Fun fact: muscle memory is in a deep-seated part of your brain far separate from your consciousness. W.C. Fields could get mind-erasing grade wasted and do stuff like this. There have been reports of people doing everything from driving to eating while sleeping to Mike Birbiglia’s misadventures.
And now, apparently, teens are starting to claim that they’re sleep-texting.
Although needless to say, sometimes this comes off as less a real thing and more of a convenient excuse:
“The phone will beep, they’ll answer the text,” [professor Elizabeth] Dowdell says. “They’ll either respond in words or gibberish. (It) can even be inappropriate. Ex-girlfriends contacting ex-boyfriends, saying ‘I miss you. I want to see you.’ The thing that happens, though, is that when they wake up, there’s no memory.”
So, wait, you send an embarrassing text to an ex, and then wake up with no memory of it ever happening. That’s… convenient.
Sarcasm aside, apparently what happens is the phone chimes, the teens grab the phone, and text to somebody anything from random gibberish to actual words. It makes sense, especially with smartphones that use swiping technology. If you spend a lot of time around input devices, it’s actually pretty easy to use them with your eyes closed: Just ask anybody who was forced to learn touch-typing in high school.
That said, we’re pretty sure that at least some of this is an attempt to get out of explaining sending awkward messages. Dowdell recommends removing the phone from the bedroom if you “sleep text”, and that’s probably a good idea, either way.