Saturday, February 21, 2009

Somnambulism

I found an interesting article online about emailing people in your sleep. Supposedly it's a side effect of prescription medication. There's one you don't see! Side effects: Nausea, Vomiting, Diarrhea, Chest Pain, Dizziness, and Somnambulism. If I happen to send you any weird party invitations, disregard them.

"According to a case described in the medical journal Sleep Medicine, a 44-year-old sleepwalker logged onto her computer and emailed out party invitations to friends. Fortean Times magazine looks at this case and several other bizarre episodes of somnambulism.

From Fortean Times:
The mails themselves were perhaps not up to the woman’s waking standard; each was in a random mix of upper and lower case characters, badly formatted and containing odd expressions.

The writers of the report have dubbed this new variation of sleepwalking ‘zzz-mailing’. They say: “We believe writing an email after turning the computer on, connecting to the Internet and remembering the password displayed by our patient is novel. To our knowledge this type of complex behaviour requiring coordinated movements has not been reported before in sleepwalking. She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them. She did not have any history of night terr­ors or sleepwalking as a child.”

Unlike simple sleepwalking, they argue, the activities the woman engaged in required complex behaviour and coordinated movement, as well being able to remember her login details. She had no memory of the events next day. It’s thought that the somnambulistic episode may have been triggered by prescript­ion medication."

3 comments:

Melissa Phelps said...

Dope. Too bad she didn't write a song or short story... perhaps a nice poem.

Dani said...

I heard somewhere that Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" was composed in his sleep! Wow.
And I still say some of your posts are too, Sam. (wink)

Anonymous said...

It could happen.
I don't have to remember my login details. They are automatically entered on my computer. And it's always on, always online with a DSL line.
All she'd have to do was hit Send to all, and it would go on its merry way!