TL;DR Note: If you don’t want to read this newsletter today, could you at least fill out this survey please? 🙏🏻💜

A few mornings ago, I woke up, as I often do, verbally saying aloud the phrase that I was saying in my dream before I burst up through the threshold of consciousness.

“Can’t turn the lights off!” I muttered aloud, still half asleep, but awake enough to hear myself talking. I was dreaming about a wall covered with light switches that controlled a ceiling covered with lights. Some children needed to go to sleep, so I was trying to dim the room to allow them to rest, but I couldn’t find the correct switch to turn off all the lights. One particularly naughty child would run around when my back was turned, and switch a light on, frustrating my efforts.

It was a funny dream that left me musing about what in my life felt like a possible “switch” was occurring, or where I felt I needed a rest but wasn’t getting it, due to being too “wired” in the on position.

I also chuckled about the fact that I was talking in my sleep again. I have done so since I was a child. After a slumber party once, my friend told me I scared her to death by “telling the devil to go away” while I was sleeping. I had no memory of saying that, and I didn’t even remember dreaming about any devils!

Aside from being sorry about scaring my friend, I’ve never thought too much of the fact that I sleep-talk. I’ve slept alone most of my life, so there’s nobody around to become annoyed with this habit. And even if someone were bothered by it, there’s not really much I can do to change it. In my case, it’s a harmless quirk of my brain.

Sleep-talking, or “somniloquy” can sometimes be a symptom of a sleep disorder, or a byproduct of trauma or stress, but usually it is completely harmless; a normal part of nature. For those for whom it is not pathological, it is usually hereditary. It is claimed to be more common in children than adults, although I question this. Parents frequently are awake longer than their children and can observe them sleeping, while adults do not always have someone to tell them what they’re doing while they sleep. Adults may think their sleep-talking has gone away, when really, they may just not know if they are doing it. It can be difficult to know if you talk in your sleep, since… well… you’re asleep at the time! There are only three ways to discover it:

1. Another person who is observing you while you sleep, informs you.

2. You set up a recording device (such as a sleep app, for example) to record you through the night.

3. Your sleep talking occurs while you are in the process of emerging from sleep to wakefulness, allowing your conscious mind to be aware of what you are doing.

On the morning I mentioned, I began to wonder if there could an astrological connection behind my nocturnal verbal utterances. In my natal chart, my Moon sextiles my Mercury quite closely—only 1.5º apart. The Moon could represent sleep, and Mercury could represent talking. An aspect between them might point to sleep-talking. I wondered if this was a coincidence, or if there were a connection in other charts besides just mine.

I inherited the sleep-talking trait from my mother, who also talks in her sleep, so I checked out her chart. What do you know… Moon sextile Mercury with only 6º separation. I began to ask around. None of my siblings have natal Moons aspecting their Mercuries, and none of them got the somniloquy gene. My best friend has Moon and Mercury in mutual conjunction, as well as a wide (12º) sextile, and she talks in her sleep.

Hmmm! Interesting!

I decided to take a poll on Twitter, and I got a surprisingly large number of votes.

Over half of the people with Moon-Mercury connections talk in their sleep. Whereas only roughly 1/3 of people with no Moon-Mercury connections talk in their sleep. I know it’s just a Twitter poll, so we need large grains of salt here, but it seems like there could be some kind of significant correlation waiting to be discovered.

I should have narrowed the question to just aspects, not reception. Including two variables may have muddied the results! Now I want to dig a bit deeper and just focus on aspects.

Hypothesis: Moon-Mercury aspects in the natal chart correlate positively to somniloquy.

The Moon aspects Mercury (in “major” aspects) for roughly 1/2 the time out of every synodic cycle, if we use a 12º orb for the Moon and only major aspects. How do I figure? Here’s the breakdown of the Moon going around a 360º circle, and how many degrees of that circle it is in orb of aspecting Mercury:

Check out the Moon-Mercury synodic cycle for a visual of what I mean. (Sorry, my software freaks out a bit for the first sign, but it works after that.)

So the Moon and Mercury spend about half the time in the Zodiac in aspect to each other. This should mean that any astrological meaning related to Moon-Mercury aspects should correlate to roughly half of the population. If my hypothesis is correct, this would mean that roughly half the population talks in their sleep. Is this true? What is the population prevalence of somniloquy? 

It was hard to find good data on this, as there aren’t very many studies on the topic. It’s not surprising that research on this is scarce, since sleep-talking is rarely pathological. Also, it’s difficult to measure, since episodes are not predictable, and most people don’t measure their sleep behaviors long-term, if at all.

One study shows that about 67% of people have ever talked in their sleep, but only about 17% of people report having talked in their sleep within the past 3 months (Bjorvatn, B., Grønli, J., & Pallesen, S.). That study was limited to Norwegians, so results may or may not apply to other races. It was also just a snapshot in time. I found a slightly more comprehensive study, (Nielsen, T., Svob, C., and Kuiken, D.) which not only measured population prevalance (how many people have every done it), but also frequency (how often it happens.) The limitations of this study are that it drew only from first-year college students who were all around a similar age, and that we do not know the racial breakdown of the participants. So again, it is not clear how generalizable these results are to the broader population. Nonetheless, the results are interesting.

This chart shows how many people have done these behaviors at least once in the past year (left side) and at least once per year during childhood (right side.) The black bars indicate nonspecific questions, such as “how often do you talk in your sleep,” while the white bars indicate more detailed questions, such as “how often have you awakened from a dream about talking to find that you are speaking out loud some of the words in the dream?” I circled the results I’m interested in: prevalence of sleep-talking among adults.

Well, we have a match, folks. Over 50% of the population talks in their sleep… and the Moon aspects Mercury about 50% of the time!

A few questions come to mind from this:

• I would be interested to know if there were a connection between types of aspects and the frequency of sleep-talking behaviors. For example, do sextiles and trines sleep-talk more often than squares and oppositions?

• Is there a connection between types of aspects and the pathology of sleep-talking? Are squares and oppositions more likely to be accompanied by problematic sleeping disorders, while trines and sextiles more likely to be benign?

• I would also be interested in whether the closeness of the aspect’s orb correlates with frequency of the sleep-talking. Do closer orbs indicate more frequent episodes of sleep talking?

I can’t answer the first two questions right now. But I may be able to shed some light on the last question using the data from the study. Table 3 in the study shows the breakdown of reported frequency of various sleep behaviors. Again, I added boxes around the data I’m most interested in:

18.4% talk in their sleep “sometimes,” which must mean at least more than once per year, and 5.9% talk in their sleep “often.” I am definitely in the “often” category. Now let’s break down percentage of time the Moon aspects Mercury, using tighter orbs.

If we use a 7º orb, the percentage of time is roughly 31%.

And if we use a 3º orb, the percentage of time is roughly 13%.

These numbers do not correlate as nicely as total prevalence of any frequency. But there is still a general direction downward, which is interesting. Of course, the only way to know for sure would be to examine hundreds of charts.

Ultimately, I may never know the answer! But I built a survey, just in case. If anyone reading would like to contribute to my survey, perhaps I could get enough participants to formulate firmer numbers! Could you fill out 7 quick questions? If you don’t know astrology well enough to answer the questions, email or DM me, and I’ll help you.

Happy sleeping!

References

Bjorvatn, B., Grønli, J., & Pallesen, S. (2010). Prevalence of different parasomnias in the general population. Epidemiology of Sleep Disorders, 11(10), 1031–1034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2010.07.011

Nielsen T; Svob C; Kuiken D. Dream-enacting behaviors in a normal population. SLEEP, 2009;32(12):1629-1636.