Do You Talk or Curse in Your Sleep

SeaBreeze

SeaBreeze

Endlessly Groovin'
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Study says that many people will curse in their sleep, every now and then I'll hear my husband saying something but not always understandable, I might say a word or two in a nightmare....but neither of us have cursed out loud in our sleep. Do you talk or curse in your sleep? medicalxpress.com/news/2018-01-reveals-talkers.html

A team of researchers with members from several institutions in France has conducted a study regarding sleep talking and has found that most sleep talking is not only negative in nature, but involves a large amount of swearing. In their paper published in the journal Sleep, the group describes their study, which involved watching and recording hundreds of volunteers as they slept.

Objectives

Speech is a complex function in humans, but the linguistic characteristics of sleep talking are unknown. We analyzed sleep-associated speech in adults, mostly (92%) during parasomnias.

Methods

The utterances recorded during night-time video-polysomnography were analyzed for number of words, propositions and speech episodes, frequency, gaps and pauses (denoting turn-taking in the conversation), lemmatization, verbosity, negative/imperative/interrogative tone, first/second person, politeness, and abuse.
Results

Two hundred thirty-two subjects (aged 49.5 ± 20 years old; 41% women; 129 with rapid eye movement [REM] sleep behavior disorder and 87 with sleepwalking/sleep terrors, 15 healthy subjects, and 1 patient with sleep apnea speaking in non-REM sleep) uttered 883 speech episodes, containing 59% nonverbal utterance (mumbles, shouts, whispers, and laughs) and 3349 understandable words.

The most frequent word was "No": negations represented 21.4% of clauses (more in non-REM sleep). Interrogations were found in 26% of speech episodes (more in non-REM sleep), and subordinate clauses were found in 12.9% of speech episodes. As many as 9.7% of clauses contained profanities (more in non-REM sleep).

Verbal abuse lasted longer in REM sleep and was mostly directed toward insulting or condemning someone, whereas swearing predominated in non-REM sleep. Men sleep-talked more than women and used a higher proportion of profanities. Apparent turn-taking in the conversation respected the usual language gaps.

Conclusions

Sleep talking parallels awake talking for syntax, semantics, and turn-taking in conversation, suggesting that the sleeping brain can function at a high level. Language during sleep is mostly a familiar, tensed conversation with inaudible others, suggestive of conflicts.
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How would be know if we talked in our sleep unless we sleep with someone who tells us? To date, I've never talked in my sleep. A cluttered troubled mind = more troubled sleep. Meditation before bed, or even in bed can really help.
 
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Both of us talk in our sleep. My husband is doing an inventory at work, so I hear him talking about that. I guess I just mumble, though one time I shouted for the police so loud I woke us both up.
 

The Spousal Equivalent tells me every morning what I talked about in my sleep the night before. Usually it's about losing something or not being able to figure where I'm going. One night he said I was speaking what sounded like Russian. I don't speak Russian.

The one incident he likes to tell is the first night I spent the night with him, I sat up in bed and yelled, "***-******, _______! That ******* cow is on fire AGAIN!" You may fill in the blanks as you like, but it was pretty profane. I've not figured why the cow would be on fire the first time, never less on fire AGAIN. Dreams are funny things....
 
I don't think I talk or curse in my sleep. But several times over the years (and more recently, also) I have woken up in the morning to reach over from my bed to tun on the light in a lamp and got nothing. Then I would find the bulb nearby on my desk. At first I thought maybe the bulb went bad, but when I put the bulb back in it works.
 
Olivia said:
I don't think I talk or curse in my sleep. But several times over the years (and more recently, also) I have woken up in the morning to reach over from my bed to tun on the light in a lamp and got nothing. Then I would find the bulb nearby on my desk. At first I thought maybe the bulb went bad, but when I put the bulb back in it works.
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Olivia, who took the bulb out of the lamp those times, was it you and you just forgot? :confused:
 
SeaBreeze said:
Olivia, who took the bulb out of the lamp those times, was it you and you just forgot? :confused:
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It could only have been me. I'm thinking it's some form of sleepwalking although it's only happened with light bulbs. I have a story about the
first time it happened which was many years ago. When I woke up I tried to turn on the floor lamp with the chain right beside the bed.
And nothing happened but the bulb was on my desk. I thought maybe in the night I needed to turn on the light and when it seemed to be burned out, I then took it out
meaning to put in a new bulb in the morning.

Anyway, when I did get up, the first thing I did was to write an e-mail to my cousin in Austria. I did it early in the morning because of the time
difference. One of the things I wrote was to ask him what he had done that day (it would have been evening there). And when he answered, he
talked about a pear that he had eaten and how great it was and went on and on about it. I didn't think much about it until I realized (we wrote in German)
that the word for light bulb in German was the same as the word for pear. That kind of threw me (because he never talked about eating a pear before) and
made me wonder, hey, did I do some kind of astral traveling and saw him eat that pear? I know it's crazy but it did occur to me. And he has passed
away since then and a couple more times I've had a bulb from a lamp show up on my desk. Weird...Lol
 
Wow Olivia interesting story to be sure! They say some people sleepwalk and even cook in their sleep when under the influence of sleeping pills like Ambien, thankfully I've never walked in my sleep....that I know of anyway. My sympathy for the loss of your cousin. :rose:
 
jujube said:
The Spousal Equivalent tells me every morning what I talked about in my sleep the night before. Usually it's about losing something or not being able to figure where I'm going. One night he said I was speaking what sounded like Russian. I don't speak Russian.

The one incident he likes to tell is the first night I spent the night with him, I sat up in bed and yelled, "***-******, _______! That ******* cow is on fire AGAIN!" You may fill in the blanks as you like, but it was pretty profane. I've not figured why the cow would be on fire the first time, never less on fire AGAIN. Dreams are funny things....
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That's hilarious, jujube! I've often wished I could hold on to a dream long enough to know what I was dreaming about.
 
I do not talk or curse. I moan! I learned this back in the early 70's. I went to Cape Cod with a group of girls. It was February so the place was a ghost town. It was not all built up the way it is now. We were sitting around talking. Finally I got too tired and went to bed. A while later they woke me up. They told me I had scared them silly because it was dark outside and suddenly they heard a loud moaning sound. It was me. Many years later I would take the commuter bus into Hartford. The delightful rocking motion of the bus would put me right to sleep and of course I would moan and wake to weird looks from nearby passengers.
 
It's funny that I read this just now. I never knew I talked in my sleep until last night. My husband woke me up and told me I was yelling. "Who are you" over and over again. I guess it's official now that I finally lost my mind.
 
I shared a bedroom with my younger sister for a number of years. She frequently woke me up, calling my name and warning me about someone. I never understood who she meant, but she would say things like "They're out there now. Don't look outside." Her eyes weren't focused and it was obvious she was asleep. After she delivered her warning, she would lie down and go back to sleep.

I was a sleepwalker. My mother had locks put high enough on our doors that I would have to drag a chair over to get to them. She would hear me moving the chair and take me back to bed. Until she put those locks up on the doors, I led her on several good chases. I remember bits and pieces of my runaway attempts; mostly I remember thinking I had to get out of there.
 


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