Sleep Walking and
Sleep Talking
Sleep walking and sleep talking are different from night terrors and nightmares.
When a person is sleep walking or sleep talking, they typically have no memory of having done so, though they may remember their dreams when they wake up. Studies have shown that this happens more to children, though for some it does continue into adulthood.
Sleep Walking
For a period in my childhood, I was a sleep walker. No one knows how often this occurred, as I have no memory of it except for one occasion, and unless someone else was awake and saw me, my family had no idea of how often this was happening.
I remember only one experience, and that is because I was woken up while sleep walking. I was at my grandmother’s house and sleeping with her in her bedroom. She and my grandfather slept in separate bedrooms, as is the custom for some couples as they get older. Her bedroom was at the front of the house and had a door that led outside to the front porch. Back in those days, many homes in the South had access to porches from the bedrooms, as not everyone had air-conditioning. On hot summer nights some people would sleep on the porch to enjoy the cooler night air.
On one of these nights at my grandparents’ home, I sleep walked right out of that front door, unlocking it and going to sit on the front porch swing in my nightgown. I would have no memory of doing this if my grandmother had not woken me up because the front door to her room was wide open and rain was blowing in. She went to close the front door only to find me sitting there on the front porch swing. She was startled at first to see someone there on the swing. As she came up to the porch and saw that it was me there, she called out to me, but I didn’t respond. She was very worried because it was pouring rain outside, and while the front porch had a roof, the wind was blowing the rain onto the front porch. When I didn’t respond to her call, she came closer to me and asked me what I was doing on the porch swing at this time of night. She said that I responded to her by saying, “I love the rain.”
At this point she realized that something was not right and touched my arm. That’s when I woke up to find myself sitting on the front porch swing in my long white nightgown with no shoes on. Because I was woken up, I vividly remember this night and still recall how it felt to wake up on the front porch swing in the rain. It’s a very happy memory for me because I love the rain. Rain is very soothing to me, and I love nothing more than a rainy day! Getting to sit on a porch swing at night watching it rain would be something I would love to do. My parents have other memories of me sleep walking around the house around that age, but there were no other times when I went outside, thankfully.
Sleep walking is still being studied, with some research concentrating on sleep deprivation as somehow leading to sleep walking. While the person typically has no memory of sleep walking, they do still tend to remember their dreams. For example, when my grandmother woke me up on the front porch, I remembered that I was having a really great dream about being on a swing in the rain. I just didn’t realize at the time how literal that experience was.
Sleep Talking
Sleep talking is something I have done several times. While my parents noticed that I sleep walked for a period of time, they also noticed that it stopped around the age of eleven. They had no idea that I talked in my sleep until two years later.
During this time, my family was preparing to move out of state, and all our furniture had already been packed up and taken by the movers. We were staying in a furnished apartment for a couple of weeks until we finished the school year and made the move. My father had gone ahead to where we were moving to handle things there while my mother took care of everything where we were living. Because of the tight quarters in the little apartment, I was sleeping in the same room as my mother, where there were two twin beds. The first night we moved in there, something very strange occurred, as my mother later told me and my grandmother.
There was a phone in the bedroom on the nightstand between the two beds so that my mother could receive calls from her work in the oil and gas business. She was leaving this job when we moved, and people were calling her to get information they needed before she was gone. In the past couple of months, she had been out in the field where the oil rigs were pumping and had collected a lot of data to report back about the status of the rigs and the production.
Late during the first night there, while I was sleeping she received a phone call from one of the engineers who had some detailed questions for her regarding the status of what was going on in one of the fields. The man on the phone was asking her questions, and my mother said that before she could answer him, I was answering the questions as if I had heard him on the phone.
That was strange enough, because this was before the age of cell phones. She was on a landline, holding the receiver of the phone to her ear, so it would be very difficult for me to overhear the conversation. Also, I was deep in sleep, which she could tell from my breathing, yet I continued to answer these questions that the man would ask before she could even respond to them.
Now here’s the really interesting part: the questions were very detailed and specific to ratios and calculations regarding amounts of oil being retrieved and processed as well as timelines for certain parts of the project to be completed. No information of this kind was accessible to me, nor at that age did I pay much attention to what my mother did at work. Even if I had, these calculations and data were information that she had just received earlier that day, and she had not even had the time to look them over. That’s why she wasn’t responding quickly to each question, as each time the man asked her a question, she was looking through the reports in order to find the information.
To her great shock, each time she found the answer, I had already answered the question, and I was right every single time!
This continued for several minutes into the conversation, and at first she was fascinated hearing me give these replies. After a few minutes, though, the man could hear my voice in the background and asked who was there with her listening to the conversation. This was private, confidential information regarding this oil company and their oil wells, and he wanted to make sure no one was overhearing this sensitive data.
My mother replied that it was her daughter, and he said, “Okay, I’ll wait. Get her back to bed before we go further.” My mother knew she couldn’t explain that I was asleep yet somehow talking in my sleep and giving correct answers to formulas and data before she could process it from the reports. So she put the phone down and woke me up.
I had no idea what was going on. She asked me if I could go into the living room and watch TV for a little bit as she was on the phone with work. I had no problem with this request, as it was a chance to watch late-night TV, which I wasn’t often allowed to do.
When I went into the living room, I found my grandmother there watching a program and sat down next to her. She asked me what I was doing up at this late hour, and I explained to her that my mom was on a phone call. A little while later, my mother came into the room and told my grandmother and me what had happened.
“How did you know this information?” she asked me.
“All I remember is that you woke me up and asked me to come out here and watch TV.”
She pulled out some of her research papers and asked me a few questions, and I laughed. “You expect me to know the answers to this? You know math is my worst subject. I have no idea how to do those calculations.” I laughed at the incredulity of it.
When she told me and my grandmother what I had been doing, it was a shock to us all. As we discussed this anomaly, I shared that I had been dreaming about the oil field and that I would see the information in my dream about the oil rigs. Much like the dream in which I enjoyed being in the rain with my sleep walking, I had no idea that while I was dreaming about the oil fields, I was speaking this information out loud. In the dream, I was speaking with a man who wanted to know this information, and I was providing him with answers.
Learning to Sleep Talk in a Dream State
Edgar Cayce would lie in a dream state while conscious and lucid. He could quickly receive answers from almost any question spoken out loud to him. He was able to do this repeatedly yet unable to explain how the process occurred. It is still a mystery.
Cayce’s method invites us to consider what outside stimuli enter our dreams while we are asleep. Can we absorb information like in the stories in which a person puts a book under their pillow? What if we sleep with the TV on—what type of information are we collecting from the news or other type of program?
Additionally, are we capable of sending telepathic information to each other as we dream? Was I telepathically reading the reports that my mother was holding while I was in a dream state? During the dream state, was I able to hear the questions coming from this man prior to him stating them out loud to my mother, so that I had the answers before she could even reply? Was it the act of my mother asking the questions out loud that triggered my response to answer out loud? Is this how it worked with Cayce—did he answer out loud because someone was there to ask him questions while he was in this state?
There are more questions than answers to types of experiences in which dreams interact with our psychic abilities. I don’t know how to recreate sleep walking or sleep talking. I only have my personal experiences to share, and I hope they may be of some assistance to you if you have experienced these phenomena or know someone who has. In fact, I’ve tried to replicate my own Cayce type of experience while in a dream state. Here’s how it began:
Replicating Cayce’s Experience
The next person to notice my sleep talking was my husband. It began years later in a similar scenario with questions. He worked in IT, and when there’s a problem in IT, everyone works around the clock to fix the problem until it’s right.
He once received a call in the middle of the night about a technical problem. In this case, he had a cell phone and put the call on speaker so he could listen while typing on his laptop. He kept a desk in the bedroom for the late-night emergencies so that he could jump right out of bed and be on the computer when needed.
The problem he was dealing with had something to do with software, and they were asking him several questions about Unix and how things were operating on the servers. He was in deep thought, considering what the problem could be and where it stemmed from. While he was thinking about this, I spoke out loud in my sleep and began to give him information about Unix and where the problem was.
At first, he said that he responded to me, joking and saying, “Quiet down, woman. I’m working here.” He thought that I was teasing him.
Instead of quieting down, I said, “The problem is with this,” and gave him very technical information.
That time he listened and thought, Could this be true? He looked into it and discovered that was indeed the problem. He turned back to me and asked, “How did you know that?”
I didn’t respond, as I was fast asleep. He shook me to wake me up. I asked what was wrong, and he looked at me confused.
“How did you know the answer to the problem?”
“What problem?”
It was then that he realized I had been sleep talking. He explained a little bit about what was going on at work and said he had no idea that I knew so much about Unix. I laughed and said that he knew full well that I didn’t know anything about Unix. He then explained the depth and complexity of my answer to him and how it had led him to the solution. We were both surprised.
The next morning as we discussed what had happened with me further, he proposed that obviously somewhere deep in my brain I had the ability to understand very complex technical problems and that I could become a system administrator if I wanted to do so. My response was no way. I could never work on that stuff—it’s too logic-minded and technical for me. I would be bored.
He asked if he could ask me other questions while I slept. We wanted to experiment and see what kind of things I knew about or had the ability to access from the akashic records, global consciousness, or other energy fields where I was obtaining this information. What was most fascinating to him was that when I was in this state, I didn’t spend any time processing this information when it came through me. The answers were immediate and very specific.
We wondered if this was how it had worked for Edgar Cayce when he went into a light meditative state to receive the answers he did for his readings. Over time, as we experimented with my sleep talking, we found that I could answer questions about a wide variety of topics that I had no idea about when I was awake. Additionally, many times the answers related to topics that I not only had very little knowledge on but also tended to have very little interest in.
We also found that when I woke up, I would have been having a dream about the subject that I was being questioned on. I didn’t like to do this exercise very often, as I felt that it disturbed my normal dream sequences as well as caused sleep deprivation from being woken up repeatedly throughout the night.
The one thing I would not do in this state was divulge any secrets. Some part of my consciousness was aware of the intention of the question and would not share information of a personal sort on anyone or about myself. The answers were typically more focused on information on large calculations, data retrieval, technical situations, and sometimes on future events.
This is all just another testament to how we are able to be psychic and pull information from the other planes, such as the global consciousness and many other levels, through dreamtime.