Have you ever woken up and wondered, “Did that really just happen?”

For literally hundreds of years it was generally accepted that having orgasms during sleep was a physiological occurrence reserved just for men. The experience, scientifically called “nocturnal emissions,” was colloquially dubbed “wet dreams”— a term that has obviously stuck around.

It wasn’t until 1953, when the famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey published a study on the occurrence of sleep orgasms for women, that “nocturnal emissions” stopped being an appropriate term, both because females don’t “emit” anything, and also because, as college students know, sleeping certainly doesn’t have to happen at night (regardless of this, the term “nocturnal orgasms” is still widely used).

Since Kinsey’s study, there have been only a few researchers to look at female sleep orgasms. In fact, the general knowledge of this phenomenon has remained so well hidden that when Barbara Wells published her study “Predictors of Female Nocturnal Orgasms: A Multivariate Analysis” in 1986, only 35 percent of her female college student sample had ever heard of nocturnal orgasms.

Until about a week ago, I was as clueless about the universality of this phenomenon as the other 65 percent. During a discussion with a friend, we stumbled onto this taboo topic, and I have been fascinated by it ever since. Turns out, a lot of women orgasm in their sleep. Kinsey’s study of 5,628 women found that 37 percent of women had experienced an orgasm during sleep before the age of 45 with an average of three to four per year. You can imagine how elated I was to read that he also found that the incidence increases with age (something to look forward to, ladies). Unfortunately, the more recent study by Wells refutes or complicates a lot of his other conclusions. In fact, the differences in the results between the two studies leave very little clear about female sleep orgasms other than the fact that a good number of women have them, and that they are not, as Kinsey asserted, closely tied to past sexual experience or current sexual activity.

What fascinates me is that our bodies are capable of having purely physical responses to completely mental stimuli. Without trying or having conscious desires, our bodies can create psychological situations powerful enough to ignite something as tricky and stubborn as a female orgasm. Furthermore, women have been shown to reach orgasm significantly faster in their sleep than when they are awake.

For me, this boils down to one really simple but surprising idea: orgasms are a lot more of a mind matter than we think. Obviously, I’m not saying that it’s all mental (can we even imagine a world where it is?), but it seems that mental roadblocks or unbuilt bridges must play a large role.

If only it were easier to build those bridges.