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Slipping under the covers for a safe, good night's sleep may not be all it's cracked up to be.

New research shows that abnormal sexual behaviour during sleep is more common than had previously been believed.

According to a U.S. study to be published Friday in the journal Sleep, there is an increasing number of reports of sleep sex or sexsomnia, a sleep disorder that causes people to have sex with others or masturbate without waking up.

Further, the study found that virtually all known sleep disorders, from sleepwalking to sleep apnea, carry a risk for abnormal sexual behaviour when the lights are turned off.

Carlos Schenck, the study's lead author and an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, blames the hectic modern lifestyle for aggravating sleep disorders. Sleep deprivation, he said, is a precipitator for those predisposed to sex-related disorders because it creates more instability in their sleep.

“When you look at our way of life in the Western world, we live in a caffeinated, high-stress society where people take their sleep for granted,” Dr. Schenck said in a telephone interview Thursday. “I think our lifestyle is increasing the rate of all the [sleep] disorders.”

Dr. Schenck's study reviewed all published literature on sexsomnia.

He said most people are aware that sleepwalking, aggression and even eating while asleep are medical disorders.

But most are shy to seek help for abnormal sexual activity during sleep, he said.

“It's very embarrassing. First of all not to remember, and then to be told that you've done all these unusual sexual things in your sleep,” said Dr. Schenck, also the author of Sleep: The Mysteries, The Problems and The Solutions.

He added: “The brain can go wrong in a multitude of ways in the context of sleep.”

Dr. Schenck's study found that sleep sex is rarely isolated from other sleep disorders. People who suffered from sexsomnia had two to four other sleep disorders, from sleepwalking to sleep terrors.

And while embarrassing, sleep sex is nothing to laugh at.

Dr. Schenck has seen examples of men and women injuring themselves with violent masturbations.

The issue has ended up in court, where sleep sex has been raised as a defence in sexual-assault cases in Canada, the United States and Europe. Two years ago, a Toronto judge acquitted a man of rape after ruling that he suffered from sexsomnia and was asleep during the attack.

There are treatments available, such as the drug clonazepam, which allows patients to stay in a deep sleep and makes it more difficult for the internal triggers to go off, Dr. Schenck said.

“It can be properly diagnosed and treated,” Dr. Schenck said.