Steamy dreams on the rise

Ladies, no need to be coy. Now we know what you’re really thinking about.

A new report published in the journal Psychology & Sexuality reveals that women aged 16 to 30 are having three times as many erotic dreams as they did 50 years ago, according to sleep researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany.

The research puts women’s sexy reverie quota on par with men’s.

Similar studies conducted in 1966 (prior to the so-called “sexual revolution”) and 1998 showed just under 4 percent of women reporting sexual dreaming. Now, thanks to the mitigated stigma around the sex lives of women, researchers say they’re more likely to remember their dirty dreams simply because there’s less shame in it.

The study polled 2,907 participants aged 16 to 92 on their dreams, and found that, for both men and women, an average of 18 percent of all dreams were naughty in nature — which includes “sexually motivated” acts such as flirting or kissing.

Men in the 16 to 30 age group experienced erotic dreaming about 25 percent of the time, compared to women at 22 percent. And these dreams seem to occur about three to four times more than those involving sports (about 6 percent) or politics (around 4 percent).

“The gender difference in the percentage of erotic dreams in men and women aged 16 to 30 in the present study is lower than that found in a 1966 study, which could reflect the evolution induced in modern societies by the feminism movements,” study authors write. “One might speculate that younger women in modern society deal with sexuality more openly than older women of previous generations.”