Hilarious Article
Posted by David Pescovitz, February 18, 2009 10:31 AM | The Article Link
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. One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm. Bring wine and caviar only.” Another said simply: “What the…”
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.
What is great about this is not just the article, but the comments people put on it, I'll highlight some of my favorites:
"Oh yeah I can agree with that. Ambien made me do all sorts of bizarre activities. I once came to running around my neighborhood in pajamas as fast as my body would let me in a state of abject terror."
"I'm sorry, but that sounds like a fantastic party. There's nothing about that invitation I don't like.
I really hope that all her friends showed up at 4:00 the next day, ready to sort that hell hole out."
"Honey, how are we going to get this place ready for a 500 person party by this afternoon?
Oh shit, tell them I was sleepwalking and the party is canceled."
"To me, "z-mailing" sounds like it involves zombies. Which, now that I think about it, is not too different from sleep-walking."
"I have a friend who did almost this exact thing a few years ago with the help of Ambien. He signed onto a dating site and invited multiple people out for streudel, which we joked must've been a euphemism for something more interesting."
"Ah Big Red, the Ambien/eBay scenario is a familiar one. Thank God I lost those snowshoe auctions--I don't even LIKE the outdoors."