When I was a senior in college, I fantasized about getting a job as a professional sleeper.
I was that good at it.
(Unfortunately, nobody was hiring.)
Joe, my roommate, on the other hand, was just the opposite of me when it came to sleep.
The poor guy had more nocturnal issues than The Night of the Living Dead.
During his junior year, for example, Joe would sleepwalk on a regular basis. That wasn’t so bad for him, I suppose (he never tripped). But, it was downright awful for Joe’s roommate who kept getting the bejeezus scared out of every time he woke up at 4 a.m. and found Joe at his bedroom doorway.
Just standing there.
In the dark.
Thankfully, Joe didn’t sleepwalk the next year when I roomed with him — or, at least, if he did he never ended up planting himself in my doorway — but that’s not to say that he didn’t have, well, a few other peccadilloes.
One night, Joe woke up i the wee hours of the morning and became positively convinced that — in the pitch-blackness of his room — someone was sitting in a chair in the corner of his room, staring at him.
For a good two hours, Joe told me the next day, he just laid in his bed — scared silent — as he tried to identify the intruder.
Which turned out to be his guitar case.
Later on that year, Joe got the bright idea to tape up an enormous poster of Jack Nicholson’s legendary “Heeeeeere’s, Johnny” scene from “The Shining” on his bedroom ceiling.
Directly above his bed.
Not surprisingly, after a couple of nights of nearly wetting the bed when he woke up flat on his back and saw Jack’s psychotic grin staring back at him in the dark, Joe took the poster down.
And put it on the wall behind his head, instead.
As goofy as my old roommate’s nocturnal hijinks were, however, not even he attempted something quite as wild as what the medical journal Sleep Medicine claims that a 44-year-old woman did one night while sleepwalking:
She sent Zzz-mail.
Or, perhaps, more specifically, Zzz-vites.
Because, according to the magazine Fortean Times, which looked into the case, this woman reportedly logged on to her computer and e-mailed party invitations to friends that “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…’ ”
Party sounds kind of like a snooze to me, but nevertheless …
The doctors who authored the study for Sleep Medicine, went on to say that they “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.”
Then again, neither did another girl who I also knew during my senior year of college.
Nevertheless, she too, staged her own amusing stunt while sleeping as, after pulling an all-nighter in preparation for a final, she dozed off in class the next day right during the middle of her essay test.
Upon snapping back awake, this girl was amazed to discover that while snoozing she had scrawled the single word “YELLOW” in large letters on her exam.
Which just so happened to be the dominant color of her plush bedroom back home at her parents’ house.
And with that, I’ve got to say I’m green.
The color of my comforter.
G’night, everyone. Sleep tight, and don’t let the Zzz-mails write.