Sleep talking

thundercake

My fiance sleep-talks...generally in a much louder voice than he normally uses. It usually happens in the middle of the night: he wakes me up half-shouting a series of complete jibberish and nonsense phrases. This has been happening two or three times each night for the past few months. Sometimes we'll hold entire conversations - he'll wake me up to tell me something about turtles or ballerinas, and promptly fall back asleep, leaving me confused and wide awake. Sometimes he says things that are eerie or disturbing. More than once I've thought he was in serious pain.

I am exhausted. Does anyone know why this would be happening so much more often? He never remembers it and it took some convincing to get him to believe that he delivers entire speeches while fast asleep. Is it just stress or lack of sleep?

kevbot

I have the exact same problem... as your fiance. My room-mate used to wake me up to find out what was going on... I'd sometimes be screaming nonsense loud enough to wake up the neighbors. I find that if I go to sleep a bit earlier I don't tend to sleep talk as much, but that just might be me. Some people I know with the same problem go for a massage a few times a week and swear it helps. Another friend of mine does something called sleep eating, where he basically sleepwalks to the kitchen and loads up on carbs. He's eaten entire loaves of bread and buckets of ice-cream with no idea of what he was actually doing. I've walked in on him a few times while he was doing it... he seemed perfectly awake, but almost completely oblivious to my presence. It might be a good idea, if this is just happening recently, to go to the doctor and get some tests done. If you explain your problem they should be able to refer you to the right person. It's a pretty simple test... you just sleep in the hospital hooked up to some sensors.

Good luck!

Iceman.USAF

I do this on occasion, but I find it happens more when I'm sleep deprived and I'm not actually giving my body enough time to shut down for sleep. Does your fiance only sleep a few hours mostly?

XaiberD

I sleep talk as well, though what I say isn't jibberish or loud. Anytime it happens to me it's me responding to people around me talking (my friends have a tendancy to hang out starting late at night, and throughout the summer I had a job that had me waking up at 5am, so me hanging out with them consisted of us sitting around talking for a while, then me falling asleep). It only really happens, as kevbot said, when people are really tired, so he may not be getting enough sleep. On the (sort of?) plus side, since you're not sleeping very much, maybe some sleep-conversations will happen (witnessing these are quite hilarious).

Suggest he go to bed earlier, or take a nap sometime during the day so that he gets more rest. I'd say that you should either consult a sleep doctor (or just a regular physician, I'm sure they can help the problem too), or try to get him to sleep more for a week or so, and if it keeps up, consult a physician. If they prescribe sleeping pills, I'm warning you, they may work for a while, but a friend of mine (who got them prescribed) is now immune to them or something, he's still wide awake after taking them, and has even worse sleep (or did, he started sleeping better, but we have no idea why, it was after he was finished the sleeping pills too.

tldr version: I sleep talk too. See a doctor, or try to have him get more rest (longer night sleep or a nap during the day) and it may go away.