One in four Brits has sex dreams about their colleagues

Nearly a quarter of people in Britain has had a sex dream about a colleague, a new poll has revealed.

A survey carried out by YouGov Omnibus and Yahoo News UK asked just over 2,000 people whether they had ever had a sex dream and, if so, who it was about.

23% of Brits have dreamed about a sexual encounter with a colleague, with the same number dreaming about sex with a celebrity.

Men were more likely than women to have had a sex dream about a colleague, with one in three (30%) saying they had had one, compared to one in six (17%) women.

Singletons are also a little more likely to have erotic dreams about a co-worker than their coupled-up counterparts, with 26% of those who had never married admitting to office-based sex dreams compared to 21% of married people.

Nearly one in ten (9%) Brits said they had had a sexual dream about their best friend, while 26% had dreamt about a friend.

Nearly a third (30%) had had a sex dream about their current partner, and nearly as many (28%) had dreamed about an ex.

One in five (22%) had dreamed about an attractive stranger, while 8% named a teacher or professor as the object of their erotic dream.

A fifth of people (20%) said they would prefer not to say.

When it comes to age, 18-24-year-olds are much more likely to have sex dreams about their friends, the survey revealed, while 25-34-year-olds are more likely to have sex dreams about every category.

Professor Jason Ellis, director of the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research, told Yahoo News UK podcast Britain is a Nation of…: “We know that all dreams have certain emotions tied to them, some of them are going to be sexual.

“When you think about it, we actually become quite sexual during the night anyway. Men, for example, will get an erection every 90 minutes.”

Men getting an erection coincides with REM sleep cycles, he said, hence it potentially happening every hour-and-a-half during the night.

“So that’s where we might actually get more of those sex dreams coming in,” he added.

“One of the problems we have got is we don’t know a lot about dreams. It’s not incredibly well studied, believe it or not.”

But one theory, he said, is that dreams are a way of ‘getting rid’ of information you haven’t processed during the day.

“There’s a school of thought that dreams really are just a way of getting rid of all the information you don’t need anymore. So during the night we are going to process every single thought, feeling or behaviour and ask ourselves, ‘do you need this? Do you need this to survive?”

To hear more unpacking of statistics about British people, listen to the full episode above, or download it on Apple Podcasts, Acast, or Spotify to listen while on the go.