Many motivators drive behavior from temperature and sleep regulation to water and food sustenance to the avoidance of predators (Mogenson 1977), but there are few drives as powerful as sex, which evolutionist would say is central to maintaining the future of a species (Darwin 1809-1882; Dawkins 1976). That sex is a major driver even for humans is substantiated by the following cases: Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nasser, Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and I am sure you have your own list of notoriety. If you have ever read the Old Testament, the rape of a defeated army and people is used as a form of retribution, followed by the killing of all males (Trump 2024).

In 2003, Nielson et al. conducted a study on the quality of dreams experienced by 1,181 university students from the universities of McGill, Trent, and Alberta in Canada (Neilson et al. 2003). The average age of the students was twenty. The most common theme was being chased or pursued with no injury (82%) and the next most common theme was sexual experience (77%). The former (i.e., being chased) was evident amongst women (83% for females vs. 78% for males) and the latter (i.e., sexual experience) was common amongst men (85% for males vs. 73% for females). Other themes reported in 50% of the subjectsincluded falling, studying, arriving late, remembering a dead person, trying-and-trying-again, soaring through the air, failing an exam, and physical attack. Perhaps not surprising, the themes cover many of the four-F’s of evolutionary biology: fleeing, fornicating, and fighting, but (less so) of feeding (Dawkins 1976). Memories are consolidated during both slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep (Boyce et al. 2016; Girardeau et al. 2009; Louie and Wilson 2001; Wilson and McNaughton 1994). That the sleep state is dominated by fleeing, fornicating, and fighting (but less so by feeding, see Footnote 1) should not be surprising, given that humans like all animals must ultimately deal with the drive to survive: humans are expected to attain a population of 10 billion by the end of this century, well out competing most other animals whose numbers are in decline [UN Report, 2019, Nature’s Dangerous Decline, May 6]. Thus, as proposed by Sigmund Freud (1899) the purpose of dreaming (a putative pathway to the id) is to remind the organism of its basic motor drives [also see Jouvet 1962, Peever et al. 2014, Porte and Hobson 1996].

Footnote 1: The absence of dreams of food by the students is perhaps because Western students are typically well-fed. My oldest adopted boy who experienced extreme hunger while growing up still has dreams of food and its absence.