Late on a recent weeknight, Jessica Castillo fell asleep after talking with her boyfriend. The next morning, Castillo, 24, of Italy, Texas, was surprised to learn she had sent her boyfriend two text messages, apparently while asleep.
“Baby u there? Need to tell somethin …” read the first message before it dissolved into jibberish. “U told me and i tell u…..u harm …” started the second message before it, too, became incomprehensible.
Move over, sleepwalking, sleep-driving and sleep-binge-eating. Increasing numbers of cell-phone users are reporting on blogs and message boards that they are “sleep-texting.” It’s a sign of the times, say sleep experts and experts on technology, who see the phenomenon as a natural extension the reliance on text messages. But scientists and sleep professionals disagree on whether the individuals involved technically are asleep when they text.
“Texting for some of the younger generation is probably as ingrained as driving is for some people,” said Dr. Ron Kramer, spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Like many in the so-called “Internet generation” — born after 1979 — texting has emerged as a major way of communicating, according to Larry Rosen, author of “Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation.”
And late-night text messaging is ubiquitous among teens. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in a relationship have communicated with a boyfriend or girlfriend hourly between midnight and 5 a.m. via cell phone or text messaging, according to a 2007 online survey by Teenage Research Unlimited, a youth research group.
Meanwhile, more and more of those text-obsessed individuals are sleeping next to their phones, Rosen said.
“They’re not only with their cell phones most of the day,” he said. “They often sleep with it right next to them and let the vibration wake them up.” The inevitable result is that some may continue to perform the activity while unconscious.
But some sleep experts have another explanation for the sleep text messaging, particularly in those situations where the text message is coherent. Some say the messages are written while the patient is awake, but they have amnesia for the event.
“The ‘sleep-texter’ may actually have been awake, but had not formed new memories for the event,” said Scott Fromherz, medical director of Westside Sleep Center in Tigard, Ore. “There is a ‘built-in’ amnesia of sleep that occurs when the brain is briefly awakened for less than three minutes.”
Thus, a person might wake up in the middle of the night, text someone, go back to sleep and have no recollection of the activity.
But Kramer doesn’t dismiss the possibility that some people could be text messaging while asleep, though the messages likely would be incoherent. People have been known to perform a variety of activities while asleep, from simply sitting up in bed to housecleaning, binge-eating or driving a car — so sleep texting may not be much of a stretch, he said.
And there just may be another category of sleep-texters: people who may be embarrassed about a message they wrote and who claim they don’t remember doing it.
“Maybe the person who sent the message regretted saying something over a text late at night,” Kramer joked, “and used ‘sleep-texting’ as an excuse.”
