January 28, 2011 ~ Day 50Sleepwalking

Image by Graur Codrin



This afternoon I entered the home office where I typically write and was surprised to discover my five year old son sound asleep on a futon mattress. Given that it was naptime, perhaps the biggest surprise should have been that he was sleeping at all... something five year old boys are not typically very excited about. This boy, however, is the best napper in the house.

I was surprised then not by the fact that he was asleep, but rather by the fact that I'd just seen him sound asleep 20 minutes prior in his bedroom. Snoring away, totally and completely out. How did he get from one room to the other? I wondered. (Obviously, he walked.) Why did he switch beds?

I sat down to write and not long after he opened his eyes and stared at me as though he'd never seen me before in his life. "What am I doing here?" he asked. "Why did you move me to this room?"

A cold chill settled into my spine. "Don't you remember how you got here?"

"No. I remember when you put me into my room for my nap. Why did you put me here?" He stared at me a little longer and collapsed back onto the mattress sound asleep.

So, do we have a little sleepwalker on our hands? That could be a problem down the road. I recall knowing a girl in college who walked in her sleep to the extent that they had to put locks all over her room so she wouldn't accidentally walk right out a second floor window while sleeping.

Always one to consult Google first (my husband teases that it is my personal oracle) I decided to investigate sleepwalking. Thousands of pages popped up right away and I was somewhat relieved to read on Wikipedia that sleepwalking 'events' are common in childhood, usually decreasing with age. The article cited a study that found the peak age for sleepwalking is between 4 and 8 years of age, and typically fades away as children grow older. My son at age five-and-a-half falls right into that time frame.

Luckily we are moving from our current two-story house to a one-story home just two weeks from today. I won't have to worry about my son falling out of windows anytime soon, so for the time being this new behavior can be just one more cute thing that makes him uniquely special to us.

With my worries about sleepwalking assuaged and my son once again snoring by my side, I started to think about the concept of sleepwalking in general. It's incredible that a person can do things with their body and even brain of which they later retain no memory.

I myself am a sleep-talker. (Of course I am! My husband calls me a born-communicator which is his very kind way of saying that I never shut up. Heehee!) I have been known to answer questions while asleep, hold one-sided conversations and even awaken crying from some sad thing I've just 'discussed' in a dream. Once when I was a teenager a best friend spent the night at my house and in the morning we realized we'd had an entire conversation about pizza while sound asleep.

When I was fifteen I woke one day while on a family vacation in Switzerland to see my parents peering down over my bed giggling, because apparently I'd just been talking extensively about broccoli. "There are no vegetables here!" I'd cried. Years later a boyfriend confided me that in the middle of the night I'd thrown my arm over him and shouted, "I will protect you!"

The nature of consciousness itself is such a fascinating mystery to me... where exactly does our spirit go while we are sleeping? How is it that our minds become so totally untethered from our bodies during those hours? What are we capable of during that time? (This fascination explains why I loved this year's Academy Award nominated film Inception.)

If humans can literally walk in their sleep and talk in their sleep, this raises profound questions about what it means to be awake. After all, how do we know what it means to be truly awake? What if everything we perceive to be concrete each day is actually a dream in itself? What if our dreams are the reality, and what we perceive as reality is actually the dream?

Following that circular idea, I have to wonder about an ever-changing dream to which we would purposefully return day after day... re-creating all of the same characters, relating to them, aging with them. Are my husband and children merely recurring characters in a grand illusion that I have created within my own consciousness? Or, is what I perceive to be my life just a figment of some other being's imagination, or merely a speck of dust on their cosmic broom?

Countless stories and screenplays have been written on this topic, from the Dr. Seuss classic "Horton Hears a Who" to "Being John Malkovich", "Stranger Than Fiction" and even "The Truman Show". I am clearly not the first human to have fantasized about a reality much broader than the one which I appear to inhabit.

Taking the argument one step further... if life IS a dream, I wonder why we as humans would choose to dream something so imperfect. If we were truly able to create our own reality with our thoughts, why wouldn't we create something more elegant and beautiful? Why would we choose to co-create a world that is seemingly full of nightmare? Today the headlines in the paper are all about revolt in Egypt, a murderous mother, gun violence in Arizona and a train crash in Germany. Why would anyone *choose* even subconsciously to invent a dream like that?

Agent Smith tackles this question in the cult classic film The Matrix as he discusses 'reality' with its protagonist, Neo...

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

Is this kind of thinking by the script-writers genius or madness? Or, are all of the conscious thoughts of humans so limited that we cannot even get our brains around the larger questions?

I have no answers to any of this. I think there is value in thinking about it though, and I spend a lot of mental energy (while doing mindless tasks like washing dishes late at night or folding laundry) pondering the nature of existence. There must be *something* important about the division between alert/awake and unconscious/asleep. Certainly many people have tried to explore that ethereal realm in between the two mental states through the use of psychotropic drugs and other perception-enhancing experiences. I haven't tried any of that stuff so my understanding of reality is likely more limited than for many.

Still, even with my limited view I deeply suspect that there is a lot more going on all around us than we consciously know. Ancient wisdom about the semi-conscious state has been handed down through cave paintings and oral histories, creation myths, mathematics, music... even in the fairy tales and nursery rhymes I read at bedtime to my now-sleepwalking children:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

Can the meaning here be as obvious as it seems?

In the end, even if I am just sleepwalking through the existence that I call my own, I - like the humans in the Matrix - choose to continue the charade. I love awakening every day to this family, these friends, this city. I embrace this dream called life, even with its glaring flaws.