So after recording myself talking in my sleep (I have no idea why that sounds grammatically incorrect) for a couple of weeks now, I’ve learned some interesting things.
1. I don’t talk as much as I thought I did. A total of a few minutes a night, but I do seem to say something almost every night.
2. Half of what I say is totally indecipherable. Mubble zubbla wug wug, and out.
3. I seem to be a very nice and polite guy in my sleep. This threatens to make me the polar opposite of Sleeptalkin Man Adam, who is apparently very nice and polite when he is awake. (He is also far more articulate, inventive, and funny than I am in his sleep.)
4. I laugh a lot in my sleep, and I also say, “Oh, thank you very much” a lot. Maybe I’m just insecure and I give myself a lot of compliments in my sleep.
5. Sometimes I sound eerily like my father, who also talked in his sleep. My father was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and had a pretty strong accent. The other night I laughed at something in my sleep and then said, “Shee-it.”
6. I’ve read that sleeptalking does not happen when you are dreaming at all, but in hypnopompic states — that is, the sort of twilight consciousness when you’ve just gone to sleep and especially before waking. Supposedly when you sleeptalk you are actually responding to external stimuli being incorporated into your consciousness.
Far as I’m concerned this last one is bullshit. I’ve heard too many snippets now that caused me to remember a dream I’d had that I hadn’t thought of until the lines triggered it. Last night in my sleep I said, “What? A Samoan narrator?” and started laughing. I remembered that I had dreamed about my boss from back in the Internet Bubble days, Tasi Ponder, a very interesting woman who had been a competitive bodybuilder. Tasi’s mother was Samoan. (Don’t ask me where the narrator bit came from.)
Later in the night I said, “What the hell are you talking about? I never lived with her. She was an actress. She worked really hard.” Hearing that, I remembered that I had dreamed about an old girlfriend, Marilyn Chin, who had indeed been an actress (she was on an episode of Stargate, and I campaigned for her to play Deanna Troi when ST:TNG was in preproduction) and a model. Someone in my dream had been disparaging Marilyn as an actor in some way and I had leapt to her defense.
The best was a couple of nights ago when I not only sang, I sang in a weird voice with this huge vibrato. I realized I was imitating Anthony Newley singing “Candy Man.” Weirder, in my dream I had been telling someone how David Bowie had been influenced by Newley (which is true; even Bowie said so), and I was demonstrating by singing “Candy Man” as Newley but exaggerating the Bowie qualities. (I mashup imitations all the time. The other day I caught myself [not in my sleep, which in a way is weirder, huh?] doing Gollum imitating Christopher Walken, and then did Christopher Walken playing Gollum. It’s a percentage difference. It was pretty funny, though: Five hunnrid yeeuhz … I carried dis ring … up my ass … an’ now it’s yours … little man.“)