Dom Corvaisis's Sleepwalking

Dom Corvaisis’s sleepwalking is not an isolated habit but one part of a frightening, unresolved pattern involving nightly nightmares, defensive actions performed without conscious control, and recurring images of the moon. As Dom tries to understand what is happening, the episodes become a point of recognition between him and others who share strange problems—and a reason to search the past rather than accept the night’s terrors as ordinary fear.

Onset and nocturnal behavior

Dom tells Ernie Block that he began walking in his sleep in October. The episodes take several forms: he creeps out of bed and hides in closets, gathers weapons to protect himself, and, on one occasion, tries to nail the windows shut. These are not presented as purposeful decisions made while awake. They are actions Dom recalls describing as part of a larger fear: he believes he is afraid not simply of darkness, but of something specific in it.

The sleepwalking is accompanied by nightmares that have lasted for more than a month and come every night. Dom says he knows another man whose nightmares became so severe that he killed himself, making the danger feel more than private or merely disruptive. He proposes to Ernie that their fears may be connected to something that happened outside, in the darkness, during the same weekend two summers earlier. That link is Dom’s hypothesis, not a resolved explanation; Ernie remains baffled, and the source of the fear has not yet been established.

The moon, the red rings, and the struggle for understanding

Night after night, Dom tries to make sense of the paper moons that seemed to move in an impossible dance in Zebediah Lomack’s living room. He also remembers circular, swollen red rings on his hands, which he watched fade while kneeling among the moons. The images give his sleepwalking a bodily and visual dimension, but they do not yield an answer: Dom searches for an explanation and finds none.

His sleep is no refuge from the fear. Each night, he fights fiercely against the tether with which he has moored himself to his bed, a physical attempt to prevent the very wandering he cannot fully control. At the same time, as his craving for Valium and Dalmane diminishes, his unremembered nightmares about the moon grow worse. The contrast leaves the episodes unresolved rather than neatly explained: a change in his drug craving coincides with intensifying dreams, while the nightly restraint answers the danger of movement without clarifying its cause.

Recognition and disclosure

When Ginger Weiss meets Dom, he offers his sleepwalking and moon dreams as a way to reassure her that she is not alone. Ginger says she never remembers her dreams, but wakes screaming about the moon; the shared image gives their separate disturbances a point of contact. Dom also tells her of Lomack, a man in Reno who died by suicide after becoming obsessed with the moon. That account makes the pattern more ominous, while showing how Dom is already trying to connect scattered experiences rather than treating his own symptoms in isolation.

Dom makes a similar connection with Ernie, though in a more direct and tentative way. He identifies the possibility of a specific event behind Ernie’s fear of darkness and places it at the same weekend he associates with his own terror. Then he invites Ernie upstairs, where the drapes can be drawn, and offers to tell him what he knows. His disclosure changes the meaning of the sleepwalking: instead of concealing it as a private oddity, Dom uses it to make a shared fear speakable and to assure Ernie that he is not alone.

The search for an explanation

Dom’s investigation proceeds alongside a journey through Nevada. He stays in the motel room where he had lodged eighteen months earlier, choosing room ten partly because its proximity to the soft-drink and ice machines had made it memorable. The room is empty, and he gives the clerk only a vague explanation about sentimental associations. He eats at the restaurant across the road and watches other customers, while earlier using his rearview mirror to look for a tail. After disturbing Polaroid photographs arrive, he and Parker Faine treat caution and paranoia as difficult to distinguish; Dom places a call from a service-station pay phone rather than the motel and speaks to Parker at a pay phone in Laguna Beach.

The search offers no immediate revelation. Dom seeks satori, a sudden enlightenment, but it eludes him. By Saturday, he still suspects that the answer to his night fear and sleepwalking lies in Reno. Even so, he decides not to alter his plans: he will continue toward Mountainview and return to Reno only if the journey brings no understanding. On January 11, he follows the timetable of his departure from Harrah’s the previous summer, driving onto I-80 toward Winnemucca. The echo between journeys gives the search a deliberate, almost investigative structure, but the repeated route does not itself solve the mystery.

Dom’s conversations with Father Stefan Wycazik widen that uncertainty into a question of interpretation. In a phone call, Dom recounts sleepwalking, fear of darkness, lunar obsession, and deaths alongside reports of poltergeist phenomena. Father Wycazik shares what he knows about Brendan Cronin’s lost faith, miraculous cures, and strange dreams. Asked whether Brendan’s experiences might be divine, Dom answers that the signs of human connivance make that explanation difficult for him to accept. His account therefore keeps natural interference and the apparently extraordinary in contention. The sleepwalking remains both a lived source of fear and part of a larger mystery whose cause Dom has not yet discovered.