Andrew Watson, 26, was so good at coordinating international business deals that he did it in his sleep.
“I’d fall asleep with my work phone next to my head, [then send emails] and have no memory of doing it,” Watson, who worked for a cloud computing company, tells The Post. “It was really bad” — so bad that the San Francisco resident once woke up to discover he had signed off on a million-dollar deal.
According to a new report out of Villanova University, sleep-texting is a growing issue among young men and women. Scientists surveyed 372 students and found that nearly a quarter of them reported texting in their sleep — and 72 percent of those sleep-texters didn’t remember their midnight missives in the light of day.
“I think it’s more common than we realize,” says lead study author Elizabeth Dowdell, who was inspired to research the phenomenon when she heard undergrads discussing it.
FACEBOOK HIT BY PRIVACY ADVOCATES, LAWMAKERS OVER DATA-SHARING AGREEMENTS
Thankfully for Watson, who now works for a primary-care startup, there were no negative repercussions to the deal he signed. Still, he was taken aback when the agreement was brought up at a meeting — and he had no recollection of it.
“I will credit my ‘sleep career self’ with being a relatively frugal corporate finance partner,” Watson says with a laugh, explaining that he probably coasted by on “corporate muscle memory.”
Andrew Watson admits to cutting business deals by text in his sleep.
Not all sleep-texters are as articulate as Watson, though.
“The first time I realized I was [sleep-texting], I was texting the boy who is now my boyfriend,” says Madeleine Hamingson, 23, a New York native currently residing in LA. “I would text him, like, these insane things,” she says, noting her messages were often nonsense about pets. “It feels like drunk texting.”
To read more of this story in the New York Post, where it was first published, click here.