My body only danced between my thighs after midnight.
That was the compromise.
Daytime belonged to being a perfect Mormon girl for decades. Clean lines. Night belonged to whatever slipped the leash when my brain’s breaks were off. I learned not to ask for more than that. Learned to say fine. Learned to swallow the wanting and call it being realistic.
In sleep, however… something feral kept talking.
Orgasms found me there. Sadly, I couldn’t control them. They arrived bright and blunt, leaving evidence. My labia felt like clapping clamshells. I’d wake with my heart banging like it had run amok somewhere forbidden, my body warm and humming. Proof of life. I wrote them down religiously.
Because that was the only kind of religion I was interested in anymore. I didn’t leave Mormonism. Mormonism left me. And it broke my heart. At least my clit could get some love now.
I treated those moments like contraband.
It always starts with heat. No source, just heat. I look for a mirror in my dream so I can see if I’m glowing: that’s the tell that lets me know I’m dreaming. Lucid dreaming 101, baby! If I can’t find a mirror, I try to look down on my hands, to see if they’re glowing. That way, I could tell if I’m in my dreambody. Once I know I’m in it, the dream doesn’t rush me.
I’m not performing here. Nothing to self-monitor. I don’t even have to try.
My body arches without first checking with anyone for permission. It answers only to itself. Pleasure crests and breaks like something ancient that my pioneer ancestors crossed the country for Utah so they could practice polygamy without the government’s watchful eye. I wake wrecked (in the best way, of course) with my thighs warm and my head full of images I quickly write down or dictate into my phone to write down later. That’s how I can keep the dreams fresh and continue to remember them.
Fun fact: if you don’t remember your dreams very often, keep a dream journal and write them down when they do, even if it’s once in a blue moon. Then you’ll start to remember them more. And once you do that, you can start lucid dreaming. I needed to do this shadow work to cure my lifelong anorgasmia. I don’t think I’m alone in never having one but wanting one.
For years, I called this a fluke. A glitch. Something my nervous system did by accident.
But the dreams kept insisting. They followed me into the morning. Into the shower. Into the long daylight where I had already decided what was possible for me and what wasn’t. They dragged desire back into places I’d declared closed for business.
And that’s when I realized the problem wasn’t my body.
It was the unexamined shadow. And long-dormant pleasure pathways that years of sex therapy couldn’t ennervate. That’s where the TENS device came in. My dreams were screaming at me to get my attention. I finally listened.
I had been a writer once. Before kids and bills. Before I learned to settle for pleasure in dreams only. The dreams didn’t care about my stupid rules, or earning money, or constantly achieving. They kept writing scenes for me anyway.
They reminded me that imagination doesn’t die when ignored: it goes feral. Oh, and pleasure never gives up hope: it finds another door. Or in my case, a bridge. The unconscious will keep building altars, whether you worship at the familiar ones of your forefathers or not. And with that came the fear.
Because I know what happens when women like me talk out loud. I’ve literally been told by a Mormon bishop – a man I hardly knew, that I can’t talk anymore in church or they’ll proceed with excommunication proceedings. So legalistic and cruel in the name of love.
I got in the New York Times for my radical feminist activism, and it got me disowned. So I know the
family members who will read this and be so embarrassed that I put my last name to this. “WHY didn’t you use your husband’s name?” was the first sentence out of my father’s mouth when he finally called me about the NYT article. Not, “hey, we can have different beliefs and still be a family,” or “while I don’t agree with what you said, I still love you.”
No, his humanity was long gone, crushed by my mother, who made him treat his own seven children in ways most parents couldn’t fathom. First, she did it to us. Then she made him watch. And when he
tried to stand up for us, she made sure he regretted it. Like a dog with a shock collar. So by that point, the dad I knew from my earliest memories was gone. He would take me, his oldest, to the Burger King near our SoCal neighborhood and order me French toast sticks and himself a Dr. Pepper, wink, and say, “Don’t tell your mother.” Because she was a better Mormon than he and would never let a drop of caffeine pass her lips.
That’s the measure of your goodness, apparently: caffeine intake. Not whether or not you psychologically torture your children. That’s waging a righteous war against Satan over the souls of your kids who are lazy, disobedient, and disrespectful. Those memories of a young, naive father who thought he could love his children unconditionally were gone. She had convinced him by now that I was possessed by Satan and had been trying to destroy their marriage since I was two years old.
Yes, dear reader, I have that accusation in writing. As you can see, the mother-wound runs deep. No wonder I had issues with pleasure. That’s religious trauma for you.
I’m done editing myself for an audience that only loves me anesthetized.
The dreams didn’t just wake my body. They woke up my appetite for mess. For sentences that sweat.
For stories that scream in the night. For writing that crawls out of the wreckage and says: this happened. This is happening.
My secret is going public now. Mainstream. Loud. Uncontained.
I know bridges will burn. The mean girls in my life may smugly think they’re better than me because they never had a problem with orgasms. I let them. Because it doesn’t matter.
I don’t care.
My body already chose a side. It spoke while I slept and finally stopped trying to clean the truth before letting it out.
This is me, dragging the dream into daylight. Teeth first.
Kristy Money
Dr. Kristy Money is a licensed psychologist who spent a years in college and graduate school, trainings, certifications, and reading everything she could on sexuality—and still didn’t orgasm. Her PhD, her books, her research, none of it prepared her for the embodied work she needed. What finally changed everything was surrendering to her own body and listening to her dreams. She now helps women navigate their own bodies and desires, blending science with creative and somatic practices, and believes that awakening sexual pleasure more about curiosity than expertise