Somnambulism (Dominick Corvaisis)

Dom Corvaisis's sleepwalking begins as a private disturbance—unconscious writing, hiding, and attempts to secure his home—but becomes a signal that his waking understanding of his past is incomplete. Repeated messages about the moon, the failure of drug treatment to settle the problem, and the appearance of an anonymous correspondent lead Dom to reject the idea that ordinary stress explains the episodes and to retrace a journey associated with his past.

Symptoms and Repeated Messages

The episodes reach beyond walking in sleep. Dom finds himself typing the words "the moon" hundreds of times on his word processor and waking from a dream with the same words on his lips. Earlier, he had left himself the message "I'm afraid" and later wonders what he had been hiding from in closets and what he had hoped to keep out when he began nailing his windows shut while asleep. These actions make the disorder legible through objects and traces left behind: a typed phrase, secured windows, and a message that the waking Dom did not consciously choose to write.

The fear also returns in bodily form. One night, Dom wakes on his hands and knees beside the bed, shouting about the moon and struggling against the rope he had tied around himself to restrain his sleepwalking. In the dark, he mistakes the rope gripping his arm for an attacker. As sleep clears, he recognizes the restraint, but discovers that he has untied one of its four tight knots and partly undone a second. He has then tugged and twisted against the line hard enough to abrade his right wrist. The restraint has not prevented the episode; it has instead become part of the danger.

Dom remembers the shouted words clearly, though he cannot recall the dream that preceded them. He is sure it differs from the nightmare he has endured during the preceding month: this dream concerns the moon, and is terrifying in a different way. The recurring word therefore does not provide an explanation. It marks the edge of what Dom cannot remember, while its repetition makes the unknown increasingly difficult to dismiss.

Treatment and the Rejection of an Ordinary Explanation

Dom has tried to manage the problem with medication, but by Christmas he is struggling with both fear of another episode and dependence on the drugs. He takes neither Valium the day before nor Dalmane the night before, determined to avoid further reliance on chemicals even as he continues to crave them. The craving grows so strong that he empties the pills into the toilet because he does not trust himself to keep them. By later that day, his anxiety has climbed to the level it had reached before drug therapy began.

At Parker Faine's Christmas gathering, Dom explains that he had been getting hooked on the medication and had lied about its effect: dependence had seemed preferable to enduring what happened while he was sleepwalking. But the anonymous notes have changed how he understands the problem. He tells Parker that the cause is not simply within him or psychological, and that something stranger is at work. His statement does not solve the mystery; it marks a change in the question he is asking. The episodes are no longer only symptoms to suppress but clues whose source he must investigate.

The next night, a new episode confirms that the pattern is continuing. Dom wakes after shouting about the moon, injured by his efforts against the rope, and unable to recover the dream. His fear is not cured by the decision to stop taking medication; instead, the change exposes him again to the episodes he had hoped to contain. The episode also sharpens the contrast between what his body does while asleep and what his waking mind can explain afterward.

The Anonymous Notes and the Journey into the Past

The notes turn that contrast outward. Dom has received messages from someone who appears to know about his sleepwalking and his repeated typing of the moon, although he cannot understand how the sender learned these details. He tells Parker that one note arrived at the post office without a return address and another was delivered to his home. The correspondence makes it harder to treat his nocturnal behavior as an entirely private matter: someone else seems to know about it, but Dom has no clear way to identify the sender or pursue the source.

On Christmas night, he announces that he will retrace the route he took the summer before last. He plans to fly to Portland, Oregon, rent a car, and travel from there to Reno, Nevada, across Nevada and half of Utah on Interstate 80, then onward to Mountainview College. Parker immediately recognizes that this is not an ordinary pleasure trip and connects the route with the changes Dom underwent that summer. Dom confirms that he expects the sleepwalking to return now that he has discarded the drugs, but explains that the notes have made the journey necessary: he believes the problem reaches beyond his personal psychology. His proposed route makes the past a destination rather than a vague source of unease.

Memory, Repetition, and the Wider Mystery

The novel places Dom's missing dream memories and unconscious acts alongside other characters' accounts of concealed or reconstructed experience. During Ginger Weiss's hypnotic examination, she reasons that a period of captivity for brainwashing should leave an empty stretch of time. Pablo Jackson counters that false recollections could be implanted to cover the gap. His questioning then exposes the weakness of Ginger's apparent memories of four days at the Tranquility Motel: she can describe the motel, but cannot truly recall the books and television programs she says she used to fill the time. Pablo understands those activities as suggested, artificial memories rather than things she actually did.

As he presses for details, Ginger repeats programmed responses without emotion, while her face tightens with anxiety. Pablo believes the true memories are held behind an Azrael Block and fears that confronting them too forcefully could plunge her into a coma or worse. This account does not establish the cause of Dom's sleepwalking, but it changes the context in which his unexplained behavior is read: in the novel, apparent gaps and uncertain recollections can be products of deliberate intervention, not merely ordinary forgetting.

The same uncertainty appears when Dom discusses the Blocks' recollection of a toxic spill and evacuation. Ernie Block insists that the event happened and recalls newspaper clippings from the Elko Sentinel; Faye Block remembers visitors offering the family shelter during the evacuation. Dom argues that those visitors may have seen the same extraordinary events and had their memories erased too. His suggestion is not independent proof of what caused his own episodes, but it shows how the problem of memory expands from an individual's unconscious behavior into a dispute over what whole groups have been made to remember.

Parker Faine encounters a more concrete example at the Salcoe family home. A girl lies with blank eyes and earphones connected to a tape recorder, which plays a soothing woman's voice describing a hotel stay and routine activities. Parker understands that memories of the Tranquility Motel have again been repressed and that new false recollections are being planted to cover the period of the current brainwashing session. The scene gives the novel's memory motif a disturbing physical form: the spoken script enters through the ear, while the listener appears not to see or respond to the person beside her.

Narrative Significance

Dom's sleepwalking is a repeated boundary failure between hidden experience and waking knowledge. The phrase about the moon surfaces in typing, speech, and a terror-filled awakening, but repetition yields no clear account of what the moon means. The anonymous notes add another layer: Dom cannot account for the sender's knowledge, just as he cannot retrieve the dream behind his cries. Each trace is specific, yet its source remains uncertain.

That uncertainty drives Dom toward the journey of the previous summer and gives his nocturnal state a larger narrative function. It is at once an immediate danger—illustrated by his injured wrist and failed restraint—and a clue that prompts him to investigate his past. The surrounding revelations about implanted memories strengthen the novel's central tension between experience and its explanation, without resolving whether Dom's sleepwalking is psychological, connected to the events he intends to revisit, or part of something stranger.