Sleepwalking

Someone gets up in the middle of the night. Their eyes are open, but their gaze passes through everything. The movements are strangely calm, almost purposeful — doors are opened, stairs are climbed, sometimes objects are moved, sometimes a few words are murmured. The next morning: nothing. No memory, no explanation. The body was on its way, but consciousness was not there.

Sleepwalking occurs particularly often in children. It seems uncanny because it dissolves the clear boundary between waking and sleeping. Medicine classifies the phenomenon as belonging to deep sleep — a kind of intermediate state in which motor systems become active while the conscious part of the brain is still asleep. That is the physical side, and it is real. But it does not explain why a person chooses precisely this exit. Why the body gets up when the head has switched off. Why now, why this person, why at all.