Sleep-Writing

Got an insignificant, or as it seemed from the ‘Esteem’ brought by Pepsi.

It was a cold winter night of 1998; the clock would have read past two. I was at the dining-turned-study table, had a hot cup of coffee alongside. Working out some mechanics problem from Irodov was the last I remember before falling asleep. When I woke up a half-hour later, I found myself face down on the diary I used to maintain then (which I later destroyed page-by-page because it was full of depressing stuff), the above sentence scrawled over it, and cold unfinished coffee spilled on the table. I have absolutely no idea what does the sentence mean, even though I wrote it.

Somniscription. [sŏm-nĭ-skrĭp'shən] -noun.

Under the larger category of parasomnias, the act of writing while the sufferer is asleep or in a sleeplike state; generally occurs earlier in the night when rapid eye movement (REM) or the ‘dream stage’ of sleep has not yet occurred.

[Origin: 2008; from L. somnus “sleep” + scriptus, pp. of scribere “to write”].

The sentence makes no sense, is grammatically incorrect, and the words Esteem and Pepsi are ambiguous. Crap, in short. You don’t expect expert verse from someone who is fast asleep. Like other sleep-related disorders, a somniscribe is not aware of his actions in sleep.

Somniscription is quite rare a phenomenon, which can be ascertained from the fact that I could not find any word on the world-wide-web that describes sleep-writing. Or maybe it is included in the larger umbrella of somnambulism, sleep-walking, which however, clearly includes sleep-eating and sleep-sex (BTW, what’s the fun if you don’t know you are doing it?). The only two resources talking about sleep writing I could google out were:

• this page from Encyclopedia Britannica, which talks about people writing in sleep with a mental picture of the page before them and the words they have written. They do not see what they actually write, and the page talks about an experiment that proves this.
• this blogpost by one Joel Derfner, where the linguist-turned-musician- turned-aerobics instructor wonders if he was actually setting up e-mail accounts in his sleep and e-mailing himself entries for his own Blogalike contest. He tries to come up with a word equivalent to somnambulate that meant writing in sleep but finds ‘somniscribe’ revolting.

I never had somnambulism or somniloquy, and not even the act by the word I just coined—somniscription. This was one isolated incident that happened, and I don’t think it might happen again; I have anyways become addicted to technology and no longer use a pen and paper to write. Yeah, maybe some day I wake up on my laptop to find I typed a post on my blog while sleeping, in which case I’ll have to come up with another term.

See also: Searching the net about somnambulism and somniloquism led me to a few interesting people who’ve recorded their sleep-talks and uploaded them on their blogs:

Somnography of Somniloquy
Sleep Talking On The Mic
Somniloquy Revelation