So in the middle of the night, some part of my brain became aware that I was dreaming of June Foray's Emmy acceptance speech in June of 2012. Why I was dreaming of that, I had no idea but after a few more moments, I became aware that I was not dreaming of that speech. I was hearing that speech. I woke up some more and realized it was coming from my iPhone on the bedside table. I have on it a video of that event and the iPhone was running it though I had not told it to do that.
I turned it off and went back to sleep. A few minutes later, there it was again.
This time, I not only turned it off, I got up for a little while, did some e-mail, posted the previous post on this blog and went back to bed.
An hour or so later, there was music. My iPhone was playing a tune from an Internet radio feed. I turned it off and went back to bed. A little while ago when I awoke for the final time today, my iPhone was running an audioless map app I have on it.
Something similar to this happened to me at the hotel in Anaheim when I was there for WonderCon. My iPhone kept acting like a ghost — or me doing the smartphoning version of sleepwalking — had hit some buttons. I ruled those out and came to the conclusion that it had something to do with the hotel alarm clock, which in Anaheim was iPhone-friendly. So is the one in the hotel here. But there are problems with that theory…
- The alarm clock allows you to set it to wake you up by playing some audio file on your iPhone…but you have to have your iPhone plugged into the docking station of the clock. In neither hotel did I ever put my iPhone into a dock and there is no indication that these bedside devices have any capability to send wireless commands.
- Also, in both hotels, my iPhone was lying on one bedside table — plugged into an outlet — while the alarm clock device was on the other bedside table. So they'd have to have a bit of a range.
- The alarms were not enabled on the alarm clock devices at either hotel. They had, however, been set to times close to the times when I first heard the iPhone making inexplicable sounds.
I did some Googling and didn't find anyone else who'd ever had this experience once, let alone twice. I considered other causes and could only come up with one other remote possibility: In both cases, the iPhone was connected to the hotel's Wi-Fi. Could that have something to do with it? It doesn't seem likely to me but I don't have anything that seems much likelier.
Tonight, I'm going to try unplugging the alarm clock and maybe I'll take my phone off the hotel Wi-Fi. But if anyone reading this has a better theory, I'd be eager to hear it. Maybe Texting Gremlins —?