I'm at a conference at the Lodge at Edgerton Park, near where I'm living. Steve Jobs is speaking about electronics, the state of the art in computing, whatever. As usual, a reception with coffee and nibbles follows the lecture, out in the garden. It's late Spring, and the famous Olmsted landscapingis lush with leaf and flower, and everyone feels great.

Now. From what I know about academic and artistic life, there's always a crisis point at every gathering of this kind: the initial hello's being said to everyone in the room, you now have the options of having a real, as opposed to polite, conversation with whomever, walking off with or without company, or sticking around to scarf up the remaining consumables, without being especially noticed. I decide to talk with Jobs, and land a wonderfully insightful question that actually makes him think. I listen with bated breath, and just because I'd like to stay with him and gloat in my own cleverness, I ask another, slightly stupid question.

"I think," he says with a queerly knowing look,"if you really wanted that answered, we'd have to be over there." He nods in a general direction.

I look, I see tall grass, and a nice place to sit down. I realize he knows, and he knows that I now know that he knows...

Something like a strong shock happens. I wake up.

I'm awake and wet and ice-cold and shaking and acutely embarassed, though I can't figure out why. My whole body aches, as if I've been fucking, or been fucked, very hard for some time, in between my legs, I'm wet and sticky and most profuse, my vulva delicately fading like a wilting peony. You can almost imagine male ejaculate as a component -- the consistency is thicker, not unlike semen.

It's an incubus, a female wet dream. Due to the idiosyncrises of the perimenopause, tbey generally occur in women after 30, and increase as the testosterone flow increases. Sexual frequency has little or nothing to do with it: they occur in married ladies as much as spinsters, and are purely involuntary. Occurring without warning, and generally unpredictable, the content of the dream has no relation to probability of the dream turning orgasmic. (Walking in an Edwardian garden with a handsome man is romantic, but you'd think I could have come up with something more..explicit? and Steve Jobs?? I can think of better fantasies without trying!) I get them once or twice every year.

What's happened, is an orgasm. Or, to be more specific, that first paradise stroke of an orgasm, when your whole body screams YEEESS! like a cheap porno queen, and every gland in your withers tries to make a good showing for itself. Only, in this case, there's no follow-through, it's much more intense, and, well..The reason why it's much more like come than the dewy products of a woman's flower is because the Skene's glands and a few other vestigial players making an appearence.

Other than the initial shock, and the resulting whatthehellwasthat? reaction, they're fairly harmless, flushing out various secretions and systems that have to be kept in readiness to reproduce the species, whether they're going to be used immediately or not. Though I'd be concerned if they happened, say, a couple times a night, the worst thing that can happen is to get overly concerned or guilty about them: while they're acutely embarrassing, if only because you have to clean the sheets later, they're only problematic if you're under some religious or private discipline against sexual distractions. (In these cases, I've been told by my religious friends, the general advice seems to be to concentrate more fully on one's devotions -- and to count as a partial, if unenviable victory if the content of the dreams change to the object of your devotions, though you should still remain unattached to them.) Too fleeting to be savored, too unpredictable to be coveted, they remain a little-known, yet integral part of human sexuality.