Asleep at the Internet

Howdy folks, remember me? Your buddy, Oddcube here!

I know I've been lax in letting loose a likable, lyrical, alliterated load of lines here at the good ol' Abandoned Towers Blog (accept NO substitutes!). Truth is, I'm really not sure what sort of things I should be posting here, so I've been searching for something suitable to shout out about.

Let me tell ya what I ended up with:
So, I'm crusing along the internet, minding my own business, when I come across an account of interesting internet-oddity. Like what, you ask? Like this little bit I found on the Fortean Times:

"Sleep researchers from the University of Toledo, Ohio, reported the first ever case of someone using the Internet while asleep, even sending emails inviting people over for drinks and caviar.
The 44-year-old woman had gone to bed at about 10pm, but rose a couple of hours later, walked to the next room and sat down at her computer. She turned the machine on, conn­ected to the Internet and success­fully logged on with her user name and password, before composing three emails and sending them to friends. She only found out what she had done when one of them telephoned the next day to reply to the email and accept the invitation.

The mails themselves were perhaps not up to the woman’s waking standard; each was in a random mix of upper and lower case characters, badly formatted and containing odd expressions. 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…”

The writers of the report have dubbed this new variation of sleepwalking ‘zzz-mailing’. They say: “We believe writing an email after turning the computer on, connecting to the Internet and remembering the password displayed by our patient is novel. To our knowledge this type of complex behaviour requiring coordinated movements has not been reported before in sleepwalking. She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them. She did not have any history of night terr­ors or sleepwalking as a child.”

Unlike simple sleepwalking, they argue, the activities the woman engaged in required complex behaviour and coordinated movement, as well being able to remember her login details. She had no memory of the events next day. It’s thought that the somnambulistic episode may have been triggered by prescript­ion medication.

While certainly novel, this is hardly the most dramatic sleepwalking behaviour on record: there are cases of people driving cars, playing musical instruments, cooking meals and doing paintings (like Welsh nurse Lee Hadwin, dubbed ‘Kipasso’)."

They then go on to point out several murder cases where sleepwalking was used as a defence. In many of their examples, this defence worked! Ah well, scary stuff. Nothing's weirder than human nature, right? Still...perhaps it would be proper to pull the plug ere we position ourselves on our pillows tonight. Or not. Anyway, I thought it was vaguely interesting stuff, and a quick web-search on "somnambulism" uncovers all sorts of info on sleepwalking! I mean, in case anyone's interested in reading more about it! I would post a handy link, but there's something wrong about linking to another zine here in the Official Abandoned Towers Blog (accept NO substitutes!), so I won't.

So, thanks for your time, and I'll try not to stay away so long before finding something else weird enough to share!

----Your Buddy, Oddcube