Kuedo In Your Sleep (2016)
Imagine if you could get your job done in your sleep. You wouldn't need to bother with cumbersome work while awake, yet you could still make a lot of money. This is neither an exaggerated sci-fi story nor the wild dream of a lazy teenager but the real-life case of Lee Hadwin, a man who unintentionally became an artist. In his sleep.
As a kid, Hadwin had no interest in art. Actually, he hated it in school and was terrible at it, too. “I was not able to scrape higher than an E in my final exams,” he writes in a piece for The Guardian. Not that it bothered Hadwin much as he had different plans for his life anyway. After leaving school, he became a nurse.
But Hadwin had a secret talent. Since the age of five, he had been drawing while asleep. And he was pretty good at it—unlike when he was awake—and his skill didn’t fade away as he became an adult.
In 2007, he decided to sell some of his artworks to raise money for a local hospice. The reactions were overwhelming. “I had 160 calls from different media outlets and organizations wanting to hear about my art,” he recalls. Soon after, he quit his job and became a full-time artist. And it’s going well. He makes enough to treat himself to luxury holidays while he gives 40-50% of his earnings to charity.
The condition Hadwin has is called somnambulism, or more commonly, sleepwalking, a phenomenon that gets picked up in the arts every once in a while. A brilliant example is the moody contemporary R’n’B song “In Your Sleep” by electronic music producer Jamie Teasdale, aka Kuedo. Former Wild Beasts-frontman Hayden Thorpe is on vocal duties here, singing at one point: “Do you sleepwalk when I'm late out. Into the dark old corners that the light hasn't found?”
Well, if you haven't explored those corners yet, it might be worth doing so—you might discover a secret talent there.
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