USA Today reported in June that almost one in 12 patients referred to a sleep disorders clinic 'fessed up to having "initiated or taken part in sexual behavior while sleeping." This includes everything from kissing and naughty touching all the way up to sex with strangers, humping inanimate objects and sexual assault. Most of the perpetrators had zero recollection of their nocturnal misdeeds.

This probably strikes you as a little comical and a lot weird. You almost immediately picture a doddering figure in matching striped nightgown and sleeping cap, blissfully humping away at the missus, the coat rack or the family dog while "Z"s drift away from his face. Seriously, who are these freaks?

Well, me.

I've had weird sleep issues my whole life -- frequent insomnia, nightmares, sleepwalking, sleep-talking and a light sprinkling of bed-wetting when I was a kid. Once or twice, I was found outside the house, but my wanderings were usually limited to the great indoors.

Things got weirder when I started drinking and drugging as a teenager. My roommates became accustomed to lengthy, articulate-but-incoherent conversations which I couldn't recall taking part in the following day ... but wasn't that just because I was drunk? And c'mon, everyone's pissed in a sink or two while blacked out, right? Right?

My sleeping body was totally beyond my control
About 10 years ago, I woke up humping a pillow, something so base and shameful I haven't shared it with anyone until now. Shortly thereafter, I mercifully found a real, live girlfriend. In the morning, she would often share with me the sweet nothings I had murmured into her ear the night before, like, "You are a chicken chop" and "I have a glass brain." Nothing too out of the ordinary.

One morning when I woke up, my girlfriend was leaning over me, her eyes sparkling. "What?" I said. "You really don't know, do you?" She started laughing. "You were fingering me ALL NIGHT LONG!" I didn't remember a second of it, but, well, it wasn't exactly out of character for me. And why would she be making it up? I felt shamefully pervy, but, fortunately, it didn't seem to bother her.

The most advanced and, for me, the most disturbing episode happened not much later. I was deep in a dream, a sexy dream. There was a woman or women laughing kindly at me, there were long dramatic swoops of fine, shimmering honey-blond hair and I was immersed in some kind of warm, amniotic ocean. So basically it was like a shampoo commercial.

When I opened my eyes, my girlfriend was in front of me on all fours, I was behind her on my knees and we were engaged in some hardcore sex. I gasped and immediately asked if she was OK. "Oh God, yeah," she said, so we kept going. I asked her about it afterward and she said she thought it was hot. I, however, found it incredibly troubling. I have a hard enough time controlling myself while I'm awake.

Of course, in the last eight years since that episode, things have been pretty quiet.

Except for one incident ...
It was about a year ago and involved a girl I'd been hooking up with. She recalls:

"I remember we were both sleeping on our backs, and you rolled over, started fingering me, and eventually got on top of me and started banging me for about five minutes. I don't think that you finished because you mumbled something weird like 'I need to get the cat' that I couldn't quite understand, then rolled off of me and went back to sleep. I wasn't completely sure you had sleepfu**ed me until I asked you about it the next day, and you had absolutely no recollection that it happened. It was still pretty good sex, though!"

So she was a good sport about it -- even though I don't have a cat. But the different hypothetical scenarios of what else could have happened, well, they keep me awake at night.

What if I go camping with a bunch of friends and we all have to sleep in the same tent? What if I'm on tour with a band, and we all end up crashing on the floor? What if I'm coaching Olympic women's figure skating, driving the team back from a dress rehearsal in their flouncy little leotards and sparkly lamé ruffles, and the bus crashes on a deserted stretch of road in upstate New York, and we have to huddle together for warmth. One by one, they drop off to sleep and I struggle heroically to stay awake and then finally...

Man, the worst thing may be that even if something happened, I wouldn't remember it.

Mishka Shubaly is a musician who also frequently embarrasses himself for NYPress.