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'
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
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/
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)
You know, you can talk to sleepwalkers, and they will answer you. Sleepwalkers can also handwrite. Why wouldn't they be able to type in an e-mail ?
A widely reported behaviour of sleepwalkers is to redo in their sleep movements and actions they are very used to, like dressing up. Typing in an URL and a password might be such a repetitive action. Of course, you may also be right. But it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me.
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).
...it's a slippery slope to "sleep procrastination"
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)
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.
Typing in an URL and a password might be such a repetitive action.
This is true. For 'lower security' passwords that I don't change often (yet are sufficiently complex), I often can't remember exactly what the password is if I have to tell it to someone else, I have to type it.
My blog
Where is the evil bit in all of this?