Friday, October 15, 2004
Sleep Voting No Hoax, Scientist Insists
By day, they are respected professionals who read online news from four different continents, discuss manufactured consent at the dinner table with spouses and children, and knit their high brows at the thought that Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry may be selling out to the large corporations.
By night, they sneak out of their apartments and houses to vote for scurrilous right-wing demogogues.
And the frightening thing is, they are typically unaware of their own double lives--because their nocturnal voting derelictions happen while they are asleep.
Or at least so claims Dr. Alphonso Midnight of the Department of Parasomnia at Hermectoral College in Washington, D.C.
"It's natural to be skeptical of these patients' claims to have no memory of leaving the house," Dr. Midnight said in an interview yesterday, "let alone their alarming voting habits. But in NIMH-funded longitudinal studies conducted in my Parasomnia Laboratory here at Hermectoral College, we have determined time and again that they are telling the truth: they really don't know what they do while asleep."
Dr. Midnight confesses with a boyish laugh that over the last eight or ten years he and his associates at Hermectoral College have "experimentally" swung several key elections in Congressional districts up and down the Eastern seaboard, simply by putting their test subjects up at motels near polling places on election days.
With radio-operated electrodes attached to their foreheads reporting their sleep states back to the mobile van lab, these educated liberal subjects have gotten up out of bed, walked to the polling places, and cast their ballots for backwoods right-wing shysters, hucksters, con-artists, and snake-oil salesmen.
When asked whether he would consider running nation-wide experiments with the upcoming Presidential Hermection, however, Dr. Midnight grows serious.
"Certainly not," he says. "Too much rides on this one. The very future of our country rides on the reelect--er, hermection of a strong leader to office."
Parasomnias are sleep disorders. They include sleepwalking and sleep sex.
