Dom Corvaisis sleepwalks to the bathroom sink in an episode that changes the pattern of his nights: for the first time, he remembers part of the nightmare that drives him from bed. The remembered scene makes an ordinary sink seem like the instrument of an attempted killing, while his waking discovery that he is actually at home does not explain why the dream’s room feels different. Before returning to sleep, he whispers about the moon, an unexplained phrase that gives the episode an unsettling final turn.

Context and escalation

By Thursday, Dom Corvaisis had resumed work on his novel, and on Friday his editor in New York reported excellent prepublication reviews and rising bookseller excitement. The news briefly restored a sense that his life was back on course. Against this outward improvement, however, his sleepwalking continued: on earlier nights he had been unable to recall even the smallest detail of the nightmares that sent him wandering. Saturday brings a change not because the behavior stops, but because the dream breaks into waking memory.

The change has two possible meanings for Dom. Remembering more might help him identify the anxiety behind his nocturnal wandering, as he later reasons; yet the memory arrives as a vivid scene of helplessness and terror. The episode therefore offers the possibility of insight without providing comfort. His increasing access to the dream is also inseparable from the frightening image it restores.

The remembered nightmare

In the final minute or two of the dream, Dom is in a blurred, half-glimpsed bathroom. One unseen person holds him upright against his weakness while another forces his head toward the sink. He feels physically unable to resist: his knees quiver, his stomach turns, and he cannot speak or draw breath. The dream gives him the conviction that he is dying and that he must escape, but denies him the strength to do so.

The description narrows from his failing body to the sink only inches from his face. He can make out the smooth porcelain and chrome-plated rim of an old-fashioned drain, with its rubber plug removed and set aside. Water runs from the faucet, circles into a miniature whirlpool, and disappears. The detail of the drain becomes the dream’s focus: to Dom it seems like a mouth that will suck him down, and he imagines that the people holding him intend to dispose of him there, perhaps through a garbage disposal. Their shouting remains unintelligible. The scene supplies no names, explanation, or confirmed real-world assailants; its two attackers belong to the nightmare as he remembers it.

Awakening at the sink

Dom wakes screaming in his own bathroom, bent over the sink and shouting into its drain. He recoils from the opening, stumbles, nearly falls over the edge of the bathtub, and steadies himself on a towel rack. The body that had seemed unable to flee in the dream has, in waking life, carried him into the room that the nightmare made threatening.

When he finds the nerve to look again, the actual fixtures offer a concrete contrast: glossy white porcelain, a brass drain rim, and a dome-shaped brass stopper. Nothing in the basin is the imagined disposal he feared. But the contrast does not settle the episode. Dom recognizes that the bathroom in the nightmare was not this bathroom. The familiar room explains where he woke, not why his dream placed him somewhere else or why its violence brought him to the sink.

Return to sleep and the moon

Dom considers that remembering the dream might mark improvement, since a fuller recollection could let him discover the source of his anxiety. Even so, he does not want to return to bed and risk going back to the strange place in the dream. He knows he is not supposed to take more than one Dalmane tablet in an evening, but decides that one indulgence will not hurt. He pours Chivas Regal in the living room, takes a pill with a shaky hand, drinks, and returns to bed.

As the medication and whiskey carry him toward sleep, he reassures himself that he is improving and that the sleepwalking will soon end. Then, in the darkness, he hears himself murmuring and becomes alert to the words: "The moon," he whispered thickly. "The moon, the moon." He tries to understand what he means, repeats the phrase once more, and then loses consciousness. The scene ends at three-eleven on Sunday morning, December 8, without explaining the words or establishing a connection between them and the nightmare. That unresolved utterance follows the episode’s pattern: bodily behavior and remembered images break through, while their cause remains out of reach.