WASHINGTON – Americans send an average of 1.9 billion text messages in one month.

With those numbers it’s no surprise that text messaging now pervades our very subconscious.

In Australia, sleep specialists at the Melbourne Sleep Disorder Centre say patients are reporting instances of texting in their sleep.

The Daily Mail reports that people with the rare condition send incoherent text messages while asleep — totally unaware of the fact that they’re doing it.

Sleep specialist Dr. David Cunnington tells the Daily Mail that he is recommending patients leave their cell phones out of the bedroom.

Interestingly, researchers at the University of Toledo reported a similar disorder — sleep emailing — in 2008. A 44-year-old woman would compose emails while sleeping. When she woke up the next day she did not remember sending the emails.

Dr. Cunnington tell the Daily Mail that people who sleep text typically have too much going on in their daily lives.

Keeping the phone of out reach or in a completely different room will help, he says.

Recently, a German scientist found that dialing certain numbers on your cell phone can trigger a subconscious reaction based on the word you would be spelling out with your phone. The reaction is so strong, it can affect your mood, the study says.

In the experiment, test subjects were given cell phones with the letters covered up, so only the numbers were visible. Their emotional response coincided with the word they would have been texting.

Obviously, this applies to those with phones that have the old-fashioned number pads for texting.

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