“What the fuck are you doing here?
Piss off back to the sick part of my imagination.”
As we’ve already established, Sleep Talkin’ Man is such a separate entity to Adam’s waking self that Adam himself even refers to STM in the third person. And I’m not just talking about those glaringly obvious digressions in personality: Adam’s good-natured humility to STM’s egomania, Adam’s generosity and kindness to STM’s insulting irreverence. There is so much more evidence than these basic traits alone to suggest that a wholly separate being is unleashed when the lights go down.
For example, people always want to know whether Awake Adam is as hilarious as Sleep Talkin’ Man. Well, Adam is a pretty witty guy, and even has the odd moment of comic genius. But does he have that pitch-perfect punch that STM manages with such frequency? Not even close. Adam couldn’t come up with this stuff awake, certainly not this much of it, if he tried. And, believe me, he does try. But where STM rarely delivers a clunker, Adam is never afraid to go for the eye-roll-inspiring, low-hanging fruit joke. You know, the kind of puns that only dads make. Here’s a typical example, from one of our early morning conversations:
KAREN: Last night, you said, ‘Unless you’ve got a chicken shoved up your vagina, you can shut the fuck up. Alright, class, pop quiz!’:
ADAM: We don’t say ’pop quiz’ in the U.K.:
KAREN: Really?:
ADAM: Yeah. If anyone said ’pop quiz,’ it would be a music test … you know, pop … it would be a music—:
KAREN: Groaaaaaaan …
STM: 1, Awake Adam: 0.
But that’s far from the end of it. There are all sorts of words and phrases that STM uses that would never come out of Adam’s mouth. “Douchebag” is a distinctly American insult, never used by Adam in his waking life or, for that matter, by any self-respecting Brit. And, I’m sorry, but “hot dang” in a mildly posh English accent sounds ridiculous. Or how about this:
“Seriously man. I was mega wacked-out. True, blood. Peace out, muthafuckaaah.”
Huh?! Is STM moonlighting as a blaxploitation film actor?
Adam’s nighttime natterings are peppered with all sorts of un-Adam-like, un-English stuff like this. And I know exactly what you’re thinking: no, he didn’t pick it up from me. Of course, like most Brits, Adam has seen his share of American movies. I guess STM’s definition of cool is Quentin Tarantino.
More amazing, though, is the fact that STM sometimes comes out with words and phrases with which Adam, to the best of his conscious knowledge, has no familiarity. One night early in his sleep talking history, Adam muttered,
“Dance for me, go on. Oh, you were! I thought you were having a spaz attack … Doofus.”
When I told his what he’d said, he chuckled, and then said, “Umm, what’s a ’doofus’?” And how about this:
“We gotta get out of here. Oh! There’s a giant aye-aye coming, and he’s pissed!”
Neither of us had any clue what he was talking about. After trying out a variety of spellings in Google, I eventually determined that an aye-aye is a type of lemur. Even after this discovery, Adam had no recollection of ever having heard of such an animal.
But it’s not just the odd word or phrase that distinguishes STM from Adam. STM has even been known to mutter in foreign languages that Adam does not speak. Here he is dabbling in French:
“Touché, mon petit frère.
Now it’s MY turn to fuck you up.”
I actually posted this on the blog as “Touché (blah blah blah in french) …” because neither Adam nor I, listening to the recording, had any clue what he had said. Luckily, a few readers e-mailed us with the proper transcription and translation, “my little brother.”
Now, how about a bit of German:
“Ja. Bitte schoen, mein lieblich. Mit knackwurst. Mmm-hmm. Und Strudel. JISM!”
At least in this case, I knew enough of the language to make sense of it myself. And of course that last word, bellowed out with great enthusiasm, is pure English/American slang (and, incidentally, not an ingredient typically used in German cooking).
All that said, I certainly don’t believe that STM has access to knowledge that is completely alien to Adam. Sleep Talkin’ Man can only be a figment of Adam’s subconscious, so all this stuff must be in there somewhere. Some psychologists believe that a function of the subconscious is to sort relevant information from irrelevant, so that the conscious mind knows what to focus on. Perhaps this is all random mental detritus that just got caught in Adam’s subliminal filter, only to emerge at night. It’s either that, or STM is, after all, a totally separate entity, a night spirit who roams the earth—fleeing rare lemurs, dueling French swordsmen, swearing like a longshoreman—periodically possessing Adam’s sleeping body only to share his experiences with the living. I’d go with theory number one.
Letters to Sleep Talkin’ Man
My cousin often sleepwalks. Late one night in a hotel, he walked out of his room on the sixth floor with his ice bucket, took the elevator down to the lobby, walked to the ice machine, and filled up the bucket. Then, he got back in the elevator, went up to the FIFTH floor, and pounded on a stranger’s door thinking it was his room. When they opened the door, he handed them the bucket of ice, walked over to the refrigerator, opened the fridge door, peed into the fridge, crawled into the stranger’s bed and went right back to sleep.
I can just imagine the review of the hotel that person wrote!
Kristin B.
Alberta, Canada
Hey, don’t creep up on me like that!
Superheroes are wound super-tight.
I’m losing faith in humanity, one faked orgasm at a time.
You never take my balloons out for a walk.
They need some fresh fucking air, take ‘em outside this time. And on a long walk. They like the sun. Don’t take them to the park. I don’t want them on the swings, they’re too little for swings. And the roundabout will make them sick, just take them on a nice walk. See the duckies.
Bye balloons!
You know, it’s a human race. And you lost.
Oh shit. It’s the munchkin sing-song.
Kick ‘em in their mouths, the tuneless fucking freaks.
Butt cheeks ahoy!
There she blows!
Mine’s a potato martini.
Serve it cold.
Well, if I’m the douchebag, you’re the contents, Titfuck!
I got my big meeting today.
The one where I stand up and say, ‘fuck this shit, I quit!’
God, you whine like whale song.
But a lot less eerie and beautiful and more, well, fucking annoying.
Elvis is dead. He is dead, I tell you!
Buried and oh, just a little bit smelly.
Bad burger muncher.
Whoever invented calories is gonna get their face fucked with ice cream cake.
Of course it’s your tomato.
You can do what the fuck you want with it.
Except have sex with it.
Fucking unicorns.
’Oh, I’ve got a horn!’
So fucking obnoxious.
You’re just a horse with a party hat, dickhead.
My butt cheeks are for squeezing.
Go on, take a handful. Take two.
Oh, great. Now you’re older than Jesus.
Your one great achievement in your sad fuck of a life.
I’m sorry, but not knowing what a horcrux is is a deal breaker to me.
Deal with it, muggle-fucker.
It’s a turd. I wrapped it, and put a ribbon on it, and I’m giving it to you. See? I give a shit.
I hate bubbles. Oh sure, they’re nice and pretty to begin with, but then the rainbow colors just go POP! Instant downer. Motherfucking bubbles.
I wanna be a bumble bee. But not a slutty bumble bee, going around, pollinating every flower it sees. I’m a one flower kind of bee. A monogamous bee.
Monogabee! That’s me.
Cream c
heese to the moon, motherfucker!
Oh, I’ve got the tears of a hippo ballerina on my arm. Don’t touch. Don’t touch!
Sparkly. Oh so delicate and sparkly!
Oh, sparkly.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the event of sudden change of pressure in the cabin, you may wish to scream into your masks.
SCREAM BITCHES.
Red panda … blue panda … blue panda … Green! Panda, stop changing colors.
Someone go and get Chameleon and find out what the hell’s happened here.
Of course the mermen are all pissed off.
The mermaids are all bitches. And they can’t sing…. How do they have sex?
Mary had a little lamb. I ate it. Mary’s sad.
Stupid whiny vegetarian!
Don’t stop me. I need to put this on my Santa list before I forget. It’s my Santa list! You know, an Xbox 360 for me … and a cock slap for you. I’m so excited.
Seriously, there’s nothing like a good ass-licking before you go to sleep.
Ooooh!
I’m gonna play chubby bunny until I puke.
Yeeaaahhhh.
I’ll buy the cow and put it on the roof.
High-rise farming is gonna be MY invention.
Yeah, my balloons! Watch them dancing in the sun. Aren’t they—Fuck!
Fuck, you little fuck! Your kid’s a tossbag for popping them. Tossbag kid.
Ohhh, Snuffleupagus.
You’re such a hairy cunt.
“Today’s a bad day to be my underpants, that’s for sure.”
ME: … You also said, “Today is a bad day to be my underpants, that’s for sure.”:
ADAM: Oh dear … it’s never a bad day to be my underpants. In fact, underpants are queuing up just to be worn by me. Did you know that? I open my drawer and they’re all screaming, “Me! Me! Wear me!”:
ME: Awww.:
ADAM: And when I close the drawer again, they all go, “Oh nooooo! Not the daaaark!”:
ME: Ohhhhh.:
ADAM: But it’s okay, ’cause the socks keep them company.:
ME: How do you choose?:
ADAM: Well, it’s like a lucky dip, I just close my eyes and rummage around … It’s like the claw.:
ME: Well, no, because usually the claw doesn’t get anything.:
ADAM: I’m the good claw. But then, there’s one pair of socks, an old pair, wizened and frayed at the back of the drawer. He’s been there for a long time, he’s see it, been there, done it, and he keeps telling stories to all the other socks to keep them going. Some day the old pair of socks will come out and never come back.:
ME: No, leave him there!:
ADAM: He’s going to the sock drawer in the sky. That’s their goal in life. It’s a place where the drawer never closes, and they never have holes, and they’re never frayed, and they’re never jumbled up on top of each other, they’re folded nicely. It’s the sock drawer in the sky.:
ME: Mmm, sounds really nice.:
ADAM: And they’re always in a pair, they’re never single socks.:
ME: If the washing machine eats a sock, but you keep the other sock around for a while thinking maybe you’ll find the sock, but then you send that sock to the sock drawer in the sky, they’re reunited?:
ADAM: Yes. Definitely. Unless they’re bad socks, and they go to sock hell. And they’re permanently stuck in the washing machine.:
ME: What does a sock have to do to go to sock hell?:
ADAM: It’s one of those socks that constantly twists itself around on your foot when you’re wearing it, so it gets really uncomfortable and the heel gets twisted round on the side of your foot. Or it keeps falling down, and comes off in your shoe. Those are bad socks.:
ME: Yeah.:
ADAM: And they go to sock hell, and they go on a spin cycle for eternity. But every sock strives to be a good sock and go to the big sock drawer in the sky.:
“You certainly are incredible. A perfect example of genetics gone wrong.”
I’ve heard it said that sleep talking may be genetic. Perhaps there is something to this. Adam’s mother doesn’t quite talk in her sleep, but she does have her own special sleep behaviors. She sometimes has nightmares, in which she begins to scream. Now, in her dream, it’s a horror-movie scream. But the sound that actually comes out of her sleeping body can only be described as someone trying to do an impersonation of a siren, a rapid “WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO!” Not a nice awakening for anyone else sleeping in the house. She’s also been known to carry out brief, amusing actions from a dream. One night, for example, Adam’s father woke up to find her sitting up, punching at the air. She woke up suddenly and when he asked what she was doing, she replied “I decked the au pair.”
I’ve recently started to wonder whether sleep talking is contagious. In these past couple of years, since Sleep Talkin’ Man emerged and became a hot topic of conversation among family and friends, we’ve had a number of people in our lives—Adam’s father included—start talking in their sleep for the first time! Sounds to me like their subconsciouses are jealous of Adam’s subconscious.
Vampire penguins?
Zombie guinea pigs?
We’re done for … done for.
“Imagine waking up next to you every day … One chunder-bucket moment after another”
If you were previously unfamiliar with the term, you have probably now pieced together the meaning of “chunder-bucket” for yourself. If not, think barf bag and you’ll be on the right track. This sort of utterance makes me so thankful that I’m married to Adam, who courted me with the utmost determination to make me his wife, rather than STM, who associates married life with perpetual vomiting.
From the moment that he came through the airport doors on our first reunion, Adam was intent on marrying me. He was not perturbed by the cynics of the world, including the one that was, it would seem, lying dormant in his own subconscious.
Adam started dropping marriage into the conversation from the second day of that first visit (you remember, the one where we were just getting together for a friendly cup of coffee). He didn’t talk about it, in a serious heart-to-heart. Nor did he toss it out there in jokey, offhand comments, as though testing the waters. He simply referred to our future life together as a part of normal conversation, as a foregone conclusion, with utter confidence in the rightness of it.
But I needed a bit of convincing. On that first visit, I wasn’t sure how I felt: I had a lot of baggage from our shared past that needed unpacking and discarding. I also needed some time to reconcile Adam at thirty-four with the eighteen-year-old boy with whom I had first fallen in love. It was a lot to work through. So whenever Adam confidently asserted the inevitability of our future nuptials, I changed the subject without pretense of subtlety. I wasn’t denying, but I certainly wasn’t confirming.
Adam returned home from our six-day coffee date without any proclamations of love or assurances of a future from me. We had three more weeks of nightly Skyping, and then I, still quite unsure of my feelings, flew over to his stomping grounds to bring in the New Year. It was on December 30, on the escalator of the Tate Modern, that the last of my doubts fell away and I knew I was unquestionably in love with Adam. The certainty hit me all at once, the same way I instantly felt his presence on that first night in Israel half of our lifetimes ago.
It was two weeks later, during his second visit to the States, that Adam next mentioned our future marriage. This time I responded shyly with something like, “That … could … maybe … happen.” Adam is a guy who can spot an opportunity. In that moment, he got down on one knee, took my hand, and asked me to marry him. Well, first he had to brush some popcorn and candy wrappers out of the way, seeing as we were sitting in a Brooklyn movie theatre waiting for Juno to start. It may not have been every girl’s romantic dream, but for me it was perfect.
I didn’t feel like I could truly get engaged without my parents ever having met the man in question, so we decided that we were engaged to be engaged and thus, to fu
lly win my hand, Adam fearlessly, and awkwardly, faced each of my family members, one at a time. We scheduled a trip down to New Jersey.
First stop: Dad’s house. My father lives in my South Jersey hometown, on a little body of water that, when I was a kid, was referred to as “the sandwash” and was where teenagers went to have sex and do drugs. Now, “Shadow Lake” is the idyllic setting for a handful of upper middle-class homes of doctors and lawyers.
It was a crisp Saturday afternoon, the day after we arrived. At this point, we had been there less than twenty-four hours, eight of which had been spent sleeping. So Adam had racked up, let’s say, ten hours getting to know my Dad. The lake was frozen, and Adam and I were down on the jetty skipping rocks across the ice when my dad wandered down with some stale bagels to feed the ducks (given the passion that the Shadow Lake birds habitually show for bagels, I’m convinced they’re Jewish ducks). Since we were just a few hours shy of leaving, it seemed like the right time for me to make myself scarce so that the men could talk.
As Adam tells it, they had been tearing off pieces of bagel and tossing them onto the ice for a while when he took a deep breath and said, “Skip, there is something I want to ask you. I would like to—”
“Yes!” my father jumped in with alarming eagerness, “You can marry my daughter!”
Adam, who had prepared himself for a serious moment, was flustered. “Oh, uh, well, OK then,” he said, and took his bear hug like a man.
Having now covered the principal topic at hand, neither of them had any idea what was supposed to happen next. So, they went back to tossing bits of bagel to the ducks. The problem with this course of action was that the ducks had never, in fact, come to the jetty at all. So there they were, a man and his future son-in-law, loitering awkwardly in the middle of an ever-increasing semicircle of baked goods, desperately wishing that the woman they both loved would come back and rescue them.
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