Sleep-Talker Dion McGregor

Born in 1922, Dion McGregor's day job, if it could be called that, was songwriter. His most famous contribution to music was recorded by Barbara Streisand in 1965: "Where Is The Wonder."

Far more interesting and more celebrated, however, was Dion McGregor's nighttime proclivities. Dion McGregor was and still is the world's most famous sleep-talker.

Upon falling asleep at night McGregor would launch into elaborate narrations of his dreams, telling surreal but compelling tales that usually ended up with McGregor shrieking in terror. These strange somniloquies might never have been acknowledged if not for the fact that Mr. McGregor had a roommate who found the phenomenon interesting and began to tape them.

Fellow songwriter, Michael Preston Barr, who collaborated with McGregor on songs, was the man responsible for making McGregor's somniloquies available to the world, and to McGregor himself, for that matter. McGregor claimed to have no memory of the intense dreams he narrated. In fact he was as puzzled as anyone concerning his nighttime rants. In 1964 the two put out an LP, "The Dream World Of Dion McGregor (He Talks In His Sleep)" and a book of the same title.

The LP is now available on CD, while the book, a more comprehensive collection of the dreams, is long out of print and hard to locate. (Though I did manage to get a copy through interlibrary loans.) A second CD, "The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor: More Outrageous Recordings of the World's Most Renowned Sleeptalker," was released in 1999. It contained material that was considered possibly offensive in 1964.

Frequently McGregor narrates fantastic voyages, like his trip to the bottom of the sea, or the balloon ride to the moon. The tales are sublime and terrifying and frequently hilarious.

It is estimated that about 50 percent of children sleep-talk but most outgrow the behavior. Only about 5 percent of adults exhibit somniloquy, and for the vast majority of those people it is confined to a little mumbling, sometimes punctuated by profanities, but usually not as developed as what Mr. McGregor experienced.

Although it is considered quite harmless, sleep talking can be disturbing to listeners who interpret the utterances as logical and consequential. Sleep-talkers usually have little or no memory of the events and they are nonsensical as anyone else's dreams.

Though McGregor died in 1994, there is still considerable interest in his unusually extreme parasomnia. There is even a MySpace profile at: http://www.myspace.com/dionmcgregor. Clips can be heard there.