A Writer’s Dream Come True
Posted by William Rabkin on January 12, 2009
Every time I’m in the middle of a project, I start having this recurring fantasy that I’ll go to bed one night, and when I wake up I’ll find that I’ve finished the damn thing in my sleep. Well, that still hasn’t happened, but it’s beginning to seem less impossible:
An article that will soon appear in the journal Sleep Medicine, detailing the experience of a sleepwalker, shows that we can send messages even when we seem to be sound asleep.
The Sleep Medicine article — prepared by Dr. Fouzia Siddiqui, a neurologist at the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio, and two colleagues — describes one woman’s e-mailing while sleeping as the first reported case of “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.” It involved not just composing messages, but also navigating past two separate levels of password security to reach the e-mail software.
According to the article, the patient suffered from severe insomnia and was taking zolpidem, which is marketed under various brand names, the best known of which is Ambien. She decided on her own to increase her daily dose to 15 milligrams, from the 10 milligrams prescribed by her doctor, to counteract what she perceived as diminished efficacy of the drug over time.
Later, she received a call from a friend, asking about a strange e-mail message that the patient had sent the caller the previous night. She had no memory of having done so. When the patient checked the computer and looked at a folder containing her sent messages, she discovered that three that had gone out within eight minutes the previous night while she was asleep, all with unusual capitalization, punctuation and language. “!HELP ME P-LEEEEESE” was the subject of one message, an invitation for “dinner & drinks,” and the message also implored the recipient to “come TOMORROW AND SORT THIS HELL HOLE Out!!!!!!”
Okay, so she didn’t actually knock out act three of her feature script in her sleep. But maybe if she upped her dosage a little bit, she could at least solve some of those knotty act two problems before she woke up…
Anea said
The sleep writing isn’t so bad, although that woman should seriously consider enabling the google email security to prevent sleep messages from going out (the google service that requires you to pass congnitive tests for each message that is sent in order to prevent drunk emailing for which you can schedule time frames that the protocol is enabled for). The ones that scare me are the sleep eating, sleep driving etc. From a side effect perspective I am much more in favor of the older sleeping medications than the newer ones. For many years I took Restoril (Tenazepam) and while I was the only person under 70 who took it the side effects were totally acceptable to me. It isn’t considered especially habit forming (at least not more than any other benzo) and the main side effect is “vivid dreams” which was totally fine with me.
Enjoying the blog, glad you started one!