark obscured our view, which put us all on edge. For awhile, no one said a word. We rounded the corner of a building and saw a couple of men coming down the hills by the dumpster. And they were armed. We had no choice. We had civilians to protect in those apartments. So I jumped out and shot at them. And my comrades sprang on the rest. Whoever survived got the message and fled. And though a harrowing few minutes, it was an absolute rush. It actually felt good.

And then I woke up in a sweat, troubled by a dream in which I’d just killed a group of men. That good feeling faded to guilt. And I began to question my heart. Like, what murderous rage am I harboring? Am I some closet violent man at heart? I felt so suspicious of myself. I laid there and just breathed. And then I remembered I’d watched a couple Ukraine war news videos right before bed. Yeah that set the stage. But the emotional intensity told me there must be more to such a vivid dream.

I tried to key in on the primary emotion I felt in the dream. It was not rage. It was not even fear. We never really saw the guys we shot at since it was dark and foggy. So it never focused on any gore, nor did we actually see anyone die. Nor did I feel any pleasure in the killing. But what struck me most was the thrill of having comrades, something even deeper than friendship. We had a mission, a noble cause, to protect innocent people. These were brothers in arms. And that connection felt so incredible and enlivening in the dream. This was meaningful work together.

To my surprise, this dream was not about my suppressed murderous rage or secret aggression. No, this was a dream about my loneliness.

That tracks. It’s been a season of lots of work, lots of family demands, and lots of missing my friends. Yes, I’ve missed fishing and concerts and coffee with them. But I’ve missed adventures and mission together even more.

Loneliness was a story I did not know my heart was holding. In other words, I didn’t go to bed thinking about my loneliness or my desire to hang with friends or do meaningful work together. I probably sat overwhelmed thinking about the days next tasks. But once given the chance to relax, for my working mind to go offline, that’s what bubbled up. My suppressed loneliness. A plot I didn’t know I was carrying.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Hidden Plots

Biblical scholar NT Wright once said, “We all live in a story in search of an ending.” Nothing has captured my experience of life more than that line. Life is full of so many competing stories. Our career path, our faith journey, marriage and parenting, even the check engine light that just came on. All these little plots grip us with so much dramatic tension. Will our children pass that test today or survive the bully at school? How in the world did that marriage fight happen again? What’s wrong with the car this time? Or what does that cryptic text from loved one mean? We live life hoping, dreaming, and longing for resolution in them all. Yes, all part of the larger story of God’s redemption of the world. But all unique in their plots.

Trauma is a story in search of an ending too. Trauma disrupts life as we know it and introduces a new unimaginable, terrifying, and painful plot. We can think about trauma in many ways—nervous system overload, attachment loss, evil attack, abuse of power. It’s all those things. And yet, in all those things we want one thing: Resolution. We are dying inside for a better ending. We get locked into hoping that parent apologies or that person who abused gets justice or the tension in our bodies unties or that shame and self hatred leave us alone. Even though the event is over, we still want the dramatic tension to untie.

Most of us don’t get quick resolution for much in life. Which means our bodies hold a lot. And sure, much of it does fade. We can fix a car or sleep off a bad day. But some does not resolve and only grips us deeper, especially our trauma. We may succeed in getting it out of our minds (explicit memory), but not our lived experience (implicit memory). It goes underground. The plot gets infused in our bodies, our attachment style, our nervous system, our immune system, our spiritual life. “The body keeps the score,” says Bessel Vander Kolk. Or as Chuck Degroat says, “The body keeps the story.”

Bottom Up

Life does not feel like a story most of the time. Honestly, we probably don’t think about life’s plots all that much, from our bad day to our marriage fight and especially our trauma stories. These plots operate in the subtext, in our subconscious. What’s most top of mind for us: What needs to be done next? Where do we have to take the kids next or what bill is due this week? We live in the tyranny of the urgent most days. Do the next thing. We push our bodies into tasks. We work, we clean, we drive, we get in our heads.

We bring the story to our bodies. And we don’t make room for our bodies to talk back.

And then something bubbles up from our subconscious, our gut, our body reactions and we realize more is going on than we knew. We clap back at our spouse for saying something that felt like a dig. We discipline our child with way too much energy. Something tangles our plans and we crater inside. We burst into tears at a song in the car or a movie or a video we scrolled and not have the faintest clue why. Or like me, we wake form a dream (or a day dream) that haunts us with a forgotten memory or baffles us with its wild symbolism.

Or we may act out sexually and have no clue why we stumbled down the rabbit hole of porn, feeling as if it came out of nowhere. In sexual fantasy, we let our bodies talk back to us. Our subconscious comes out to play. We let ourselves disconnect from the task at hand and feel our desire for rest or relief or sensuality or pleasure or play or comfort. Sexual fantasy can be so entrancing for this very reason.

Sexual Fantasy as Artwork

Sexual fantasy is a form of art. Like our night time dreams, our subconscious drags up buried stuff from the palette of our day, our story, our body and heart. Sexual fantasy is a backdoor into your attentive mind. Sexual fantasy can be healthy and lead you to really innocent and alive parts of you. Or it can be something that scripts your lust and haunts you. You may think it’s bad art or harmful art, but you must treat it as meaningful (“full-of-meaning”) or you will never understand yourself.

Compulsive sexual behavior, like porn use, may not feel like a creative act but you are still making choices by what you type in your search bar and what you click on. I read a report that one popular porn site has over 700 years worth of continuous video content. That is staggering. And so, like a choose-your-own-adventure book, every user writes a story with his clicks, following subconscious fantasies. Why did that video appeal to you instead of another?

It’s common to think of sexual fantasy as “dirty thoughts”and call pornography “dirty.” Even the term “smut” originally meant dirt or soot. I don’t believe this is helpful. A wandering mind can lead to sexual lust and sin for sure. But I don’t think sexual fantasies should be treated as dirty. That gets way too close to dismissive and shaming language. You are a sinner, yes. But I have never seen someone come alive by burrowing deeper into shame. Being wrong is different than being dirty. Jesus has washed us white as snow. We do not need to keep being washed though we do need to keep being convicted.

I relish these words from Jay Stringer:

“Despite the overwhelming grip of shame and guilt, I do not believe that sexual fantasies are something to condemn. Sexual arousal is one of the greatest gifts God has given us, and we do not need to spend a lifetime annihilating it. And although some sexual behavior is abhorrent and should be discontinued, addressing sexual struggles through the lens of the abhorrent behavior intensifies shame and shame drives us deeper into the very behavior we wish to stop.”

How this works

To address unwanted compulsive sexual behavior, we must treat sexual fantasy as dream work. Remember, sexual fantasies are a form of art. And as such, they need interpretation and reflection. Hear again these exceptionally wise words from Esther Perel. “Your fantasy life is the ultimate secret code. Your prevalent fantasies reveal your deepest needs because a good fantasy states the problem and offers the solution.” A problem finding a solution is a story in search of an ending. But it’s encoded, like a riddle. What are we trying to resolve from our day, our marriage, our life, our childhood wounds?

Here are a few guiding questions to crack the code and solve the riddle of your fantasies. Invite God into your curious exploration with you.

The first question I would ask: What is my context right now? Start in the present. What is the setting, geography, time and place, situation that this fantasy or struggle is hitting me? Where am I right now? What is going on around me and within me? Usually that begins as a present day tension in your life or your body. And most often it begins outside of sexual arousal. We get triggered or stressed or disrupted in our daily life. It could be the external setting, something in our world or physical space or schedule. It could be relational strife or life drama. Or it could be your internal geography. What is going on inside of you? Are you lonely, tired, hungry, anxious, excited, bored, hurting? Try to name present tension.

As I wrote in my book, I am convinced that all sexual acting out rituals begin as body dysregulation of some sort. And rather than face that emotional pain, we hot wire our sexual arousal system to get release. Sexual release feels like resolution (we call it a climax after all). But we don’t get the story resolution and healing that we long for in life. And that story is what we need to explore. My nighttime dream was not about murder and rage. It was about loneliness. And while the dream revealed my loneliness, it did not solve it. I had to own that loneliness and do something with it in the light of day. We need to do the same with sexual triggers.

The next question follows: What’s the storyline of this fantasy? Now we bridge to the past. See everything as potentially symbolic. This is art, remember. What is the symbolism in your fantasy? What is the plot of the pornography you watch? What do you type in the search bar? What did you click on? What did you not click on? How does it play out? Bring your conscious attentive mind to the plot. You are looking for clues back to the buried unresolved stuff of your life and story.

This plot will begin to give you clues to our arousal template. As I said in my book, sex always lives in a story. It’s not simply a bodily function. Its storied. The sexual arousal cycle even parallels a story arc. The only story your sexuality can thrive within is the Lover’s story—of romance and committed love. So we hunt for what other story has hijacked your arousal template.

The last question may be the most difficult question: What is most arousing about the story? This can feel very scandalous. And potentially very triggering. So reflect in a safe place for yourself. This will help us imagine a new future. You need to get curious about what feelings are invoked in you through your fantasy. Explore what part feels the most pleasurable. Or conversely, what are the turn offs? Does that turn on have an association to your own story? What does this reveal about what I really want (beyond simple sexual release)?

Finding out your fantasies may be reenacting your past trauma is a huge mood killer. After doing this exploratory work, one man told me, “My fantasies suck! I really need new ones.” Well, yes, that is the point! You are beginning to reclaim your pain and desires and longings so you can choose a more healing path into the future. You won’t be stuck reenacting your pain in lust or porn. My hope is that all of this returns you to the only story your sexuality was meant to live in: Love. And that you begin to dream and imagine a better life and even healthy sexual fantasies.

Some Brave Stories

Clear as mud? Let me introduce you to two men and their brave work of exploring. I hope this guides you as they lead by example.

Work as a high powered attorney often left Zach churning with stress. He found that a quick porn break in the late afternoon in his day took the edge off and let him get back to work. He hated this habit and felt it competing against his love for God and his wife. As he explored his context, it felt cut and dry to be about body stress. But as we explored together more about his story, the time of day became a clue. He remembered that as a boy he always came home from school in the late afternoon to an empty house. Such was the life of a latchkey, only child to a single mom. She would call to on her work breaks to check in, but he had to take care of himself, do his homework, make himself dinner, and sometimes put himself to bed.

And then I watched his face turn ghost white when he acknowledged that the theme of his porn use often centered on the “neighbor next door” affair plot. He remembered how he often wandered up and down his street after school searching for someone to play with, often without success. Yet he recalled the face of a teenage girl that would talk to him from time to time. He liked her smile. But he remembered too how she often shared sexual stories of the sexual things she’d done with her boyfriend. She brought comfort to his lonely, neglected heart while her sexualization tied him in the bind of pain. And that bind of sexualized comfort is what he began to untie in therapy.

Another man, Theo, came to me to get rid of his own porn use. In our beginning sessions, he jumped right into the brave work of exploring and discovered that his fantasy always focused on older women. One day he sat on my couch and announced, “I’ve had an epiphany!” He told me that at a recent trip to Starbucks, he a noticed a beautiful older woman in a conversation with a friend. He could acknowledge her beauty without temptation to lust.

He decided this would be a safe moment to let himself be curious and explore his arousal. So he moved to a table outside, pulled out a journal, and started writing. What did she stir in me? Am I really wanting sex? As he let the fantasy play out, all he could picture was being held by her. Not sex. It struck him, in all his fantasies, he was craving touch—mothering touch—not sex. And down the rabbit hole of his story we went and found a boy whose mother had said I love you but rarely offered affection. That was the story waiting for him to heal.

Problems seeking solution. A story in search of an ending. May God be with you in your patient brave curiosity.

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