Slashdot Mirror
Sleep Mailing
Doctors have reported the first case of someone using the internet while asleep, when a sleeping woman sent emails to people asking them over for drinks and caviar. The 44-year-old woman found out what she had done after a would be guest phoned her about it the next day. While asleep the woman turned on her computer, logged on by typing her username and password then composed and sent three emails. Each mail was in a random mix of upper and lower cases, unformatted and written in strange language. 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......." If I had known that researchers were interested in unformatted, rambling email I would have let them read my inbox. They could start a whole new school of medicine.
Wow. They even used a pic like Idle. Why is this filtering into my regular slashdot now?
Look lady, I show up to your house with wine and caviar and you make up some lame excuse about "sleep emailing". If you didn't want the second date, you should have just said so! I'm a Slashdotter, I'm used to rejection, there's no need to lead me on and come up with lame excuses at the last minute.
Now that there's ambien and those other zombie drugs, people are sleep driving, jogging, typing, cooking, and eating. I wish I was making those up but every single one has reportedly happened. Maybe drugs that screw with your brain that much that yo go into a semi-conscious zombie haze should be taken off the market. I'm not saying this lady necessarily took them, but that sort of thing has been known to happen on some sleep aids.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
...It really reads more like she was either drunk or high while writing it, and I hate to use either of those in a stereotypical manner, but I get PLENTY of e-mails from friends who either drink too much or find other excesses, and that's exactly the kind of weird shit that they come up with.
The woman probably went on a bender that included some pills (some sedatives in particular are notorious for causing memory loss) and either isn't willing to admit she did it, thus creating some elaborate lie that's gotten way out of hand, or truly doesn't remember due to the substances and is embarrassed that she lost control. Not that she magically sat down in front of her keyboard and was able to type fully coherent English sentences in e-mails that just happened not to make sense in context.
A number of sleepwalkers have been acquitted of murder charges.
> Each mail was in a random mix of upper and
> lower cases, unformatted and written in
> strange language.
Sounds like typical l33t speak. Maybe she turns into a hacker in her sleep? :)
-- http://www.MindBlowingPhotos.com
Photography inspired by music, nature and life itself.
Actually,
Many people take sleeping pills, pain pills, mix them with booze. And these all cloud or fog the memory, and bring out bizarre behavior.
I went through a period of sleeplessness and my doctor gave me a Ambien(a hypnotic) to put me down at night.
However, having spend a better part of my teens and 20s "experimenting" was able to evidently ride the drug out and function. I just did not remember it. My girlfriend has stories of me cooking dinner, calling my parents, and moving around the house very slowly.
I am going with she was high.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Recently, a guy sleepwalked to death from his hotel room balcony:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3727373/Briton-sleepwalks-to-his-death-off-hotel-balcony.html
and another guy was acquitted of rape because of sleepwalking:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1085927/How-man-raped-cleared-sleepwalking.html
Time for new term - Somnemailism?
That aside, Gmail's Drunk Protection would come handy for the patients.
Yeah, I see the solution so clearly now, Was trying to solve this riddle for years.
'Cheating on your husband' is to 'virgin birth'
as 'drunken emailing' is to 'sleep mailing'.
SOLVED!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
http://xkcd.com/269/
She was either SLEEPY and doesn't remember well, or she was drinking alcohol and thought it would be cute to show friends how drunk she was (later regretting it).
I suggest you read Slashdot
From the summary and TFA, it sounds like she found out emails that she didn't recall writing had been sent from her computer, so she went to a doctor and they concluded she was sleep walking. No where does it say anything about observational studies being conducted, or anything that suggests anyone actually saw her do this. So...why exactly was the possibility of her account being hacked/pranked by a friend ruled out?
iN SovIET RUsia, U must BE New OVERlordS, PROFit1!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Every once in awhile I review my outgoing box, mostly to make sure I haven't made some commitment and then forgotten about it... But after reading this, I'll be checking my outbox more often, and more carefully.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I take Tylenol PM 5 out of 7 nights of the week, because it helps me go to sleep when I want, without having to worry about whether I slept in til 10am or something. It keeps my schedule from getting mixed up. Is this bad? I never have any of the side effects you list. I don't have memory problems and I'm fully aware of what I'm doing. It gives you a warm feeling and almost feels like you are a little drunk, and makes it very easy to sleep.
Any side effects of usage 5/7 days of the week for Tylenol PM?
A few years ago in my mid 20s I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea. I knew I wasn't well. I felt tired all the time, wasn't as sharp as I was because of the tiredness, was falling asleep at work even after weeks of early nights and was getting headaches. It even got to the point where I'd occasionally hallucinate or experience sleep paralysis. The kicker was falling asleep at my desk and in meetings at worked. I had to fix it or my life would very quickly end up in the toilet. It took weeks to work it out because doctors were doing blood tests etc. Once I video taped myself sleeping I knew exactly what it was and I didn't need a medical degree.
That video was one of the most revolting things I'd ever seen, and to this day thinking of it literally makes me cringe. I looked like some sort of snorting pig. I would stop breathing for between one and two minutes, then take the most loud awful pig like snorting deep breath, take a couple more shallow breaths, then stop breathing for a minute or two again. I'd do this for the length of the video. It turns out no one who had heard me snore wanted to bring it up out of politeness. I think they assumed I knew. On the other hand I had NO idea. I didn't think it was possible to do that in your sleep without knowing, but not only was it possible, it had been going on for months (or possibly even years) before I worked out what was happening.
Now I'm on a CPAP machine at night which opens up my airways so I don't stop breathing. I hate the damn thing - being hooked up to a mask blowing air into your nose just sucks badly - but just a couple of nights without it and the headaches return and I start feeling tired again. The change when I went on the CPAP was instant - mornings I felt so fresh and awake that it was surreal. I'd rather be dependant on a damn machine than constantly fall asleep, lose my job, walk around like a zombie moron, behave inappropriately or sluggishly because I'm half asleep, be unable to drive, and ultimately die of blood pressure related illness. I don't think I'd be alive today without it.
Anyway the point is this experience has shattered any illusion of knowing what happens when I'm asleep.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Ambien is definitely a likely culprit.
I took it for a time and one night I emailed to a friend after taking it but before I went to bed. I had no recollection of it afterward. A couple of days later I wrote essentially the same thing to my friend, totally confusing her. That's how I found out about the first message.
It also caused horrible, screaming nightmares that freaked out spouse and our 3 dogs.
I adhere to what I've read elsewhere: If you're gonna take the stuff, take it immediately before going to bed. Don't take it and stick around online or in front of the TV. Do not pass GO and do not collect $200 (although I bet someone is already trying to collect a lot more from the drug company).
Are they sure this stuff actually came from her? I get spam like this all the time - just not from people I know.
And so another species of internet user is born... Forum Using Nihilists. Kilgore Trout, I accuse you of being FUN!
When you sleep, you are in a Theta/Delta state of consciousness (generally 0.5 - 7 cycles per second). Doesn't mean you can't function, you just function in a very different state of consciousness as you do when you're awake (Beta/Alpha, genrally 8-40 cps). Theta states are associated with meditation, "super learning" and other things (possibly sleep walking/talking/emailing).
At the very least, I find it intriguing and would love to learn more about how people communicate during these states of consciousness.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
...it's a slippery slope to "sleep procrastination"
I've apparently made calls to other people at 8 in the morning without remembering it 2 hours later. In fact, I was quite confused when they referenced the earlier call, I didn't believe them at first. But I figured that my cell phone log isn't lying to me. I was told that I was quite intelligible, too. Oh yeah, before somebody asks, I wasn't high or on sleeping meds, although I might have gone to bed late.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Tylenol PM is not a scheduled narcotic. Take an ambien and 20 minutes later you will not be able to stand for the most part.
Side effects. All tyelenol products are extremely hard on the liver. I would not drink booze the same day as taking anything with acetaminophen in it. Hits the kidneys pretty hard to.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
As someone who has had sleeping problems my whole life, I'll chime in on this one (this is simplified for the ignorant):
Your brain has two functional bits... the "thinking bit" and the "doing bit" (yes, these are made up terms). The 'thinking bit' is what we use to solve problems, assimilate information (generally), and similar things. The 'doing bit' doesn't generally take conscious thought. This would encompass walking, chewing, picking up a glass of water.
When you go to sleep, your 'doing bit' is what is resting. Your dreams are a result of your 'thinking bit' at play. The problem with hypnotics is, they don't turn off your 'doing bit', but rather your 'thinking bit' in hopes that it will drag the other half down. This leads to you doing all sorts of things in automatic mode, with no recollection of what you did, because it is generally the 'thinking bit' that forms the memory.
Back in 2000 when I was trying to find a job before college ended, I got up, logged into my Linux box, sudo'ed to root and changed the root password -- to this day, I have no idea what I reset that sucker to.
In 2002 when I was (rightly) worried I was about to be laid off, I crawled into our closet, started tossing my wife's shows out and screaming about needing to rewire to stop my idiot users. I have no idea.
Anyhow, based on the few times I've woken up during this, it's like I'm acting in a way that makes perfect sense but obviously does not -- I'm operating from a completely made-up set of rules for my reality.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Actually, she's not lying to you. What many slashdotters fail to realise is that their boring effect on women also spreads back in time. So not only can we put women to sleep; we can put them to sleep right back to when they first contacted us.
Marisa? Does that mean the date is off?
C'mon, I thought we were finally getting somewhere. I even went out and bought the finest wine and caviar, all for you, my 44-year-old somnambulist. Does this mean my robe and wizard hat will continue to collect dust?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Many people take sleeping pills, pain pills, mix them with booze.
Straight up, or on the rocks?
And these all cloud or fog the memory, and bring out bizarre behavior.
... working for a few months on a Blagojevich'ed project does that to me, too.
I went through a period of sleeplessness and my doctor gave me a Ambien(a hypnotic) to put me down at night.
Well, either your doctor is a saint, or a sadist, when we put our dog down, she never got up again.
My girlfriend has stories of me cooking dinner, calling my parents, and moving around the house very slowly.
Hey, great for your girlfriend ("He finally cooked dinner for me!"). Great for your parents ("He called us again!"). And if you were moving around very slowly, you probably didn't wake up with any bruises, from any events that you don't remember to have occurred.
Please keep it quiet, or my girlfriend and my parents will try to push this stuff on me.
Oh, and sorry for making fun, but thanks for some definitely useful information about a medication to avoid.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yes, the main sleeping ingredient in Tylenol PM (Diphenhydramine) is a dopamine antagonist. What this means is, it attacks dopamine receptors, and keep them from receiving the dopamine that they would get during normal awake functioning. Most antipsychotics can fall under this umbrella. And just like antipsychotics, it can cause Tardive_dyskinesia which I call "The crazy twitch" (You know... the twitch that stereotypical crazies have). This is incurable.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
This would happen on the graveyard shift back in the day. I only ever sent out one that was mildly incoherent.
I caught myself on all the rest. I wish I still had the file I kept of them; a few of the gems I kinda remember:
something about hot dogs
information regarding the customer's order of shoes arriving on time.
I worked at a domain registrar/hosting company :)
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Tylenol PM is just regular Tylenol with diphenhydramine a.k.a. "Benadryl" (in the US and Canada) added to it. Using it regularly in normal doses isn't very harmful at all. However, there has been at least one study which seems to show that tolerance builds quickly towards the sedative effects of diphenhydramine builds quickly, becoming comparable to a placebo after only a few days of use. Link
YMMV.
...and i bet she got qwertyitis too...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I remember a story about using an authenication method to prevent you from sending mail while inebriated from Google. I think this will prevent a sleep emailing person from emailing anyone since you need to read the problem and solve the problem on the screen (unless you are a math klutz).
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/technology/September-October-08/Mail-Goggles--Google-s-Gift-to-the-Inebriated.html
I read the secrets that you keep
When you're posting in your sleep
A friend said he'd been caught contributing code to a dial-up BBS he was co-sysop of while asleep (a GBBS system, writing ACOS (a variety of BASIC) code). The sysop at the console broke into chat while he was typing, and he just kept typing code into the chat buffer instead of the editor, not getting any audible signal that his mode had changed. And it wasn't just a data send as there would be typos, pauses, and corrections made to the typos.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
She's sleep chillin'!
Back in 2005 I entered Nanowrimo: National Novel Writing Month. You have to write a 50,000 short novel in the month of November. That's a lot of writing. It took me about two hours per day, every day, and as I suck at scheduling this meant I ended up doing it late at night instead of sleeping.
The result was that I would occasionally fall asleep at the keyboard. And keep writing. Some of it was gibberish:
Some of it made sense, but was just strange:
(No, rock-eating worm creatures did not feature anywhere in the story.)
Some of it was my subconscious talking to me:
But I was really pleased with this, which is an entire appropriate nightmare dream sequence that I wrote in my sleep:
(All typos original. This is all first draft stuff, straight from my subconscious!)
Unfortunately the whole thing, a technical fantasy novel, turned out to have pretty major plot flaws in it which I never got round to fixing. But if I ever end up finishing it, that last passage is definitely going in.
How could she get her password right and not write mails that make sense? It is obvious now why CAPTCHAs are SO broken, and spam is common!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
In the news recently:
1. Sleep talking
2. Sleep walking
3. Sleep eating (ambien)
4. Sleep emailing
what is next?
5. Sleep texting
Gmail Goggles could be helpful, but has not been field tested yet.
sleep 3600 && echo What I want to say | mail -s "Delayed mail" user@domain.com
Please keep this crap in the idle section ... PLEASE. What the hell are you guys thinking?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
COme tOmoRRow AnD sORt thiS HeLL HOle Out. thAT iS NoT dEaD wHiCh caN eternal LIE. aND wiTH sTraNge AeOnS eveN deATh maY die. Ph'nGlUi mGLw'nafH CtHUlhU R'LYeh wGAH'NAgl fhTAgN.
ps - bring CHiPs
That was my first thought as well. I know several people who took Ambien and would wake up in the middle of the night and do very odd things, such as eat an entire pie from the fridge, or go ride on the exercise bicycle, start cleaning with the vacuum cleaner ("Um, mom? It's 3AM"), and go back to sleep with little memory of the event.
Some of them even sent emails.
These were doctors and nurses who often work the late shift at work.
Ambien makes you sleep, but apparently you don't sleep well.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I swear to you this really happened a few years ago. The transcript was slightly edited for clarity (a few unrelated comments were removed), but f0rked claimed to have no memory of this.
Note the reference to Ripper, which he thought was funny at the time.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Not his fault, he's a sleep troller
Maybe Hitler was a sleep-evildoer? (I'll let you diagnose W.)
Table-ized A.I.
Any kind of drug that interferes with natural sleep [either preventing or aiding] can lead to some weird, weird side effects.
But granted, this is some extreme case.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
I sometimes try to go online while dreaming (from my dream), however I'm rarely able to get a connection or everything just turns to gibberish. Anyone else do this?
My wife took those things at one time. She has done and said some strange things she completely doesn't remember. At one point she took my journal (not a particularly private one, just something I frequently write things in) and wrote me a piece of haunting, non-rhyming poetry about our relationship. The handwriting veers off and down to the right, but then lines back up on a new line on the left, and the words are both lucid and completely different from her usual style. She swore she didn't remember doing it, and it's not hard for me to believe, considering everything else I've seen her do.
So - emailing while on that stuff? That barely even cracks notable.
BTW, I'm not sure I classify this as "high". She's asleep. If I remember my psychology correctly from college, what's happening is the brain is shut down and dreaming but the reticular formation has failed to disconnect the ability of the brain to cause the muscles to act.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Many people take sleeping pills, pain pills, mix them with booze. And these all cloud or fog the memory, and bring out bizarre behavior.
I'm sorry, but I don't know where you get your information. It may be true about specifically alcohol, but it's not an accurate blanket statement about the other two categories. Opiates, for instances, which count as both sleeping pills and pain killers, have no effect on memory or behavior (unless you count the change in behavior resulting from the change in mood and degree of consciousness).
Property is theft.
I woke up to find myself sitting in front of my computer, staring at:
$ sudo rm -rf /
[sudo] password for $USERNAME:
$
True story.
EverYone come. SomeonE bRIng the fLesh of grapes and tHe eggs of pRotECted seA turtles...I HaVe a jelly rainBow.
People with this problem should use gmail and turn on its Mail Goggles Labs feature...unless they can do math in there sleep as well.
Description of Mail Goggles Labs feature:
Google strives to make the world's information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you're good to go. Otherwise, get a good night's sleep and try again in the morning. After enabling this feature, you can adjust the schedule in the "General" settings page.
I just thought up the most horrible weapon ever conceived: A cross-breed of digg, and the goatse family of pictures.
Alright. Selling now!
Normal delivery method include:
- Thrown by chair: A Vista laptop with 512 MB ram gets mounted to a chair, and exclusively thrown by Mr. Ballmer.
- Riding the nuke: A complete Internet-connected "diggy goatse" server gets installed in the hull of a zar bomb, which then gets ridden by one of our most experienced cowboy rednecks... straight to your home.
- Rolled trough the Rick: We are forbidden by the UN human rights council, to give you the details on this one.
- Rawberry shocklade surprise: Our specialty. A special double fake triple trolled ass-plug from pressed raw digg story submissions gets shoved up your ass. Then electrically charged steel bolts spring out, and go right to both cheeks.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
How sure are we that these acts were not the result of some weird stilnox craze?
I know a couple of people who used them to help sleep, and they have some pretty serious side effects. One of our friends was regularly texting/emailing strange messages and pics to everyone, and a few times was found wandering around outside his appartment stark naked with little idea where he was or what was going on. He had no recolection of these events the next day.
I wouldn't be surprised if this lady knocked a couple back and something weird happened, she emailed a few friends, can't remember doing it and doesn't want to admit to using sleeping pills...
Contrary to popular oppinion, London is not burning. It is, in fact, quite nippy.
When I was 17, I was sharing a room with my brother. Starcraft had just come out for sale the previous month. One morning, I happened to wake up in my brothers bed, but I was pretty sure I had chosen my own the previous night. I was grunting and he couldn't get me to understand him. According to him, before I went back to his bed, I had gotten up, walked upstairs and was using the computer.
I couldn't remember anything. I had obviously been sleep walking. So I went to our computer to see if there were any clues as to what I had done. When I saw what was on the screen, I was both shocked and entirely amused. The post-game score screen for Starcraft was still on, and from the name of my opponent, I could tell I had been playing a direct-connection modem-to-modem game with a friend of mine who lived in the next town over!
Unfortunately, it looked like I had lost the match.
I gave my friend a call to verify what had happened, and it was true. I had given him a call at around 10PM asking if he wanted to play Starcraft, to which he agreed, and so I dialed in and we had a match. He said I sucked, and that he kicked my ass.
He never believed it when I told him I had been sleeping the entire time.
i always enjoy the wacky thoughts i get drifting in & out of sleep, but recently i had a very interesting auditory experience.
usually the furnace fan has a lulling whoosh, but 1 morning i woke up hearing it stuttering: on-off-on-off, as tho it was gonna explode. but fully awake, all i heard was the normal sound.
as i dropped off again, i heard it quit again, or rather i stopped hearing it: apparently, the part of my brain that listens fell asleep before the rest of me;-) when i noticed it had stopped, i heard it again; this happened several times;-)
Did you actually think any of that was funny when you were writing it? You have the comedic talent of a festering anal sore.
Because the kids who moderate this place now, they'll just like it!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I know for a fact the same has happened before, it just didn't get written up and submitted.
Many people sleepwalk and do things almost as if awake, except linguistics are often fractured. But not always. Once subject had an episode of 48 hours of amnesia, behaving normally but being cognitively anesthetized. He also had an episode of 24 hours of amnesia. The first was due to lorazepam and diphenhydramine, the second to Ambien*, compounded by a poorly functioning liver due to hep C and its treatment.
In both cases the subject posted to /., and as far as I can tell, none of you could tell I wasn't home any more than the cops who showed up at the 3 car accidents, examined me, and determined I wasn't impaired. (As a nod to those with whom I've had words, we'll add "at least not any more than normally.) Despite not being obviously impaired, and in fact perfectly lucid, eloquent and cheerfully compliant to all requests, the cops had me taken to the hospital after the 3rd since I'd rolled a van and totaled it. It was not showing any adverse physical or mental after effects that tipped them off that something strange was going on. I forgot to go into shock or even be distraught, and by the time I was at the ER forgot why I was there.
* Ambien advertises that a side effect is "sleepwalking with no memory of the event". Sleepwalking implies that. To state the second part explicitly means they're calling it sleepwalking when it's something else. Been there, done that, call it what it is - amnesia while conscious. Dissociation is also somewhat relevant, such as with ketamine, but behavior there tends to be abnormal, though not appearing intoxicated.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Where is the evil bit in all of this?
"If it ain't broke, then it is in urgent need of serious and thorough fixing"
Yours /. staff
Today, I found Tylenol PM sold without acetaminophen in it, so I've started buying that now. I am also cutting back on taking it on some of the times I don't absolutely have to take it. Thanks for the response.
sorry for my lousy comments, but I am sleep slashdotting.
Today, I found Tylenol PM sold without acetaminophen in it, so I've started buying that now. I am also cutting back on taking it on some of the times I don't absolutely have to take it. Thanks for the response. :)
Today, I found Tylenol PM sold without acetaminophen in it, so I've started buying that now. I am also cutting back on taking it on some of the times I don't absolutely have to take it. Thanks for the response!