Teens have started sleep-texting

The burden of being a teen never lightens. You think you've got studying cracked, when along comes dating. You think you've got dating cracked, when along come drugs.

And then there are music and clothes and gadgets to deal with. It's too much.

This might (or might not) offer some explanation as to why teens have started texting in their sleep. Yes, it's just like sleepwalking, except you can be really, really mean. LOL.

There's a serious aspect to all this, naturally.

As Elizabeth Dowdell, a nursing professor at Pennsylvania's Villanova University, told CBS Philadelphia: "The phone will beep, they'll answer the text. They'll either respond in words or gibberish."

The professor warned portentously that these texts "can even be inappropriate."

This may not sound too far removed from a teen's waking activities. Though one imagines that it's slightly harder to sext when you're not exactly conscious. Or perhaps not.

The professor says that when the teens wake up they have no memory of these texts. Well, until they stare down at their phones and see what's been going on in Reverie World.

Some parents are concerned that kids are too wired, literally and emotionally. They worry that they don't get enough sleep, which leads to this manic nighttime behavior, often occurring between 90 minutes and 2 hours into their sleep cycle, Dowdell says.

Clearly, teens don't always lead the most sensible lives. They're not supposed to. But perhaps the highly complex, radical remedy is to turn off the phone.

And yet isn't there something slightly fascinating about what goes through our heads when we're not all there?

This article originally appeared on CNET.