sleepwalker

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
   • 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
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
   • 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
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
   • 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...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...2004, Robert G. Eisenhauer, Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, page 123