Talking in Your Sleep as an Adult: How Common It Is and When to Worry

If a partner has told you that you talk in your sleep, you’re in the majority. In a telephone survey of 1,000 randomly chosen adults in Norway, 66.8% had talked in their sleep at some point, and 17.7% had done it in the past three months.¹

What sleep talk sounds like

French researchers recorded 883 sleep-talk episodes from 232 adults on overnight video in a sleep lab.³ Most had a sleep disorder, 15 were healthy volunteers, the average age was about 50, and 41% were women.³

What they found	Share
Sounds rather than words: mumbles, shouts, whispers, laughs	59% of episodes3
Clauses that were a “no” or another negation (“No” was the most common word)	21.4% of clauses3
Episodes with a question in them	26%3
Clauses with swearing or other profanity	9.7%3

• Men talked more than women in the recordings, and swore more.³
• The pauses fit a conversation. The silences between phrases matched the timing of someone waiting for a reply. The authors described most sleep talk as “a familiar, tensed conversation with inaudible others.”³

What it doesn’t mean

The AASM says the content is usually harmless, may make no sense at all, and can sometimes sound vulgar or offensive. Whether sleep talk is tied to dreaming is still unknown.² The French study measured grammar and tone, not whether anything said was true.³ A name or a sharp phrase at 2 a.m. isn’t a confession.

When to see a doctor

Sleep talking on its own is benign, and in many cases needs no treatment.² The AASM says to talk to your clinician if:

• It’s happening more often than it used to.²
• It started at an older age.²
• It comes with limb movements or daytime sleepiness.²

Shouting, punching or kicking along with a dream is a different matter. That can be REM sleep behavior disorder, which tends to worsen over time and can injure you or a bed partner. People with it may develop Parkinson disease many years later.⁴ Until you’re assessed, the AASM suggests moving nightstands and lamps away from the bed, putting a soft mat beside it, and sleeping with a pillow between you and your partner, or apart.⁴ See three details to bring about dream enactment.

Related: sleepwalking: four things to note at home, groaning in your sleep and nightmares and imagery rehearsal.

Try: “My partner says that over the past year I’ve started talking in my sleep most nights, and I’m sleepier during the day. Could this be part of another sleep problem?”

Did I Do That in My Sleep? covers sleep talk in Chapter 8, “The Things You Apparently Said,” including a privacy agreement: recordings aren’t played to anyone else without consent, and a sleeping phrase isn’t brought up in an argument. Its Night Map helps you and a partner note what happens, match it to a likely cause and decide what to ask. See the book.