The attention of News Hour is drawn to sleep emailing, a phenomenon recorded by the journal Sleep Medicine – specifically, the case of an insomniac who upped her intake of the prescription drug Ambien (zolpidem), a hypnotic known for hallucinatory side effects when resisted, something which gives it tilt for the recreational junkie.
This was not a missive fired from a BlackBerry, while halfway to the land of nod – the woman navigated two password systems on a relative’s computer, and composed three emails over eight minutes. Does this mean that she was thinking? Ambien’s side effects can include amnesia, so could she have done it in some hallucinatory trance and forgot? This is important: there are legal ramifications here with regard to ‘When Sleepwalkers Attack’.
On the other hand, if one is familiar with a computer system, logging into it is as much a matter of muscle memory as anything else – after years of use, complex passwords can be typed out more easily than they can be remembered, like notes on a piano. Much of the text in the emails was formulaic, smashed together with mismatched capitals – one entitled ‘!HELP ME P-LEEEEESE!’ contained a bizarre dining invitation:
“Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m., Bring wine and caviar only.”
While another read: “What the…”
It sounds like the sort of disparate nonsense that comes out when people talk in their sleep. Is it too much to speculate that these bolted together phrases are the product of muscle memory rather than actual cognitive thought? Is this a side-effect of our increasingly familiarity with computers, a natural evolution of the more brutal notions of sleepwalking? After all, if one can sleep eat and sleep drive on Ambien, is it too much to sleep type?
What next, sleep blogging? Sleep twittering is certainly plausible. Did cavemen sleep hunt? Still, if the unconscious brain could somehow be harnessed to write emails, imagine all the unpleasant work that could be passed on to your sleeping self…
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 