Nonfiction | July 08, 2026

Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On what we know but do not believe 

Two years ago, my fiancée told me that I’d been sleepwalking and carrying on full-fledged conversations with her each night. When Kelly first relayed this, her brow twitched slightly with what I took to be suppressed irritation. These mornings, I never remembered anything about whatever it was I’d done overnight. After all, somnambulism is a classic example of automatic behavior. Yet, the archetypal image of the sleepwalker—nightcap with drooping tassel, eyes closed, arms outstretched in front, wrists bent down—is wrong. Sleepwalkers engage in complex behavior: they might cook a meal, drive a car, carry on a conversation, murder a relative—all without the accompaniment of consciousness. It raises the question: if I’m not conscious, how am I seemingly able to adapt to changing circumstances? Who was talking when I was conversing? As Kelly and I sat up in bed that first morning, her pent-up prickliness made me acutely aware of the score between us. What was the regrettable conduct I unfreely enacted each night, but for which I must nevertheless accept responsibility? Evidently, I had been peeing in the closet. 

During the first night, Kelly says, my rustling woke her up, and she asked me what I was doing. “Nothing,” I said. “Going to the bathroom.” But she could see I was standing in front of the open closet and said, “That’s not the toilet.” “Yes, it is,” I said, sounding offended, while gravely continuing to conduct my business. We would learn later why it’s said not to wake up a sleepwalker. Although it’s like a preprogrammed routine is being run, the person’s capability to react in complex ways can remain, but often only in limited form. I could interact with Kelly, for instance, but likely only to counteract her attempts to thwart me. If you attempt to impede a sleepwalker, they might instinctively find it aversive and—one article suggested—react impulsively, yet they’d be without the benefit of consciousness to reign in their anger. That was the theory anyway.  

Luckily for Kelly and me, my nonconscious self was more likely to be cavalier and arrogant than angered by impediment. While following the going-back-to-bed algorithm, I responded to Kelly’s protestations, she reports, by uttering “an aloof grunt of bemused recognition.” During the night of my second episode, when she again informed me that I was standing at the closet, not the commode, I let go another self-satisfied, haughty grunt. But I apparently persevered in my task, because she could hear the unmistakable evidence—the damp applause—of my misguided micturition. A faux fancy language affords me distance from disgusting deeds.  

The third night Kelly screamed at me, “ARE YOU AWAKE?!” “Yes,” I said. In that moment, she struggled with what to conclude about my inner mental world. For I was passing the Turing test, so to speak, yet she didn’t know if I was actually conscious. As we found out in the morning, I hadn’t been.  

When I asked her to recount the events for me once more (in furtherance of writing this essay), I noticed her brow involuntarily furrowed again. The biggest irritation, she said, was having to clean up the soggy mess after I’d already roboted back to bed.  

“That sucks,” I replied, dutifully. Yet, moments later, I caught myself feeling uninvolved again, like I hadn’t done it. I knew I had done it; I took what she said for the truth. But I did not feel that belief in my body. Usually when I’ve done something wrong, my self-criticism is more despairing. The knowledge of the injured party’s disapprobation is more—I don’t know—piercing. I get a nauseating knot in my stomach. But this time, my understanding that I was responsible for Kelly’s aggravation was entirely intellectual and bloodless. 

Because I have so tenuous a connection to what I’ve done while sleepwalking, I find it easy to be glad of my inopportune nocturnal emissions. If I had not sleep-peed in our closet, then I would not possess such a good example of an action for which I take responsibility, but which I did not do of my own free will. It’s been a fascinating experience. It’s like when, at the dentist, I cannot keep my tongue from pressing against the hygienist’s elongated mirror. ​​