(NSFW) Why do men get morning wood and wet dreams?

To be honest, I’m not even sure about this, as a male. I just roll with it. :P But I know that if you masturbate or have sex frequently, you won’t have wet dreams, so it seems to suggest that men just have to ejaculate every now and then (sexual tension, build up of semen, etc.) and if you’re not going to do it voluntarily, it’ll happen involuntarily as a wet dream.

As for morning wood, I have no idea, although I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_penile_tumescence

Semen builds up and has to be released. Morning wood is just a coincidence. Men get erections through out the night (I don’t know why) and if you wake up when that’s happening, you notice and call it morning wood.

I’m not sure why, but I can tell you if you’ve been drinking heavily the night before it doesn’t bode well when you need to pee the next morning.

I just know it gets more prevalent when I don’t masturbate or have sex.

Can I say I don’t know? I kind of suspect it’s just one of those random artifacts of evolution. I don’t believe in the clean out crap. That’s just guys trying to get a blowjob. I think it’s just a part of being male. You have sex on your mind all the time. Even when you’re asleep.

Except for the guys who don’t.

@wundayatta: Personally, I don’t really believe that it cleans you out because I have orgasms in my sleep all the time which is unnecessary for me to clean myself out. Oh well, we may never know.

@KatawaGrey Men tend to not have sleepgasms if they regularly get off.

I may be making assumptions… :|

@wundayatta Yes, it’s all to get blowjobs. Everything is to get blowjobs.

Simple… not enough sex!

An erection is a penis that is relaxed. So, it sees appropriate that one would have a relaxed penis in the morning. I have never had a wet dream though, but arousal is purely mental. A stimulated penis is only stimulated because the brain reads the signals sent from the nerves as so. So, a dream could simulate such stimuli, causing one to blow load in the sheets.

The user manual that came with mine says it is to prevent atrophy and keep the product fresh.
That is also when testosterone peaks. It makes it difficult to pee on cold winter mornings.

As a side note, guys that have had prostate surgery and lose all the nerves that control the equipment are told to use a vacuum device regularly to prevent permanent atrophy.

Morning wood can be caused by a full bladder pressing on nerves which are associated with erections. It’s where the term piss-proud comes from.

I remember reading somewhere that the erections that come and go throughout the night are just to keep the blood circulating while one is sleeping. (I think it went into more detail than that, but that’s the jist of it.)
And I know my son’s penis gets hard when he has to pee, so maybe that’s why men often wake up with them.
And yes men have to ejaculate because it builds up and their bodies have to get it out just like they have to get the waste out.

It’s a myth, @krose1223, that it has to be cleaned out. It gets reabsorbed just fine. If it didn’t, what would happen to those with vasectomies? What would happen to those, like me, who were born without a vas deferens? Would our balls swell up bigger and bigger until they burst when they got to be the size of basketballs? That’s just plain absurd. It’s something some guy told you so you’d take pity on him and “help” him out.

LMAO @wundayatta !!

Exactly! It falls in the same category as “blueballs!” : )

@wundayatta @CaptainHarley Of course it helps keep fresh stuff there. When I had my vasectomy I was told it takes 6–8 weeks before I was shooting blanks but sooner if I orgasm frequently. I did not test potency so I cannot personally verify the truth to that claim.
However, after I had my prostate biopsy I was told that it takes 4–6 weeks or several ejaculations to clear out the blood in my semen. The first few shots after my procedure looked like I was squirting motor oil – like something from Aliens. Scary. It got better and better with each shot.
I did not try the abstinence sexperiment .

LOL! @worriedguy

I know exactly how you felt, bro! It took several weeks of recovery from my prostate biopsy, by which time I was scheduled for a prostatectomy. So I never did get to put all those tests to the proof.

@worriedguy Yes, it can sweep out the mature semen and let new ones be born, but clearly it isn’t necessary. But when guys say it, they act like they will die if they don’t have an ejaculation. Simply not true.

Then there’s the source of the other stuff that carries the semen along. Again, it can’t possibly be necessary for life to have ejaculations because there are plenty of guys who rarely or never do it. I’m sure the “pipes” do “dry up” if unused for a long time, but that doesn’t kill anyone.

I’ve lived without a vas for 54 years. I have never produced a single mature sperm. Yet I’m still alive and in addition, I have two children for whom I am the genetic father. Yeehaw!

@wundayatta No Vas? How cool is that? On the bright side, you don’t have the little vasectomy scar saved several hundred bucks on the procedure. But I’m guessing the cost of the sperm harvest made up for it.

@CaptainHarley It seems like a cruel joke doesn’t it? They have to let the prostate heal from the biopsy and just when you start shooting normally again, they yank it out. Sadistic SOBs.

@worriedguy The cost of the surgery (I had to do it twice—the idiots the first time didn’t save any for future use) was yeah…. a lot. The pain of recovery in that area… well you probably know about that.

The hell of it was that I never knew until it was too late to take advantage of it. “Hey girl, you don’t have to worry about any of that with me!” This was pre-AIDS, too. They probably would have been passing me around!

But having the technology available to make it possible for me to have kids is an incredible blessing. I’m terribly grateful.

@wundayatta “They probably would have been passing me around!” pre AIDS time!

It would have been hell to be 20 years old and been treated like a piece of meat sex toy.
You’re a better person for missing out on that. Just keep saying that to yourself. ;-)

@worriedguy There must be some advantage to that situation. :(

Ah, how I love reading about the male psyche in regards to the male biology! Penises are weird, but, damn, they sure are fascinating!

@worriedguy: Yours came with a user manual? Lucky sod…

What I was taught in college is that erections while sleeping are simply a by-product of sleep cycles. It would seem that most people, male or female, become physically aroused during REM sleep. Once I learned this, it made a lot of sense why I’d wake up.. emm.. you know. I was always confused because I rarely have sex dreams, so it’s not like that was the cause.

“The mere statistics of arousal during REM sleep are astonishing. REM periods often only last about 20 minutes, and our sexual arousal long outlasts these; men typically have erections for about 30–45 minutes per occasion while sleeping. These start at the beginning of REM typically, and outlast it into the next sleep cycle.” (via)

Aside from that, I have always heard that it’s beneficial to men’s inner workings to regularly cycle through semen/sperm, so it makes sense that they are far more likely to orgasm/ejaculate while asleep (especially if they are not masturbating or having regular sex).

“A 2003 Australian study found that men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer. Regularly flushing your system, so to speak, keeps your semen healthy and prevents the build up of cancer-causing chemicals” (via)

Just to help others who read this @MissAnthrope, why don’t you tell us what REM means. Yea, to help the readers that’s it.

@Axemusica: To help those other readers, it stands for Rapid Eye Movement which is the time in your sleep cycle when you dream the most and when you can’t actually move. Hope this helps those readers. ;)

I think it does help those readers @KatawaGrey, thank you. ;)

@KatawaGrey I not only got the user’s manual, I also purchased the service manual so I could understand the plumbing and wiring. Doesn’t everyone?

Night time erections: the nervous system which is responsible for erection is the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the system that is responsible for the rest and digest functions of our body. It tends to be most active when the other nervous (sympathetic) is less active. Because of this and the relaxed state of the body during sleep the parasympathetic nervous system predominates and that is why erections occur all during the night and for some produce “morning wood”.

There are several different glands (not just the prostate and testicles) involved in making semen. They become full when they haven’t recently secreted their products. When this happens, the alternatives are to spontarously release them (wet dreams) or resorb the material (which happens but just doesn’t show up).

@KatawaGrey, with regard to wet dreams, lets put it this way, the less a man masterbates the more wet dreams he has, so my non medical perspective tends toward some type of necessary release of build up, what ever that build up is. I rarely ever have wet dreams and really should be blind at this rate, lol. Morning woods, hmm, I’m sure there are better answers above compared to how I can explain.