You wake up on some kind of ladder. There’s the sound of waves crashing and you see the white of the surf in the moonlight. Wherever you are, you’re high up. Three of four stories, something like that. It’s that height where you probably wouldn’t die if you fell off, but you might. You’re wearing a tuxedo. The coat tails flap around in the wind. It’s some kind of tower. A lookout for the lifeguards or maybe the military. You’re at the very top. Slick dress shoes slide around on the steel rung. The last thing you remember is the reception. The father of the bride passed out cigars. You grabbed another drink and sat down on a couch. You could look out the big bay window and see the ocean. The couch was comfortable and you started to doze off. Just climb down. Don’t think about it. Don’t even tell people. They’d worry too much. Say that you decided to climb the tower for fun. Don’t say anything about being asleep. Try and believe that you were awake. That you knew what you were doing. 

            
            Alcoholism and somnambulism isn’t the same thing, but they’re related. Most people don’t understand this. Most people think you just get drunk and start stumbling around, causing trouble. It’s really not like that. You’re dreaming. You have no idea what’s going on.

            
            You wake up in other people’s beds. Maybe there’s broken glass on the floor. Maybe there’s blood on your clothes. You don’t know whose it is. It can be scary.

“In adults, sleep walking is usually associated with a disorder of the mind but may also be seen with reactions to drugs and/or medications and alcohol…” (2)

            I started sleepwalking the first night that I took chloroquine. I was a Peace Corps volunteer serving in El Salvador. Chloroquine is a bitter-tasting pill that the government gave me for malaria. We were to take it once a week, on Wednesday. I would later learn that it doesn’t do much for malaria. It doesn’t cure it and it doesn’t prevent it. It only hides the symptoms for a short while. I was warned that it would give me crazy dreams. Older volunteers spoke of violent, disturbing, and vivid nightmares that came every Wednesday night.

            
            On the Thursday morning after my first dose, I woke up on a medical examination table. The vinyl stuck to my sweaty skin. My ankles and wrists were covered in mosquito bites. I could distinctly recall going to bed in a cot several rooms away in the Peace Corps training center, tucking the mosquito net in along the sides. This was all a big mystery. I figured maybe it was a prank or something. Somnambulism never crossed my mind.

                  
            The following Wednesday I was sleeping with about a dozen other volunteers inside of a warehouse building. In the morning my head was at the opposite end of the hammock. I thought it was another practical joke. Maybe they untied my ropes, spun the hammock around, and then retied them with me still asleep inside. This time there had been a witness. One of the other volunteers told the real story to everybody. They gathered around him laughing. He claimed that I’d gotten out of my hammock and walked over to his. I jumped in with him and tried to go to sleep there. He started punching my shoulder and telling me to leave. I sat up and gave him a Salvadoran gesture in which you shake your fingers toward your mouth. It means, “Let’s eat!” I slept for a little while and then got up and returned to my own hammock, facing the wrong way.

            
            I quit taking chloroquine immediately after that. The somnambulism didn’t stop. It only got worse. The episodes usually occurred when I was sleeping in a strange bed and after I’d been drinking alcohol. This made it hard to get sympathy. People thought I just drank too much and didn’t remember the stupid stuff I was doing. Climbing in bed with strangers, peeing on carpets, turning on showers, knocking over bottles—these things became part of my life.

“The somnambulist acts his dream. His condition is that of a vivid dream in which the cerebrum is so active as to influence centres usually concerned in voluntary movements…on waking there is either no memory of what has taken place or the dim recollection of a fading dream.” (1)

            Usually I don’t remember my dreams when I’ve been somnambulant. Only if something wakes me up part way through. A couple of months later, I went to a Peace Corps conference in San Salvador. They had several of us packed into a few different hotel rooms.

            I dreamt about walking around inside of this dense forest, where the ground was moist and swampy. It reminded me a lot of where Yoda lived in the Star Wars movies. There was a gray mist that hovered over the ground and the echoes of animal noises coming from all sides. I had to step over the roots of the big trees and their fallen branches as I wandered around.

            Then there was nothing but the sound of breaking glass. Somebody’s arms were wrapped around my waist and I heard my name repeated over and over. That swampy forest was actually the different mattresses in the room. The tree roots and branches were other people’s arms and legs. I’d fallen off a bed and into a glass window on the second story of this hotel. My friend kept me from going all the way through. Blood started pooling up on my fingers and forearms. The hotel staff pounded at the door and demanded an explanation. I was so ashamed. I pulled a blanket over my head, curled up into a ball, and pretended to be asleep.

“Another misconception is that a person cannot be injured when sleepwalking. Actually, injuries caused by such things as tripping and loss of balance are common for sleepwalkers.” (2)

            I was at a Salvadoran surf beach called Sunzal checking out the waves. A middle-aged American guy walked up and asked me for advice on the conditions and where to rent a board. Usually I had little patience for tourists, but this guy seemed nice enough. I asked where he was from and what he did for a living. It turns out he was a sleep disorder specialist from Florida. We made a deal where I’d lend him my other board and paddle out to the line-up with him, in exchange for picking his brain about my condition.

            
            He said it was common for sleepwalking to be aggravated by alcohol. Your brain has some kind of barrier that keeps your body from moving around while you dream. When you drink, that barrier gets fuzzy and breaks down.

            
            “Do you feel that your condition is putting you in danger?” He asked.

            
            “Does walking through windows count as danger?”

            He didn’t have a sense of humor about this at all.

            Apparently, the onset of somnambulism as severe as mine is almost unheard of at my age. It’s the most extreme and most rare type; in which the sleepwalker is able to use the senses of sight and hearing. The condition usually develops around age twelve and goes away not long after. Despite these facts, the doctor was skeptical that I got it from the chloroquine. He said that I should see a specialist as soon as possible. I asked what they would do for me. He told me that if I were to show up at his clinic, they would put me on some form of Valium.

            If I sit down and tell myself that I’m going to sleep now, that I will be dreaming but I don’t have to act my dreams out—apparently that can help too. He also suggested that I quit drinking.

“Sometimes the actions performed are of a complicated character and bear some relation to the daily life of the sleeper” (1)

            Sometimes it’s comical—a party trick of sorts. At a gathering of friends in San Diego I fell asleep while holding a full beer. It was late and I was exhausted. I nodded off in a chair, with the beer perfectly balanced in my hand. As a joke, somebody took it from me and replaced it with an empty one. I didn’t stir and so someone else replaced the empty bottle with a bicycle shoe. This somehow started the somnambulism. I must have been dreaming that I was at a party similar to the one I was sleeping through. I started sipping from the toe of this shoe and smiling and nodding as though in an interesting, silent conversation. The waking party saw no small humor in this. Particularly when the shoe was empty, and I tipped it up to get the last sip, then squinted down the top of it, checking for any more beer.

“Sleepwalkers may also urinate, defecate or avoid looking at another person who attempts to communicate with them. Exiting through a window is not an uncommon practice either.” (2)

           
He can be the life of the party, my sleepwalking self. I’ve come to think of it like this; that the person walking around is someone else. Not unlike Tyler Durden of Fight Club, he’s a different side of my own schizophrenic consciousness. Mostly he’s trouble. He breaks stuff and makes messes. I’m embarrassed by him most of the time. But I envy him a little too. I envy his reckless inhibition. He’s bold. He does what he feels. He climbs in bed with whatever girl he wants to. He smashes glass just to hear the sound it makes. He doesn’t share my fear of heights. He whips out his dick and pees wherever it suits him. He has no use for social conventions. He literally lives out his dreams.

“It is important to notice that there is scarcely any action of which a somnambulist may not be capable, and immoral acts from which the individual would shrink in waking hours may be performed with indifference.” (1)

            He was at his best and worst on a trip that I took to the Canary Islands with my friend Paul. We went to stay with my aunt and attend a good friend’s wedding. We borrowed two tuxedos for the trip. One was too skinny and the other too fat, so we instituted a program in which Paul would eat half of all my meals in the weeks preceding.

            Without haste and without design, this trip somehow became an international marathon of pissing-off Spanish friends and relatives; making enemies out of people who had always been very kind to me. I’m not sure how this happened exactly. I didn’t mean for it. 

            It all started when Paul and I befriended a stray dog and accidentally brought him home to my aunt’s house. We named him “Señor Huesos” and made a nice little bed in the basement while the rest of the house was asleep. My aunt and her housemate were still getting over the recent death of another dog they’d taken in, and had strong feelings about the stray issue. The screaming started early and only got more intense as the morning went on. We were told that we were so ignorant, “we didn’t even know what ignorance is.”

            We put Señor Huesos in our rental car and drove off. Friendships suddenly seemed like windows or glass bottles; something that makes a beautiful sound as it breaks. So once that had been established as the theme, we just went with it. It was in the stars. The somnambulism fit in nicely. I could destroy friendships and burn bridges in my sleep. We were the perfect team: Paul, Señor Huesos, myself, and my sleepwalking self. Ugly Americans waging a twenty-four hour campaign of ugly inappropriateness.

“The sleepwalker may feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, anxiety, and confusion when they are told about their sleepwalking behavior.” (2)  

            The night before the wedding we stayed in a shared house with a bunch of other guests and the bride’s two beautiful sisters. My waking self was inappropriate enough, drinking all the wine in the cupboards, including one bottle which in hindsight was almost certainly vinegar. I was still eating only half of my meals, so the alcohol was going straight to my head.

            I remember flirting too much with a girl named Lucy, one of the sisters of the bride. I hadn’t seen her in years. The two of us had a history together, but she was attending this wedding with her German boyfriend. He was a medical student, studying to become a gynecologist. A nice guy, but somewhat intense and aloof. I got the feeling that he didn’t enjoy hanging out with the rest of us. He would sometimes go to a corner and open one of his textbooks—filled with images of vaginas labeled with Latin terms—and study as we shouted and laughed. It was like he was there more to keep an eye on his girlfriend than to have fun.

            The German was suspicious of me from the start, and with good reason. I would have stolen his girlfriend in a heartbeat under different circumstances. If I didn’t know that it would ruin the wedding and probably get Paul and I kicked out of the few remaining houses on this island where we were still welcome.

            My somnambulant self saw things differently. There were no eyewitnesses. There’s no real record of his behavior after I passed out on a downstairs couch. What I do know is that he left me lying in an upstairs bed with Lucy—without any clothes on and without explanations—in the spot where the German was supposed to be. 

            This sounds funny but it’s not. Sleepwalking? Would you have bought that if you were the German? Apparently he had insomnia and went out to the patio to smoke and look over one of his vagina books. My somnambulant self—always the opportunist—made his move. He doesn’t care about consequences. He doesn’t care about boyfriends or the group dynamics at some stupid wedding. Moments are all that matter to him.  

            It was mentioned in passing that next awkward morning that a glass of water must have been spilled somewhere downstairs. I didn’t say anything, but I figured it was more likely a bladder full of wine and vinegar that had been spilled.   

“Frequently [somnambulists] have gone along dangerous paths, executing delicate movements with precision.” (1)

            So things proceeded like this for several days, until the big night. The wedding reception was a huge party held in a yacht-club right by the shore. It was an all-night affair; hours and hours of eating and drinking and dancing. Paul was talking to the maid of honor—the daughter of my aunt’s close friends—so I figured he was carrying the baton in this particular lap of our race of offensiveness. I sat on a plush couch by an oceanfront window and watched the waves breaking out in the bay. Their crashing sound came right through the walls. I remember my eyelids getting heavy and the warm, soft upholstery of the couch wrapping itself around me.

            The sound of the waves never stopped. My foot slid off of something and my arms pulled taught. Inside of my fingers was the cold metal rung of a ladder. My feet dangled. I opened my eyes. I was four stories up and hanging from some sort of a tower. I saw the ocean meeting the land far beneath me. My legs kicked in circles until they found a foothold. The too-tight tuxedo jacket whipped about dramatically in the wind. I wrapped my arms around the ladder and hugged my body to it. I felt to see if my bow-tie and cummerbund were still in place.

            I’m afraid of heights. I get vertigo. I would never do something like this even piss drunk. But it’s right up his alley. He loves this kind of shit. If he sees a ladder he climbs it. If he sees a window he tries to jump out. He must think he can fly or something.

            I gathered my thoughts and slowly descended the ladder. On the way, I convinced myself that this didn’t just happen. That I wasn’t really asleep. I just climbed that tower on my own. I never told anyone what happened up there. I didn’t believe it myself until years later.

“It is very important that if the sleepwalker exits the house, or is having frequent episodes and injuries are occurring—do not delay, it is time to seek professional help…there have been some tragedies associated with sleepwalkers” (3)

            This isn’t a joke to me. I take it seriously. A man in Arizona is on trial for stabbing his wife forty-four times before drowning her—all while sleepwalking. But what are my options, really?

            
            I know exactly what the doctors will do. They’ll give me another pill, this one designed to keep me from dreaming. They’ll deny that it was a pill that started this mess in the first place. Hypnosis and some eastern medicines will be briefly mentioned and mostly dismissed. They’ll tell me to quit drinking, to get more exercise, and to eat healthier. Then I’ll be presented with a bill so far beyond my ability to pay as to make the whole idea laughable. 

            
            In short, they’ll try and destroy him. They already deny that they created him. And I’m not just talking about the doctors here. He’s the creation of a whole world of conventions and inhibitions; a world where you can’t live out your dreams. There have been some tragedies associated with sleepwalkers. There have been some comedies associated with them too. My somnambulant self has been associated with both.

            
            But there have been tragedies and comedies associated with my waking self as well. I sometimes cause myself embarrassment, shame, guilt, anxiety and confusion in broad daylight—performing with indifference acts from which I will later shrink. Perhaps they have a bitter-tasting pill for that as well, but I wouldn’t want to take it.    

1. Sommers, William. “SOMNAMBULISM.”  LoveToKnow 1911 Online Encylopedia. 2003, 2004 LoveToKnow. http://45.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SO/SOMNAMBULISM.htm.

2. Crescent Life. “Sleepwalking (Somnambulism).” http://crescentlife.com/disorders/sleepwalking.htm.

3. “Parasomnias- Arousal Disorders Information.” 1999. http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/para.html.