On Sleepwalking

A short story

I’ve been a sleepwalker for as long as I can remember. Sleepwalking is not so much an act or condition as it is a philosophy, a viewpoint on life that colors how I see everything. In fact I think that sleepwalking and my storytelling are related. The sleepwalker and the writer are nearly identical. One of my earliest memories is a dream in the third person where, suddenly inspired by some dark urge and unable to stop myself, I leap out of my crib in the dead of night, sleepwalk to the hallway, and still unable to stop myself, while also horrified to watch my body acting against my will, I jump from the top of the stairs to the ground far below, dying instantly; still from the third person, from a perspective on the second floor hallway, as if viewing this whole drama from a camera on a tripod, I watch, in my dream, as the first floor foyer fills with morning light, illuminating my broken two-year-old body, which for a long time was shrouded in blue darkness, and is now covered in the harsh glare of the sunrise, a spectacle I view which forces me, in the dream, to reckon with my own obliteration; then still from the perspective of the camera, I watch as my parents wake up finally, rubbing the sleep from their eyes as they yawn and shuffle down the stairs, before finally stumbling upon my body there, dead, broken, just a doll voided of human intelligence, of any soul, and I watch, powerless to act or speak, from this hard angle high above them, as my mother cries in horror, as my father picks up my body and tries to coax me back to life with words made animal by grief, and the whole time, as the foyer fills with light, I am unable to do anything, I am unable to stop their grief, just as I was unable, sleepwalking (in the dream), to stop myself from jumping down the staircase to my death. While this episode was entirely a dream, it contains the elements of what it means to sleepwalk: the confusion of dream and reality, the odd inspiration to act, the incapability to stop oneself, and an impotent third perspective that witnesses it all, vaguely aware of the stupidity of everything the self is doing while sleepwalking.

Recently, I visited a friend in San Francisco and slept on his couch for a week. At night I would wake up terrified, convinced that I was at my other friend’s apartment in Colorado, convinced that I was in Paris, convinced that I was in D.C., and walking the small apartment, I would try to figure out where I really was and why, often waking up several times in the night thinking I was in any number of the rooms around the world I’ve slept in at one point or another in my life, like Proust’s narrator who is plagued by a procession of the bedrooms of his life.

Other nights, I woke up convinced that I was in danger, and standing in the small apartment’s kitchen, I would consider waking up my friend to warn him of the danger, while knowing that this was all just a delusion, that I was just sleepwalking after all, and eventually I would fall back asleep. But the urge to wake my friend and warn him of the danger, and also to seek comfort from it with him by having someone else who could verify the danger that I really thought was there, was so strong that I began to cry as I stood there alone in the darkness in his kitchen. Here, you can see, reality itself splits. There is the delusion of danger, the story I’ve told myself in sleep, and there is the completely harmless reality; alone, confused, scared, I must forget my dreams and remember the real world around me, or else wander in confusion through the lonely 3:00 a.m. world.

But at least I can remember these sleepwalking events. They exist in my memory as testimonies that I can study to understand what happened. Sometimes though, I wake up to find a bag packed in a rush, my bedsheets carefully folded on my desk, my window open, a lukewarm breakfast half-eaten on the kitchen table, or my notebooks taken out and scribbled in, all without remembering packing a bag, folding my bedsheets, opening a window, making and eating breakfast, or writing in a notebook. In these instances, I am left not with testimonies to my sleepwalking but relics, like a detective or an archaeologist investigating a crime or bygone culture through the evidence they left behind. I must ask myself what I did in the night. And I wonder if I’ll discover anything else in the coming day that I had done and forgotten in my sleep, like how all archaeologists secretly worry about what hidden nature of man may be revealed through the careful study of our distant past. What brutalities, what obliterations, what stomach-churning monstrosities are we all responsible for in our collective heritage, in the world of dreams?

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The year is 2026, I am walking beside the city walls of Marrakech’s medina, which is odd because I was last in Morocco in 2022. It is not exactly night. Out in the rocky plains beyond the city walls, packs of dogs sit watching, not even silhouettes but shades against that unnatural sky. No cars pass on the road. The palm trees cast strange shadows on the dust. I have the feeling that someone is following me in the semidarkness and it makes me scared. But why am I walking here? There is nowhere ahead that I must go, nothing that is waiting for me; if it weren’t for the feeling that someone is following me, I could walk forever in a slow pace along these walls, enjoying the desert landscape, enjoying the music I hear coming from within the walls. I walk for a long time with that feeling before I turn to confront whoever is following me, but nothing is behind me except that haunting feeling...what am I doing here?

These questions tug a bit at the fine curtain before me; the red walls of the old city and the buildings like red play blocks, and the boulevards beyond that, and the desert landscape on the other side, and those hills, and the snowcapped mountains in the distance: all of this collapses with a fabricated flourish, and now I am in the hallway of my college dorm, I must go somewhere on campus, but I’m not in a hurry, so I walk down the staircase into a vast, twilit space of columns and brick buildings and libraries endlessly repeating. Beyond the windows of the buildings I can see so many students out there, partying, laughing, and I am in here walking the empty hallways, entirely alone: but I am not sad, in fact I am happy to be here, walking alone, watching everyone through the windows. I am not in a rush as I walk these long hallways.

Then with a whiplashed headache, I am awake in the hallway of my apartment in D.C., where I really do live. I’m in my underwear and covered in sweat. Embarrassed, I return to my apartment, where I fall asleep instantly on the couch...a flash of consciousness in these long wanderings through the night...The rest is darkness, sleep, dreams...

Now I’m in Maine, where I spent a memorable vacation when I was ten. I’m standing in that strange room with the bathtub directly in its center like an upside down chandelier and the dolls on the shelves. What am I doing here, after all these years? I follow an urge to go outside, where it’s not quite dawn. Everything is softly illuminated despite the dark skies. I follow the rocky coast, picking my way through tidepools brimming with starfish and crabs and little fishes, all of them in wonderful colors. Eventually, I turn on the bathroom faucet and feel scared, and without turning off the faucet I walk away from the coast of Maine, through the door, and into the pine forest just up the crest. I walk for a long time, inspecting the gnarled coniferous trees, all agonized by the wind into strange shapes that seem to outline the constant unseen pressure coming from the sea. Through the window I spot the small oak tree growing in the canyon of brick and glass formed by my apartment building and the next; the oak tree usually looks somewhat grand in the summer with its whole orbit exploding green, leaves dripping exultantly from between the brick canyon walls, but now the oak tree, in the winter, at night, illuminated by an orange glow, looks sickly and small, nothing compared to the towering, ancient trees of the forest at my childhood home in Virginia, which I had never been particularly proud of until I took a girl home from college, and she stopped in awe before the forest and said: wow, these are huge trees, you’re so lucky to live in a real forest...

I am in my childhood bedroom. It’s so dark that I can’t see the opposite wall except in the shifting, hostile, maggoty forms of shadows. Something is very wrong, I wake up knowing that something is wrong. At first, my only confusion is about where I am: it’s my childhood bedroom in Virginia, and for just the briefest moment I feel like I should be somewhere else. But something else is wrong. Why am I so scared?

In the shadows, something is watching...

Terrified, I leap out of bed. What is it? Where? I run out of my bedroom into the Virginia woods. It’s summertime and daylit. I see the huge exposed root system of the fallen oak tree where I had at one point built a really great fort. Digging into the rich earth below the root system as a kid, I expected to find fossils and buried treasure, those kinds of true riches that could only be found deep in the earth, because this pit under the root system felt truly cavernous and deep when I was just ten. Now, I don’t really feel like digging. I stand in the cavity of the root system and look around. I see the creek with the high bank on one side which I used to call “the bluffs,” where I would often lay on my stomach with my .22, watching for both squirrels and imaginary enemies to shoot. Once I saw a sixteen-point buck standing on that high bank, breath fogging in slow huffs around its head.

Something is odd about these woods now, though. What is it? Without knowing why, I start to run towards the house. Seeing only in flashes, I look back. Up on the creek bank where the sixteen-point buck once stood long ago, there is now an old woman, slumping oddly forward on a body that is little more than an upright pile of rotting meat. Her flesh itself is crawling and writhing, her black hair burns. An evil halo over her head, the moon strikes through the thick forest canopy, a pulsing orb of silver and blue, projecting this woman onto the forest floor, projecting her hungry shadows out towards me. Her eyes are two hateful gems, delicate and sharp and watching. I see all this in a flash, recognizing her instantly for what she is: a witch come to destroy me. I keep running as she unleashes a hacking laugh.

I am back in my apartment in Washington D.C. It is winter. Despite the cold, I am standing in my underwear, sweating, by the refrigerator. I still feel scared, in fact my heart is pounding, but everything is finally taking on concrete forms, the terror of imagination fades as reality asserts itself.

I look at the time: 3:13 a.m. Some nights, I sleepwalk every thirty minutes, driven up out of my bed by some unknown fear until wearily I am awoken by the alarm and must trudge through this reality, which, though less terrifying, is also sometimes less wonderful and always much harder. The world of dreams provides me a second life which furnishes this one with so much beauty and wonder and meaning, even in the nightmares, as if this life is a shore around a lake; I look upon the surface of the lake and only see the world doubled, but when I dive into it, into the world of dreams, an entire magnificent kingdom is revealed that I can explore, pilfering its beauty as resources to keep me going through the world of reality above the surface of the lake, where, looking back at the world of dreams below the surface, I can marvel at how strange and mysterious that other place is. But sometimes I dive into that world below the surface and instead of a strange and beautiful kingdom, I am confronted with something terrifying. In the water there are treasures and monsters both, our distant origins and our new beginnings, the new world and leviathan; the water reveals with one hand and drowns with the other. Our dreams, like the oceans, are ballasted with the bones of those who didn’t make the voyage.

I go into the bathroom. The faucet is running. Confused, I turn it off. I take a quick shower to separate myself from the vision of the witch of the woods which scared me so much. But even so, when I pull back the curtain, I am careful to look around the bathroom to make sure nothing is there waiting to seize me.

Stepping carefully, as if sneaking, I return to my bed, my real bed, the bed in my apartment in Washington, D.C., where the blankets and sheets are bunched together and chaotic from my sleepwalking that night. After looking up to make sure that the witch of the woods hadn’t followed me, I fall back asleep—,

When I wake up again, the night is gentle, its yearning shadows reach out to me, the blue light through the window kisses and licks my fingers, my arms, my neck. I look up and see a woman just out of reach, in the soft darkness of the night. This is who I’ve been waiting for all my life, but she is only a silhouette, an indistinct shadow just barely outlined by the light from the window. I rejoice that the love of my life is here, now, that she is waiting for me just over there. I get up and reach for her, but my hand touches nothing. In the place where she was, there is now just emptiness. No one is there, I imagined it. Sitting alone in my bedroom, I start to cry.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Siren, Lee Krasner