Dominick Corvaisis discovers that, while sleepwalking, he has filled pages of his unfinished novel with a message of fear. The episode turns a private anxiety into a baffling physical record: his sleeping self has acted with obsessive persistence, while his waking self can neither recall the act nor confidently explain what it means.

Context and Discovery

Corvaisis is already preoccupied with the approaching publication of Twilight. He wonders whether the novel will justify Random House’s investment or fail, whether he can repeat his success, and whether his rise will be followed by an equally swift descent. These questions circle through his waking hours and, he suspects, continue through his sleep; he understands his sleepwalking as an attempt to escape them and find a place where worry cannot reach him.

At his desk, he switches on the IBM Displaywriter and opens chapter eighteen on the first disk of his new, still-untitled book. The previous day he had stopped halfway through the chapter’s sixth page. Now the screen displays a full sixth page of unfamiliar green text, followed by pages seven and eight, although he had not created either page. His first response is disbelief; the discovery leaves the back of his neck cool and damp.

The Message on the Screen

The new material consists of one short sentence repeated hundreds of times: “I'm scared.” Its force lies partly in the contrast between the smallness of the words and the scale of their repetition. The message occupies page six in double spacing, indented four times, with four sentences to a line and thirteen lines on the page. Pages seven and eight each contain twenty-seven lines. Together, the pages record 268 repetitions.

The computer, Corvaisis reasons, could not have composed the text by itself: it did only what it was instructed to do. Nor does he find signs that anyone broke into the house to tamper with the manuscript, and he can think of no likely prankster. He concludes that he must have come to the word processor while sleepwalking and typed the sentence repeatedly, despite having no memory of doing so. The machine has preserved an action that his conscious recollection cannot supply.

Fear and Competing Explanations

Corvaisis can account for some of the fear through his career worries, but he doubts that sleepwalking itself explains the intensity of the message. The episode is disorienting, yet he does not consider it an ordeal sufficient to produce such terror. More troubling is the possibility that the words concern something beyond his professional future: a threat his conscious mind has not recognized, but that his subconscious has tried to communicate while he sleeps.

He immediately resists that interpretation, dismissing it as the overactive imagination of a novelist and deciding that work is the best remedy. His explanation therefore remains divided. He has a concrete account of how the sentence reached the screen—he typed it while sleepwalking—but no settled account of what the sentence means. The words may reflect the pressures he already knows, or point toward a danger he cannot yet consciously identify.

Recurrence and Significance

Corvaisis tries to contain the incident with what he knows about adult sleepwalking: most adult sleepwalkers, he believes, have only a short run of episodes, and few experience more than half a dozen, usually within six months or less. He takes comfort in the likelihood that the midnight wandering will stop and that he will not again wake huddled and tense in the back of a closet. That reassurance does not resolve the message; it only offers the hope that the behavior producing it will end.

As a narrative event, the episode makes sleepwalking more than an unexplained disturbance. The manuscript becomes an involuntary record of a mind divided between conscious denial and an unrecognized fear. Its exact repetition gives that fear a voice without clarifying its source, leaving the reader with the same uncertainty that unsettles Corvaisis: whether the message is an expression of known pressures or a warning whose meaning has not yet surfaced.