Wake Me Up When People Are Sleep Sexting

You thought that all you needed to control while you slept was your bladder, it turns out people need to control their fingers too—people are sending texts in their sleep.

The fact that sleep texts are sent seems understandable enough. Most people have enough practice that they can send a text with mostly muscle memory and will do so under any circumstance even when Werner Herzog makes it clear that texting could kill. Are we texting because we don’t care about the risk, or because we’re sure that when we do it, it isn’t that risky?

And people are apt to do all sorts of stuff in their sleep that seems equally difficult—we’re talking, walking, cleaning our homes, having sex—so of course we’re texting while asleep. The real question is: are people sexting while they’re asleep?

For years now, there has been anecdotal evidence of people sending texts from the groggy, in-between place where you’re not exactly awake but you’re still functioning, at least well enough to send a text message. People rouse a bit, reach next to their beds for their phones and send messages. Some are incoherent messes. Some are expressions of deep affection for, uh, ex-boyfriends or platonic friends.

But for a while sleep-texting seemed like a sort of flimsy, anecdotal scare story. “Blah blah, everyone’s sending texts too much!” sort of thing. But now the numbers are in from Villanova University.

Elizabeth Dowdell, a nursing professor who researches Internet risk behavior, surveyed 300 students, and learned that 25 to 35 percent had sent text messages while they were snoozing. Granted, these are college students in 2013, and the exact population of nearly life-long cell phone users who you'd suspect.

Dowdell was too busy with the start of classes to answer my extremely legitimate, scientific inquiry on people sending sexts, so in true Internet-article fashion, I went ahead and wildly speculated.

According to an estimate from Stanford researchers, about 1 percent of the population are “sexsomniacs,” and a researcher in New Hampshire said that roughly 3 percent of the population instigates sleep sex.

So Villanova found that anywhere from 75 to 105 people out of 300 were sending text messages while asleep. And while the most consistent fact about sexsomnia that I found is that men are more likely to engage in it than women, let’s just use the modest 3 percent estimate. That means that statistically speaking, at least two or three people in the Villanova are sleep-texters AND sexsomniacs.

But sexsomnia, in spite of its charming portmanteau, can be an unpleasant if not horrible experience for the partner who wakes up being groped by an unconcious bedmate. It might be too severe to use to estimate if people are sleep-sexting.

Apparently 80 percent of college students send sexts, which means that at least 60 people who sleep-text have also sent a sext. It seems inevitable, at least in the college crowd.

The general population is a little harder to peg, but c’mon, have you met the general population? Only 6 percent of adult cell phone owners own up to sending sexts. This must be too low, because 20 percent of Democratic candidates for mayor of New York do it, and it’s not like the type of person drawn to political office is some sort of out-of-control narcissist.

If you consider what it would be like to wake up after sleep-sexting, it’s probably enough for you to shut your phone all the way down before going to bed and toss it in the other room. On the other hand, if you’ve been caught in another sexting scandal, maybe this is just the dodge you’ve been waiting for.