TO sleep, perchance to talk nonsense. Internet users have suddenly become obsessed with what we get up to in bed. It is not so much who we sleep with but what we say in our slumber that has triggered the latest online craze.
The Sleep Talkin' Man, a web page that received more than 1m hits last week, goes even more public tomorrow when audio recordings of Adam Lennard, 36, an advertising executive from southwest London, are broadcast for the first time.
Lennard utters gibberish in his sleep at home in Richmond, but his talk of "vampiric penguins and zombie guinea pigs", fish with big floppy lips and custard in his pants, has attracted a huge audience to a blog written by his US-born wife, Karen, also 36.
Such is the appeal that last week Lennard and his wife received orders for 120 T-shirts featuring quotes from his sleep. They insist they are not cashing in on a publicity stunt, though they are now talking about launching a book on Adam's night-time thoughts.
Hoax or not, the couple still have a long way to go to beat Bizkit, an American labrador cross who runs in her sleep, even standing up to bark while clearly still deep in a dognap. Three films of her have been viewed a total of 20m times since last February. They have also prompted a debate between animal-lovers and vets over whether the dog is chasing an imaginary rabbit or having a seizure.
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YouTube has more than 1,000 videos of people, dogs and even a budgie holding forth in their sleep. One American woman recalls in a video that, while sleepwalking, she thought she was having sex with George Washington, the first US president. "Things were going better than my wildest dreams," she says without a hint of irony.
Experts believe that as many as one in 20 people may experience forms of parasomnia, a disorder in which we talk, walk or express emotions in our sleep.
Despite years of research, scientists admit they still do not fully know what goes on in our brains when we are asleep, even though we spend a third of our life in that state. For the majority it is a blissful lapse into unconsciousness, in which we go through sleep cycles lasting 1½-2 hours. The stages are marked by different brainwave activity but some people may not make the complete switch from one stage to another, leading to conditions such as talking in one's sleep and sleepwalking.
Jim Horne, the head of sleep research at Loughborough University, said: "Sleep-talking is nothing to do with dreaming; when you are dreaming, you are paralysed and cannot talk. It occurs in a light form of sleep when your brain is mulling over things at the back of your mind. Often it is gobbledegook, but people can spill the beans when they sleep-talk. Many divorces will have started that way."
The website YouTube has more than 3,000 videos of people supposedly sleepwalking, but none shows anything as extreme as the story of the 15-year-old girl who climbed 130ft up a crane in London. Police, alerted to a possible suicide attempt, found her asleep on a narrow concrete counterweight.
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An internet forum called The Craziness You've Heard People Say in Their Sleep collects evidence of sleep-talking. A man tells how his brother declared at 3am: "Sleepy Mexican community, stop feeding me marshmallows."
The Lennards, who married last July, say Karen started recording Adam and transcribing his sayings on to a daily blog two months ago for their own enjoyment. Previously she had just noted his sayings on a computer. They say the blog went viral when it was mentioned on an American website called Reddit.com. On one day alone it had 248,000 visits.
By this weekend they had 75 products for sale on the site, with £15 T-shirts and £20 bags adorned with Adam's sayings, such as "I can't control the kittens. Too many whiskers" and "I haven't put on weight. Your eyes are fat". Karen works as a web development manager for a media company. On her MySpace page she recalls: "As a child, my favourite pastime was dissecting fresh fish and labelling their fishy little parts on paper towels."
The Lennards insist that nothing is contrived - despite Adam saying in his sleep: "This fish has got big floppy lips. Floppy lips. Fishy kissy, fishy kissy," and calling out: "Look out! Marshmallows." He also occasionally breaks into American slang while sleep-talking.
Karen, who now records her husband each night on a voice-activated digital recorder, said: "I can't explain why he uses American words. They are not words I use."
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Adam said: "We thought it was going to be a bit of fun to start with and now it's blown up into this social media sensation. I know it almost sounds too contrived with the two industries we work in, but it started as fun for family and friends."
Roderick Orner, a sleep disorder specialist and visiting professor of clinical psychology at Lincoln University, said: "It's interesting so many people are following Sleep Talkin' Man. It may appeal to a voyeuristic inclination in some."
Colin Espie, director of Glasgow University's sleep research centre, is equally intrigued by Lennard's case. "What we do in our sleep is one of the mysteries of science that we haven't unlocked yet," he said. "This is why people are so fascinated."