Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Luke succumbs to the soporific
effects of my office chair

Yesterday, my puzzled editor returned an assignment to me which was garbled partway through. I knew what had happened: sleep typing.

This is an embarrassing condition that occurs when I start to fall asleep while I'm working. My conscious brain shuts off but my fingers continue typing.

And it's not just typing. I've also been known to sleep write. When I was a grad student, I was grading a paper and woke up writing about pizza. Chagrined, I got my whiteout pen and obliterated all references to snack foods.

I suppose there are worst things you could do. My sister used to sleep walk. She once sleepwalked into my mom's room and jumped up on her bed, screaming about candle people.

The closest I've come to doing something like that was recent. I woke up downstairs on the couch in the early morning, confused because I knew I'd gone to bed the night before. The Gryphon told me that he'd received a page in the middle of the night and gone downstairs to reply. He discovered me lying on the couch and said something, but I just mumbled and went back to sleep.

"Why didn't you nudge me and make me go back to bed?" I asked.

"You didn't seem to want to."

I still don't have any idea why I ended up down there, except maybe The Gryphon's snoring got louder than usual, and my unconscious body stumbled away from the noise.

Whether or not this happens to animals, it's hard to tell. Their usual behavior doesn't make much sense either. Do they have stories like, "I woke up licking a footstool and I have no idea how I got there"?

I've also wondered about doggie dreams. My dog, Una, will move her feet and bark or whine. I wonder if they have dreams about dog things, like chasing squirrels, or whether the same strange creatures that inhabit our dreams make calls in theirs. Do those same dream creatures cause the strange behaviors we sometimes enact in sleep? Do they nudge the unconscious body to perform their bidding, like marionettes on a string?

I think I have an idea why this happened to me. After New Year's, when I overindulged on a number of things, including caffeine, I cut back severely on caffeine to where I was having practically none. But apparently, I need the little boost that a glass of soda or a cup of coffee will give me in the evenings when I'm working. No matter how much sleep I get the rest of the day, no matter whether or not I have an afternoon nap, somewhere around 12:30 the brain starts to drift. Before I know it, I'm waking up with my forehead on the keyboard.

There are few professions where you can be a caffeine teetotaler, and none of them involve the media. So I've learned a valuable lesson, emerging with a little egg on my face — or in this case, the impression of the space bar. But it's all good. At least I don't wake up licking footstools.

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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