Sometimes I talk in my sleep. That means that a part of me is conversing while the thinking part of me — the part I usually think of as me (during the day, anyhow) — is unconscious. I find this a bit creepy. It’s like being possessed, or operated by remote control, or having multiple personalities, or something.
Yet it’s also perfectly in character as well. My forebrain often has a monkey grip on the rest of me. It lets go during yoga, martial arts, great sex, and great drugs, which of course has made all of those things fairly appealing over the years. Not, you know, that some of them wouldn’t be appealing anyhow. But even during some of these I tend to be pretty high-verbal. (I’ll leave it to you to decide which ones. But you can probably rule out yoga.)
I’ve awakened myself more than a few times, either yelling something or just laughing out loud, and I’m told that if you respond to me while I’m talking in my sleep, I’ll reply. Apparently if I’m contradicted, though, I get all flustered. At least I’m consistent asleep or awake.
I recently subscribed to the Sleeptalking Man blog. If you don’t know what it is, I urge you to run over and take a look. (Go ahead; I’ll wait.) If I lived a thousand lives I could not be as consistently creative, brilliantly narcissistic, and entertainingly belligerent as Adam is in his sleep.
But the blog made me slap my head in one of those “D’oh!” moments. Adam’s wife records his nightly utterances with a voice-activated recorder. Whythehell didn’t I ever think of that?
I immediately switched the little Sony voice recorder I use to record readings & lectures to “voice activation” and set it by the bed that very night. And the next morning I listened to myself say, “Oh, thank you very much!” twice, with genuine pleasure in my voice, as well as “I know I can do it; I saw it in a movie!”
Hearing myself talk in my sleep is both more and less creepy than I thought it would be. More, because I’m saying shit I wasn’t there for. Less, because what I’m saying isn’t all that creepy. In fact, I seem to be kind of a nice guy in my sleep. Perhaps I am the temperamental opposite of Adam, who apparently is a very nice guy while awake. Hmm.
The next night yielded “Oh, no, I read her obituary in the L.A. Times,” and, “Great to see you, man!”
The Sony’s battery doesn’t like to last all night on voice-activation, so I bought a nifty little iPhone App called Audio Memos 2 that records in .wav format and has threshold, limiter, volume, and decay controls along with voice activation and stereo options. I used it last night and it’s even better. (Afterward I learned that there is a dedicated Sleep Talk Recorder app that seems pretty nifty, too. I shoulda known.)
I realized that there some other potential benefits (and pitfalls) to recording yourself in your sleep. Increasing awareness of sleep apnea, for one. Making your partner believe he or she snores like a bathtub sucking down jello, for another. For me, though, I’m fascinated with these little glimpses into brief and unaccompanied journeys a part of me takes most nights.