sleep-walker

Noun

sleepwalker (plural sleepwalkers)

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
2. (archaic) One in a state of magnetic or mesmeric sleep; someone in a hypnotic trance.
   • 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...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.
   • But don't zombies exist in real life— such as the Haitian zombies called “sleepwalkers" ?2008, Christian de Quincey, Consciousness from Zombies to Angels
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...1997, Jerry H. Bryant ·, Victims and Heroes, page 226