Asleep but not Abed Kat Meads What woke me? Piss trickling down my inner thigh and a soppy crotch. But I kept at it, the pissing, until done. At that point, why stop? Pjs somewhat pissed on are still pissed on. Never pissed the bed, though, not once. I’d sleepwalk inside to out, squat and let flow in the backyard grass. Awake and playing in daylight, too involved in the playing to sprint for the house bathroom, I squatted in the woods and between corn rows. So the squatting to pee in itself: not a bit disturbing. A dark bedroom spooked me at that age (five or near vicinity), but somehow, waking up, middle of the night, backyard, squatting, didn’t. Pine trees like fat black switching sticks. Open field crisscrossed by deeper shadows. A hide and seek moon in the hide and seek sky. None of that surround made me tremble. Post-pissing, I stayed put, gazing, squatting, letting the night air have a go at drying my drawers. Not a bad memory, that. Not even close. Sleepwalking, the practice, didn’t get me shunned in-family or in Shawboro. In fact, Shawboro, during my youth, hosted a substantial population of kid sleepwalkers. Those of us who strolled on level ground weren’t in the same league as Clark Brinkley, brother of the county’s future sheriff. When Clark got out of his bed in his second-floor bedroom, he walked directly to the window, climbed out onto the porch roof and on that slanted platform continued to pace. Occasionally he fell into the bushes but, really, considering the circumstances, he toppled very seldom. He held the uncontested record for longevity and maneuvering skills in-the-act-of, Clark did. No mere yard walker could hope to compare. The sleepwalking children of a farming community gather at the single crossroads, preparatory to spreading out and inflicting mischief on uncles and cousins still in bed. Many a B horror flick has been built on lamer premises and done quite well financially, first in theatres, later in video. The Shawboro script could cadge from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, twist silent German expressionism into a chatty Baptist mood piece. Besides lots of sleepwalking, there’d (of course) have to be a murder. Insanity or its strong suggestion. A prolonged coffin scene. Knives brandished and used. (No problem assembling a weapon cache—Shawboro kids, awake or asleep, had easy access to butcher knives, rifles, shotguns, hatchets, axes, chainsaws and other potential wounders. Our houses and sheds and barns were full of objects stabbing sharp and bludgeoning blunt.) Although the fetching damsel in distress might have to be reformulated in a cast of five- to eight-year-olds, there’d be no need to improvise a village setting. In 1960, in 2006, Shawboro was/is a hamlet. An arts and entertainment staple, sleepwalking. As a human condition, it’s too deliciously suggestive to ignore; as a creative tool, it’s so wonderfully, serviceably flexible. Use it as a device of revelation or horror. Use it, overuse it, and still it fascinates. In Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera La Sonnambula, heroine Amina enters Rodolfo’s bedroom during a night walk-about. Despite the excellent opportunity, the count’s son and cad holds off on defiling his visitor, so impressed is he by her innocence and obvious virtue. After Amina is discovered snoozing in Rodolfo’s room, fiancé Elvino is less convinced of his lady’s unsullied purity and breaks off the engagement. Distraught and grieving for her lost love, Amina sleepwalks onto the perilously high, unstable mill bridge. While spellbound villagers watch, Elvino among them, she picks her way to the other side where doubting-no-more Elvino scoops her up into his arms. She wakes. The villagers rejoice. Curtain. Too bad the village crone didn’t pull Amina aside and urge the girl to take her sleepwalking act elsewhere. Join the circus. Join a cliff-top nunnery. But stay clear of Elvino. Once a suspicious partner, always a suspicious partner. To his heroine’s already plentiful trials and tribulations in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy added a sleepwalking husband. Angel, rector’s son and Tess’s true love, is yet another man overly sensitive to female sullying. He can’t quite move past Tess’s earlier seduction by man of means Alec. The fact of it torments him, awake and asleep. During a sleepwalking episode, he slings his naked wife over his shoulder and heads “in the direction of the river,” most probably to drown his cargo, since he’s muttering all the while “My wife—dead, dead.” He doesn’t dump Tess into the river; instead, he dumps her into an empty stone coffin. Thinking fast, ultimate survivor Tess uses “persuasion” to save herself, whispering in the sleepwalker’s ear: “Let us walk on, darling.” The ploy works but come the requisite stabbing, to the frank relief of many a reader, the character wielding the knife is Tess. Long before Bram Stoker made stake-stabbing famous and doomed flirtatious Lucy Westenra to walking the night alone and in the company of Count Dracula (Dracula, 1897), John Polidori penned The Vampyre, featuring an aristocratic bloodsucker based on the mannerisms of Lord Byron, his patient and close friend. The novel grew out of the same literary dare that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori among those present at the Villa Diodati the evening Byron challenged his houseguests to compose a ghost story. The previous year, 1815, Polidori wrote his medical dissertation on the subject of sleepwalking. In that nonfiction work, as a man of science, he advised sleepwalkers to issue whips to their servants. But what about those who have at their disposal neither servants nor a whip supply? Contemporary sleep experts suggest these precautions: —Sleep on the ground floor. —Lock all windows and doors. —Cover the windows with “heavy” drapes. —Clear out/lock away all sharp objects and hazardous materials (knives and the like). —Block off stairways. —Remove any snaking electrical cords. —Pad sharp-edged, jutting furniture. —Avoid drinking before bedtime. —Especially avoid drinking alcohol. —Avoid fatigue. And my favorite: avoid insomnia. Listen up, all you willful, insomnia junkies out there: sleep deprivation is a sleepwalking trigger. Indulge your vice and prepare to pay the piper. If the above actions bring no relief, attach a bell to the bedroom door. Or try hypnosis. Or try drugs (benzodiazepine, antidepressants). Or, if you’re 5 years old, grow up. Chances are, you won’t also be a sleepwalking adult. (Most) scientists agree that sleepwalking is more common in children than adults, more common in boys than girls, occurs early in the sleep cycle and typically causes no harm to the sleepwalker or anyone he or she might encounter along the way. Sleepwalkers may tool around in leisurely fashion or run that circuit screaming. If sleep talking (somniloquy) simultaneously occurs, the talk is generally disjointed and difficult to understand, except in the case of obscenities. Sleepwalkers curse clearly. It’s not unheard of for sleepwalkers to urinate in inappropriate places, closets and such. But not every bedwetter is a sleepwalker. Not all who suffer night terrors walk in their sleep. And sleepwalking is not linked to achluophobia (fear of the dark). When I came across that scientific finding, I dropped the book to clap. Always so much nicer when science backs up one’s emotionally formulated, gut conclusion. If I’d been trying to escape darkness, I assume I would have sleepwalked my way toward a light switch. Instead, I left a darkness with limits, a domesticated darkness, for darkness wild and without boundary. That never struck me as a journey a scaredy pants would undertake, awake or asleep. The notion that you shouldn’t wake sleepwalkers? A myth. If opera were reality, those spellbound La Sonnambula villagers could have risked a shout-out to Amina on her bridge trapeze. They didn’t, in point of fact, have to follow cad Rodolfo’s advice and wait for the heroine to save herself. Conclusions about which scientists continue to disagree: —The percentage of the population affected (estimates vary from 1 to 20 percent). —Whether or not there is a sleepwalking “gene.” —Whether stress causes sleepwalking. —Whether sleepwalkers are more or less likely to suffer “psychological disorders” than the populace at large. Several of the activities undertaken by sleepwalkers sound like a chore list: feeding pets, washing clothes, bathing, cooking, stripping wallpaper, rearranging furniture. Up a notch, in terms of danger: roaming the streets, riding horses, climbing towers, drawing knives from kitchen drawers. The sleepwalking defense (automatism) has been used, to date, in more than 30 murder trials worldwide. Among the sleepwalking violent, stabbing seems to be a favored method of attack, perhaps because there are knives, usually many knives, in any standard kitchen. There are sleep experts willing to testify that sleepwalkers are not and cannot be held culpable for their actions during sleepwalking episodes. Defense lawyers take notice when as eminent an authority as William Dement declares, as he did in The Promise of Sleep, that society “cannot hold sleeping people responsible for their actions for the same reason we cannot hold insane people responsible; in order to do wrong in the eyes of the law, the accused has to be conscious and aware of his or her actions and their effects.” Among the defendants acquitted by reason of sleepwalking/automatism: Steven Steinberg of Scottsdale, Arizona. In 1982, while asleep, he stabbed his wife, Elena, 25 times (other documents give the number as 26). When he woke, he claimed to have no memory of that act. In Toronto, in 1987, Kenneth Parks left his house and drove (again, reporting discrepancies, either one block or 14 miles) to his mother-in-law’s house where he stabbed her to death (and may also have beaten her with a tire iron). Still asleep, he then drove himself to the police station to confess. Men stabbing wives, men stabbing mothers-in-law. I sense a trend. One wife-stabbing sleepwalker who drew a skeptical jury pool: Scott Falater. In 1997, also in Arizona, he stabbed his wife 44 times, then dropped her into the swimming pool and held her head under. To judge by precedent, if he’d stayed with the knife attack and steered clear of water, his chances for an acquittal would have vastly improved. And what of the women sleepwalkers? In Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1833, one of the class John Polidori suggested arming with whips was, herself, a sleepwalker. Domestic servant Jane Rider, “Springfield Somnambulist,” caused quite a local stir with her ability to thread needles, set the table, cook, recite poetry, pray and sing while soundly asleep. When Rider’s nocturnal activities became too disruptive to the household, her employers sought the medical assistance of Dr. Lemuel Belden, Yale grad. Once Belden took the case, Jane Rider’s celebrity increased without an accompanying decrease in the incidence of her nighttime walks. Signed into the Lunatic Hospital in Worcester by Belden, Rider was fed laxatives and laudanum. Her head was shaved. Leeches were applied to her scalp. On occasion, she is said to have called out: “My head, my head, do cut it open!” Belden suspected her of smuggling in forbidden green currants—sleepwalking triggers, those currants, he believed. When bald, drugged and bled Jane Rider continued to sleepwalk, Belden blamed (why is this so not a surprise?) an “irregular menstrual flow.” In the movies, in an opera, in fiction, you know how the Jane Rider story would play out, don’t you? Asylum Jane laying hands on a needle the size of an ice pick and seeking out the good doctor in the middle of the night. And who would not applaud that fictive vengeance? Who? Squatting in the backyard, bladder empty, weaponless and newly awake, I used to call out into the night. I called to no one in particular. Just called out, to announce or confirm my existence, perhaps to hear my own voice. Immediately afterwards, my mother, a light sleeper on her best nights, came running. I could hear her rushing room to room, frantically searching for me. A perverse comfort, her accelerating alarm. I didn’t call out again to help in the locating; I waited, in the backyard, squatting, assured of rescue, content. When my mother found me, she took my hand, led me inside and back into my bedroom, stripped off the peed-in pj bottoms, dressed me in a clean pair and tucked me into bed again. And then, I suppose, I slept. I suppose I did.