Dictionary

sleepwalker en · NOUN

Pronunciation

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Etymology

From sleep + walker or sleepwalk + -er.

Meanings

1. A somnambulist; one who walks, or is active, while asleep.
   • Edward Churchill still attended to his work in a hopeless mechanical manner like a sleep-walker who walks safely on a well-known round. But his Roman collar galled him, his cossack stifled him, his biretta was as uncomfortable as a merry-andrew's cap and bells. 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XV, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
   • Second, in the "hypnotized" subject, but not in the sleepwalker, characteristics such as a blank stare, a rigid facial expression, and an unwillingnes to talk have been produced by suggestions to become relaxed, drowsy, and sleepy and they can be easily removed by suggestions — for example, by suggestions to be alert. 1974, Theodore Xenophon Barber, Nicholas P. Spanos, John F. Chaves, Hypnosis, Imagination, and Human Potentialities, page 10:
   • I was a sleepwalker, incapable of controlling or recalling my nocturnal activities. 1989, Elaine K. Stirling, Sleepwalker, page 184:
   • Ashley looked dull as a sleepwalker and, as he came to her and put his hand upon her arm, he spoke like a sleepwalker. 1936, Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, page 994:
   • Consider, for example, the sleepwalker who goes into her neighbor's yard, takes an apple from the tree, and eats it . 1992, Michael Davis, To Make The Punishment Fit The Crime, page 171:
2. (archaic) One in a state of magnetic or mesmeric sleep; someone in a hypnotic trance.
   • CALIGARI (Relaxing a bit.) I would like to apply for a permit to present my exhibit at your fair. CLERK. Oh. Then you're here to make money rather than to spend it. (Sighs) What kind of exhibit? CALIGARI. A somnambulist. CLERK. A somn-what? CALIGARI. A somnambulist, a sleepwalker. 2013·, Gary Earl Ross, Sleepwalker, page 22:
   • But the sleepwalker does much that is correct . The magnetic somnambulists are not dreaming ~ such that there is an accidental connection of images;~rather they know of themselves what they are, but as feeling beings they know this through their genius. 2007, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, translated by Robert R. Williams, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8, page 133:
   • Though the sleepwalker sat with closely bandaged and wadded eyes, and his back to the grimacing part of the company, he described everything they were doing with the most comic humour, and he asked, 'What in the world is that gentleman in the chair making such faces for, and what is he giving himself such trouble about? […]" 1866, Edwin Lee, Animal magnetism and magnetic lucid somnambulism, page 97:
3. A person from whom a voodoo practitioner (a bocor) has taken over control of their mind, making them a zombie who must do the bocor's bidding.
   • However, I suffer the loss of slumber with waking dreams of what I am to become, a sleepwalker, living a nightmare, and that's the way it goes . 2017, David Goff, A Sleepwalker's Guide:
   • But don't zombies exist in real life— such as the Haitian zombies called “sleepwalkers" ? 2008, Christian de Quincey, Consciousness from Zombies to Angels:
   • These were not the rotting corpses of the modern zombie apocalypse; rather they were laborers and sleepwalkers that served their masters dutifully. 2016, John Edgar Browning, David Castillo, David Schmid, Zombie Talk, page 83:
4. (figuratively) One who goes though life in a state of obliviousness.
   • Perhaps he should have killed the white man, who, after all, is the dangerous one, the sleepwalker, the blind man . Getting rid of him would have protected " the higher interests of society " on three counts : It would have made this dreamer and sleepwalker "pay the price" for refusing to awaken to the truth of human identity; it would have destroyed the dreamer's "dream world," which excludes blacks; and it would have carried out the narrator's " responsibility," as "invisible victim," for " the fate of all"—for those both within and without the sleepwalker's dream world. 1997, Jerry H. Bryant ·, Victims and Heroes, page 226:
   • These lines, stylistically reminiscent of Dante's guided tour of damned souls in the Inferno and written in a similar terza rima meterical pattern, survey the human condition, seeing hellish lineaments written on the faces of human souls—not because of any particular sin but as the after-effect of a staining caused by submitting to the triumph of life, suggesting the notion of existence as a process of unabating lapse and disfiguration, a hopeless enterprise where human action, bereft of beauteous shape, has not meaning, and all are, or soon will be, sleepwalkers oblivious to poetic truth. 2004, Robert G. Eisenhauer, Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, page 123:
   • Thus the Republicans, meeting in Philadephia in June to pick their candidate for president, passed over such party favorites—all conservative isolationists—as senators Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, men whom Walter Lippmann had called "sleepwalkers” oblivious of the nation's crisis. 2010, Robert A. Rosenbaum, Waking to Danger: Americans and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941, page 177:

Forms

Synonyms

somnambulist