WBxx said:
Inquiring mind wants to know. Is bed-wetting always accompanied by pee dream where the dream is only remembered when one wakes during the act?
It happens but not always. REM occurs at a surprisingly shallow level of sleep, pretty close to being awake, so your senses can seep into your mental state, past the usual blockade your brain provides while you're asleep. (for most people this successfully blocks physical interaction, but then we have the occasional sleepwalkers etc) So anything you hear, feel, or smell while asleep can make its way into your dreams. Dream state is very flexible and has no problem integrating these senses into a dream. That's where the "put a sleeping person's hand into a bowl of warm water to make them wet themselves" comes from. (it's one of those "doesn't work too consistently but has been known to work on some people" kind of thing) I know I've heard people in my dreams as they are speaking to me trying to wake me up in the morning. "COME ON time to get up, you've got school today!" What are you talking about? we're on vacation on the moon right now, there's no school here and I'm not asleep...? (*POP*) Oh. Thanks, mom. I was enjoying bouncing around in my space suit....
Just like dreaming you're walking around the house doesn't always cause sleepwalking, dreaming you're peeing doesn't guarantee you're going to wet your diaper (or bed...) in your sleep. Pretty much everyone has had a dream of walking around, and look how uncommon sleepwalking is. That's the brain's blocking your thoughts from becoming actions while you're sleeping. Most of the time it works as designed. Sleepwalking from what I've read is either something you tend to do or not, it's not one of those random events that everyone is prone to. So I suspect sleep-wetting is the same way, there are a few people that are probably chronic with it, and the rest of us don't have to worry about it at all.
I personally have difficulty with lucid dreaming. I only very infrequently get to a point in a dream where I realize I'd dreaming, and I'm at such a light level of sleep at that point that I usually only have tens of seconds to do something before I wake up. (and overall I don't sleep very soundly, I wake up many times overnight almost every night) It's almost like I need to relax and take it slow and easy, not get excited, not try to exercise too much control, if I want to avoid waking up immediately. I've also had very few dreams involving peeing, but it's happened a few times that I can recall. In most of those cases, I woke up before I got much accomplished. I never did wet my diaper though. Makes me wonder just how much more of a problem this is for people that are prone to sleepwalking/sleep talking/etc.