Of course, you’ve heard of sleepwalking. Maybe you’ve done it, maybe you’ve lived with someone who has, maybe you just watched it happen at a sleepover in seventh grade and never fully recovered. Sexsomnia is the version of that nobody warned you about.The condition falls under the same clinical umbrella as sleepwalking and sleep terrors, classified as a non-rapid eye movement parasomnia by Psychology Today. What that translates to in practice is that people can initiate sexual contact, masturbate, touch a bed partner, or attempt intercourse—completely asleep, no memory of it by morning. Not a sex dream. Not a nocturnal emission. Actual physical behavior, happening while the brain is functionally checked out.It’s more common than most people would think. A 2025 Norwegian study of 1,002 adults found that 10.5% had experienced sexsomnia at some point in their lives, and 6.1% within the previous three months alone. Men were about 1.6 times more likely to report it over a lifetime. Masturbation was the most frequently reported behavior. Completed intercourse was rare. Those numbers are also probably low—people sleeping alone may have no idea it’s happening, and the ones who do know aren’t exactly rushing to bring it up at their annual physical.Some People Have Sex in Their Sleep and Wake Up With No Memory of ItThe brain explanation involves something called “state dissociation.” Normally, the shift from sleep to waking is a synchronized process. During an NREM parasomnia, that synchronization breaks—motor and emotional systems come online and start generating behavior while the parts of the brain handling judgment, memory, and self-awareness stay asleep. A 2026 umbrella review confirmed sexsomnia shares its neurological circuitry with sleepwalking. Known triggers include alcohol, sleep deprivation, stress, irregular schedules, and obstructive sleep apnea. Millions of people check every box and nothing happens—so the trigger list tells only part of the story, not all of it.Diagnosing it isn’t easy. No test can confirm whether or not someone has this. Sleep studies almost never capture episodes because they don’t happen on schedule, so a normal result doesn’t rule anything out. Clinicians work from behavioral reports, partner accounts, sleep history, and ruling out other explanations—REM sleep behavior disorder, sleep-related epilepsy, medication effects. A 2026 clinical review flagged sexsomnia as something psychiatrists need to get more comfortable assessing, not least because the consent questions for a bed partner are real, serious, and not going anywhere.The medicine around this is still being figured out. For the people already living with it, that timeline probably isn’t comforting.The post Sexsomnia Can Make People Initiate Sex While Completely Asleep appeared first on VICE.