Dominick Corvaisis’s sleepwalking and sink nightmare

Dominick Corvaisis’s sleepwalking and sink nightmare expose the uneasy gap between visible improvement and an anxiety whose source remains unknown. As treatment makes his nocturnal wandering less frequent and less destructive, a remembered dream gives his fear a precise, horrifying image: his face forced toward a running sink and its open drain. He wakes in his own bathroom, screaming into that drain, but cannot connect the nightmare to any known event in his life.

Background and Treatment

On Monday morning, December 2, Dominick went to Dr. Cobletz’s office with Parker Faine. Because the doctor had recently examined him and found no signs of physical disorder, he did not recommend immediate diagnostic procedures. Instead, he discussed somnambulism, a subject he had read about since Dominick’s previous visit on November 23.

Dr. Cobletz explained that sleepwalking in adults was usually short-lived, though in some cases it could become habitual. Persistent somnambulism, he warned, could impose rigid patterns on a patient’s life, foster fear of night and sleep, and deepen feelings of helplessness into more serious emotional disorders. Dominick already felt close to that danger: his bedroom barricade and the arsenal he had assembled there made the threat of his sleepwalking tangible even while he was awake.

The doctor prescribed Valium during the day for anxiety and a 15-milligram Dalmane tablet before bed. His rationale was that a sedative might interrupt the pattern of nocturnal wandering; after several undisturbed nights, the behavior might stop. In chronic cases, Cobletz said, daytime medication could supplement the nightly sedative.

Dominick’s Decision and Early Improvement

Dominick chose to remain alone in his own house rather than stay elsewhere. He feared that leaving would resemble the retreat from life he had made for years before his change of outlook during a trip to Mountainview College in Utah the summer before last. At thirty-three, he had begun to like the person he had become and dreaded falling back into his former existence.

Parker believed the sleepwalking might be mysteriously connected to those changes. Dominick doubted that the link was mysterious or complicated. He suspected instead that the episodes offered an excuse to retreat from the challenges, excitement, and stress of his new life. He decided to remain at home, take the medication as prescribed, and endure the problem rather than withdraw from that life.

By Saturday, December 7, the decision seemed to be helping. Before treatment, he had walked in his sleep every night. In the preceding five nights, he had left his bed only twice, during the predawn hours of Wednesday and Friday. Some days he needed Valium and some days he did not; each evening he took Dalmane with milk or hot chocolate.

The episodes had also changed in character. He no longer gathered weapons, built barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut. On both nights, he had gone only as far as the back of the closet and made himself a makeshift bed there. He woke stiff and sore, frightened by an unnamed threat from dreams he could not remember. The reduction in danger was real, but it had not ended the fear that drove him from bed.

The Sink Nightmare

On Friday, Dominick had received encouraging news about his novel, Twilight in Babylon. His New York editor, Tabitha Wycombe, read him two excellent prepublication reviews and said that growing bookseller excitement had prompted another increase in the first printing. After their nearly half-hour conversation, he felt that his life was back on track. The following night, however, his sleepwalking brought a new development: for the first time, he retained part of the nightmare that had driven him from bed.

In the dream’s final minutes, he stood in a blurred, half-glimpsed bathroom. An unseen person shoved him against a sink while another held him upright and pressed his head down. Weak, unable to speak or draw breath, and convinced he was dying, he could not escape. His face was only inches from the porcelain basin. He saw running water swirl around a chrome-plated drain without a stopper; the rubber plug had been removed and left somewhere out of sight.

The dream narrows around the drain. Water circles and disappears into it, and Dominick becomes fixated on the whirlpool. The open hole seems to him like a sucking orifice that will draw him into its depths. He imagines that the people holding him intend to force him into it and dispose of him, perhaps through a garbage disposal. Their shouting remains incomprehensible. The scene supplies no explanation for who they are or why they are attacking him; its force comes from his bodily helplessness and the drain’s increasingly threatening presence.

Awakening and Unresolved Fear

Dominick woke screaming in his own bathroom, bent over the sink and yelling into the drain. He sprang back, stumbled close to falling over the bathtub, and caught the towel rack to steady himself. After catching his breath, he returned to look: the basin was glossy white porcelain, and its brass drain had a dome-shaped brass stopper. There was nothing worse in it. The room in the nightmare had not been this room.

The mismatch offered no relief from the dream’s intensity. Dominick could find no symbolic or real connection between it and his life, yet the experience remained profoundly disturbing. At the same time, he measured the night against his earlier episodes: he had not barricaded himself or gathered weapons, so he considered the nightmare a minor setback, perhaps even a sign of improvement. If he could eventually remember his dreams from beginning to end, he thought, he might discover the source of his anxiety and deal with it more directly.

It was only 2:25 a.m., but Dominick did not want to return to bed and risk the strange place in the dream again. His Dalmane bottle was in the nightstand drawer. Although he was not supposed to take more than one tablet each evening, he considered making an exception, reasoning that one indulgence could not hurt. The episode thus ends without a recovered cause or a confirmed cure: the treatment has curtailed his most alarming sleepwalking, while the sink nightmare leaves him afraid of sleep and tempted to exceed the prescribed dose.