Knows how tampala sounds.
Suddenly waking up with a “brilliant” idea is another common hypnagogic experience. People sometimes write down nighttime revelations, then go back to sleep, confident that their discovery will revolutionize the world. Occasionally, these ideas do pan out. More often, though, the sleepers are disappointed the next morning, for they realize that what they wrote during the night is nonsense. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, experienced this odd phenomenon. He recorded the following nonsense poem he heard while asleep: “I walk before no man, a hawk in his fist; Nor am I brilliant, whenever I list.”47
Similarly, some people talk nonsense when they talk in their sleep. I myself have heard several people talk nonsense in their sleep. Other people have told me the same thing about their sleeping children or spouses who talk nonsense in the night.
Sometimes we are forced to talk nonsense in order to verbalize bizarre, outlandish dreams. As an undergraduate student of philosophy, I once dreamed I was holding arguments in my palms. I seemed to be putting interconnected, silvery segments together in my hands when I was reasoning to prove a point. I also had a dream in which two of my relatives and one of my friends were fused incomprehensibly together into a single dream personage. Of course, some dreams are quite literal and can be captured in straightforward, prosaic language. Often enough, though, nonsense stories are the only available means of putting strange dreams into words.
Nonsense can be a sign of medical or psychiatric disorders. People sometimes talk nonsense when they suffer from psychosis or physical ailments that affect the mind. “Word salad” is a form of nonsensical speech found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenics mix made-up, meaningless neologisms with actual words, with the mixture lacking overall sense. I had a patient with paranoid schizophrenia who made up blatantly obscene nonsense words. His long, rambling epistles were addressed to no one in particular, and they were full of meaningless words like “thuckabussy,” “puckcucky,” and “fugbucker.”
The self-contradictory utterance “I am dead” is a hallmark of the delusional disorder known as the Cotard syndrome. These patients convince themselves that they are dead, and they cannot be swayed by rational arguments to the contrary. Severe psychotic depression causes this delusional belief that one is dead.
Intoxication with various psychoactive substances also causes people to talk nonsense. For example, the anesthetic nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, has this effect. American psychologist William James studied the effects of nitrous oxide by inhaling it himself. He carefully wrote down what he thought at the time were profound mystical revelations. Here is his account of the phenomenon:
I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality.48
What’s mistake but a kind of take?
What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism—how criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement—disagreement!!
Emotion—motion!!!49
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn’t hurt! Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense.
Thought deeper than speech—!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God, oh God!50
Mercury poisoning causes irritability, mood swings, and, sometimes, meaningless, rambling speech. In the nineteenth century, mercury was the main ingredient of a fashionable pharmaceutical remedy for depression known as blue mass. Abraham Lincoln took the popular antidepressant and apparently became intoxicated with mercury.
Henry Clay Whitney was an attorney who often traveled a circuit with his friend, the future president. He wrote that he awoke one morning to find Mr. Lincoln sitting up in bed and “talking the wildest and most incoherent nonsense to himself.”51 Fortunately, Mr. Lincoln stopped taking blue mass before he became president because he found it made him “cross.”
Even those who by profession are communicators may have moments where lucidity suddenly lapses. As reported in the March 2015 issue of New Scientist, Serene Branson, a Los Angeles broadcaster reporting from the Grammy Awards, struggled visibly to speak meaningfully as her lips formed the words, “Well a very, very heavy ah heavy duit burtation tonight. We had a very deres dereson. But let’s go ahead tarish dereson tasen losh lobitt behind dupet.” Branson later described the moments as terrifying, as she could not put together an intelligible sentence. Later, it was determined that a migraine headache was responsible for her disrupted speech. The same year, a Madison, Wisconsin, television anchor, Sarah Carlson, had a small seizure during a broadcast, leaving a confused and disoriented audience to try to make sense of her unintelligible words.
Athletes of all kinds, particularly boxers and football players, also have had instances in which their language has become unintelligible for medical reasons. In many cases the effects are short-lived, but all who witness the delirious speech realize something beyond the normal has occurred, and it leaves a powerful impression.
Nonsense can make people doubt their senses or think that they are going crazy. Nonsense can confuse people. For instance, double-talk is a variety of near-English nonsense that mentalists and magicians use for entertaining their audiences. They talk double-talk to cloud people’s minds and make them laugh.
Double-talk is created by a simple formula: Begin sentences with phrases like, “Do you know—?” or “Will you please tell me—?” or “Do you have any idea where—?” to get listeners’ attention. Their wheels start turning as they prepare to come up with an answer. Then toss in a liberal quantity of made-up, meaningless near-English nonsense words. The process results in double-talk such as, “Would you please tell me where I can find some spanagloap for the tarkerblay?”
As listeners, we bring multiple meanings and associations to the act of listening, assuming that in every act of communication, the speaker’s intent is to communicate meaningfully. In the case of double-talk, the listener’s expectations are not met, and this can lead to people questioning both their senses and sanity.
Nonsense can powerfully attract and hold people’s attention. Nonsense often captures and holds attention more effectively than humdrum, prosaic language that is perfectly meaningful and intelligible. For example, advertising is all about getting attention. That is the reason why nonsense shows up frequently in ads. A television ad for KPMG, a corporate finance firm, was built around categorical nonsense. The ad incomprehensibly mixed the phraseology of motherly admonitions with the terminology of international finance. In the ad, cranky mother figures offered meaningless advice like, “Don’t go out with wet hair. You might catch a case of involuntary international corporate rightsizing.” Another cranky mother insisted, “Always construct a mass utilization model before crossing the street.”