Easy days, weird nights

[The purpose of this post is to document the most significant personal symptoms of orgasm withdrawal at T+12 days]

I have not had an orgasm for 12 days, have not looked at porn for (a personal record-breaking (at least for the last 2 years)) 14 days, and have not looked at any substitutes that reward my porn-reinforced neural pathways for 5 days. Whereas a few days ago it was impossible to get through more than 20 minutes without having intense orgasm cravings, the temptations today have been mild and infrequent. Perhaps the orgasm withdrawal phase is over, or maybe I am for some reason at the peak of an epicycle (local maximum?) on the way to baseline dopamine levels.

On the other hand, my mood-swings and anger could be embedded in a more complex matrix than orgasm frequency or my virtual sex viewing habits. For years I have suspected (though never been formally diagnosed) that I have seasonal affective disorder, so now that the days are getting longer here in the northern hemisphere, I could be feeling more happy and balanced because I actually get to see the sun after work.

I guess it's always possible that tomorrow will be rough, which would be strong evidence for rapid fluctuation between minimum and maximum dopamine levels, possibly indicating that I'm approaching dopamine homeostasis. Even if this is true, it may be quite difficult for me to identify balance since I've been having orgasms at least once a week for about 13 years.

Sleeping is still far from normal, however. I took sleeping pills for about 6 nights in a row, and they helped to stop recursive fantasy insomnia, but they caused mucous membranes to become painfully dry, and increased urination frequency from <1x/night to 2x/night. While waiting to fall asleep every night, I felt low-level pain in my urethra as if I needed to urinate even though I had just drained the bladder.

Last night I did not take the pills, and the sleep experience was very different. Interestingly, falling asleep was very similar, since I still experienced the weird urethra pain, except now without the pills as a potential explanation. As a side note, erections have been painful--if I tense the associated muscles, the terminal 1/3 feels an acute ache. Erections are often painful for me because the clips from my vasectomy rearrange themselves, and the intensity of this pain has also increased.

Returning to sleep phenomena: whereas the sleeping pills eliminated dreams or blocked my memory of dreaming, without the pills the dreams have returned with atypical frequency, realism, and content. I rarely dream about sex, and even when I was kept awake by sexual fantasies at the beginning of this experiment, when I did fall asleep my dreams were non-sexual. In contrast, last night I dreamed almost exclusively about sex, and with themes that were unusual. In one dream I was high on three different pharmaceutical drugs while having conventional sex with five or six women--I have dreamed about sex with multiple women only twice in my life. In another dream, I was having sex with my wife, but only as a warm-up for her to have sex with someone else who had an enormous, Echidna-style bifurcated penis. I woke up from the dreams often, and I was sweating, which is unusual since I rarely sweat while asleep. Oddly, when awake I did not have any sexual fantasies, and I could only think about how to avoid dreaming about something disturbing during the next sleep cycle.

I do not want to take the sleeping pills anymore because of their physical side-effects, but if the dreams continue to be so disturbing, I may have to keep medicating. I plan to avoid the pills tonight, so if strange dreams return, I can be fairly confident that some hormonal or neurological process is substantially different. I realize that identifying the causes of dream content is hardly something that I can objectively accomplish, but I can be certain that last night's sexual dreams were not influenced by thinking about, reading about, watching, or having sex yesterday.