Sleep-Driving, Sleep-eating, and we want YOUR sleep stories!

Dear Journal,

I just returned from 9 cities in 11 days. Though I'm tired, I've returned with stories. In week 1, we rented a bus and hired a driver. The idea behind the driver is that we sleep while the driver drives through the night. The problem is that last week, while we were sleeping in the back, he started to doze off in the front. So both the back and front were asleep, leaving only the people staring at our bus swerving off the road who were awake. We knew this because we started to hear more and more of that "rumble strip" rumbling, and that's never a good thing. It's never like, "Oh, that pleasant rumbling! Our bus driver is probably taking a short cut through the woods!" The upside of this, had he driven off the road, would have been that we'd have died in our sleep. Of course there'd be that confusion if we show up at the Pearly gates and we explain to St. Peter that, in fact, we're just dreaming. And he says, "No, you're actually dead." And we say, "Of course we're not dead. We hired a driver to stay awake so we wouldn't die." And St. Peter would be like, "He's right behind you."

This week my friend Ed and I were videoing people's sleep stories. We discovered things like "sleep-eating." We met a girl who often wakes up in piles of Reese's peanut butter cup wrappers. If someone asked, "How do you eat your Reese's?" she'd have to say, "When I'm unconscious."

Not to be graphic but one woman explained that she started performing intimate acts on her boyfriend in her sleep and the awkward part was that they hadn't been dating so long. So it was a bit forward, and to make matters worse, she would fall asleep mid-act. So it's kind of a dream come true and kind of a dream come blue balls.

Many of the sleep stories involved peeing. Peeing in hampers, on the kitchen floor and out on the lawn. The sleep-peeing stories were so common that they became predictable, like a guy would be like, "I was having this dream that I was filling up my Jetta with gas," and, we'd be like, "Wait, we know. You were pissing in your wife's face, right?" He'd be like, "Um, no."

Narcolepsy is also a big problem. These are people who fall sleep anywhere anytime. There are narcoleptics who fall asleep during sex. There are women narcoleptics who fall asleep the moment they have an orgasm. I was thinking they could call those women "men." Some people have what are called "confusional arousals." Which means you have slow speech, confused thinking, and blunt responses to questions. Some people call this "being John McCain."

I actually met someone who has what I have. It's called REM Behavior Disorder and he explained that he was up one night looking under the bed. His wife asked, "Why?" and he said "Because your goddamn parents are still sleeping in the living room." What's funny is that her parents weren't sleeping in the living room and even if they were, why would that justify looking under the bed? The most specific of stories came from a guy who went online and bought a "learn to play the bass guitar" book. He didn't realize it had even happened until it showed up in the mail. So now he hides his credit card before he falls asleep.

Well, the last phenomenon we found out about was "sleep-driving" often brought on by the drug Ambien. A guy we interviewed actually drove his car towards a dead end and woke up just in time.

And we thought, just for a moment, if only we could teach this useful skill to our driver.

And that concludes this week's entry in my secret public journal.