Sleep Talking

I sleep with three boys. All the boys talk in their sleep.

I don't know if sleep talking is deemed as a disease, as in the case of sleep walking. Sleep talking is of course less dangerous than sleep walking, but it is probably just as amusing.


Max was sign talking in his sleep before he started talking. Once while we stayed over at my mum's, My sis and I were chatting right through the night. So we were absolutely amused when we saw Max sitting up, eyes still firmly shut, and gesturing "nothing" with both his hands! Max's first words spoken in his sleep were, "Car, car." He once tried saying "thanks" and it came out as "Tans, tans, tans," in his sleep. These days he will cry out "Mamee, Mamee" and also "nan-nan, Nan-nan" when he wants to nurse (more of comfort sucking).


Micah usually replay his every day stress in his sleep. Often he will cry out, "No, Max!" or "Not like that! Not like That! Waaah!" One in a while we get quite funny quips like, "Yah, yah. That's right. That's right." Sometimes he giggles in his sleep too.
Just now, as he was drifting into dreamland, eyes already firmly shut, he started telling me, "Centipedes can bite you. Millipede cannot bite you. Even the big millipedes cannot bite you. Scorpions can sting you. So can hornets and bees..." Those were his preoccupations for today.


Daddy talks in his sleep too. Often he seems to be still working on what a friend called "screen saver mode." Even though he is physically asleep, his brain seems to be still at work. (Is this like The Matrix or what?!) He would be saying things, all the computer and IT jargons, that I can't even repeat. Occasionally he seems to be holding conversations with foreigners and he speaks "American". Only once he spoke in Cantonese. He must be dreaming of his badminton buddies. Often I would mention to him that he was talking in his sleep and he would ask me what he said. Duh? Of course I can't repeat those stuff. can't even remember what they sounded like.



When I was studying Linguistics in my TESL degree, I remember the lecturer mentioning that your mother tongue is the language you dream in. Guess our mother tongue is English-manglish.