Reading the ramblings of Sleep Talkin’ Man remind me that while I don’t talk in my sleep, I sometimes say and do things in that weird, semi-conscious state between sleep and full, wide awake, consciousness…things that are strange and strangely related to the context of the waking environment…and most times, things that I would never say or do if fully awake.  For example, I was once awakened by a ringing telephone on my nightstand at 4:30 a.m., and I went all Maxwell Smart and tried to answer a shoe which was not far from my bed.  I remember trying to hit the answer button on the bottom of my shoe, holding it up to my ear to talk, and being perplexed as to why it was still ringing.  It took about 30 seconds before I realized what I was doing, but by then it was too late to answer the real phone.  Another time, I incorporated my dog’s nails clicking on a linoleum floor near my bedroom into my dream as rain hitting the window, shot up out of bed, and tried to close the window to prevent the rain from coming in.

And it can be worse when there’s someone else there.

I have a standard spiel where I tell overnight guests that they should just ignore anything and everything, good or bad, that comes out of my mouth for the first five minutes after I wake up, especially if I’m awoken suddenly by an alarm clock, an inadvertent kick, etc.

Tracy did not heed my advice.

Continue reading . . . 

I was on the phone with a friend of mine, who happens to be blonde, and she started to tell me about a boat party.  Since she was on a cell phone, and there was some background noise, I wasn’t sure if she said “boat” or “goat”, so I asked her…

Me: Wait, ‘boat party’ or ‘goat party’?
Her: Boat as in baa.
Me: Uh…um…uh…you, uh…you do realize that didn’t exactly clear it up for me, right?

I was having dinner with a friend and we were having some chicken roll appetizers.  She dipped her fork into one of the dipping sauces, tasted it, and said, “Tastes like horseradish.  Of course, I’ve never had horseradish, but I assume that this is what it would taste like.”

I went out on a date a while back.

While at dinner, I asked her if she thought that President Clinton had had some “extracurricular” activity with Monica.

She replied, “I don’t think I saw that episode.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.  It was on all the newscasts and newspapers in the previous few days.

“Huh?” I asked.

“I think I missed that episode.”  She must have seen the confusion on my face, because she added, “You’re talking about ‘Friends’ right?”

Scary, isn’t it?

A few days after that, we were talking on the phone, and she asked me, “If there’s one person of all of history that you could meet, who would it be?”

I thought about it for a few seconds, and said, “Leonardo da Vinci.”

She replied in an excited tone, “Oh, he was so good in ‘Titanic’ wasn’t he?”

Needless to say, it’s been a while since I’ve talked to her.