Teens Now 'Sleep Texting'

Everybody panic: Our latest youth crisis has teens texting in their sleep. On CNET, Chris Matyszczyk calls it "like sleepwalking, but potentially more amusing." As an expert explains to CBS Philadelphia, “The phone will beep, they’ll answer the text. They’ll either respond in words or gibberish. [It] can even be inappropriate." What the professor describes sounds a lot like texting while awake (example: "Ex-girlfriends contacting ex-boyfriends, saying 'I miss you. I want to see you'"), with one difference. "When they wake up, there's no memory." So ... kind of like drunk-texting, then?

But, the professor insists, this is a real problem. "This interrupts what could be a good night’s sleep, because they're an hour-and-a-half or two hours into their sleep cycle, and they're answering texts or the machines are beeping at them." How to combat this new woe? As Matyszczyk quips, "Clearly, the highly complex, radical remedy is to turn off the phone." Or at least keep it on the other side of the room. (More texting stories.)