Dom Corvaisis’s attempt to seal his windows and hide while sleepwalking turns advice meant to quiet his mind into a scene of unexplained terror. In the morning, he finds the physical traces of a nocturnal effort to fortify his home—and of a flight from whatever he believed was outside.

The Advice and the Night

After Dr. Cobletz advised him to step away from his writing and exhaust himself with physical activity, Dom began the regimen on Saturday. He pursued it with more single-minded intensity than the doctor had suggested. The exertion sent him into deep sleep as soon as he went to bed, but it did not prevent his sleepwalking: instead of waking in bed or in a closet, he came to in the garage.

Dom was gasping, terrified, and sore. During the night, he had taken two folded canvas dropcloths from a shelf above the workbench and squeezed into a narrow service space behind the furnace. He lay concealed beneath the tarps. The makeshift shelter was not simply a way to keep warm; his actions indicated that he had been hiding from something.

Evidence of a Barricade

Later, in the bedroom, Dom found steel finishing nails scattered across the carpet. A partly emptied box of nails and a hammer lay beside the baseboard beneath the window, whose drapes had been drawn aside. Three more nails rested on the windowsill. Together, these objects supplied a material record of what he had done while asleep: he had begun preparing to nail the windows shut.

The attempted barricade had not been completed. The evidence suggests that Dom was overcome by fear before he could finish, abandoned the bedroom, and fled to the garage, where he hid behind the furnace. The episode thus joins two defensive acts—trying to close off the house and then concealing himself when that effort failed.

The Unseen Threat

By daylight, the view beyond the window offered no visible explanation for the terror: rose bushes, a strip of lawn, and an ivy-covered slope leading to another house. The landscape appeared peaceful, and Dom could not believe it had looked more threatening the night before. Yet the nails, hammer, displaced dropcloths, and cramped hiding place remained as evidence of the fear that had governed him while he slept.

The episode makes Dom’s unconscious behavior more legible without identifying its cause. His sleeping mind responds as if danger is approaching from outside, first by trying to seal the boundary of the home and then by retreating to a concealed space. The threat itself remains unknown, leaving the ordinary bedroom window and the garage furnace as the physical traces of an anxiety Dom cannot explain while awake.