In Kabbalah, such speaking might be considered employed in answering a dream question, asked of angelic escorts in the ascent of the souclass="underline" answers hidden in this product of the blank space, a furtive message. “The early medieval master Hai Gaon notes a method for attaining a dream question involving fasting, purification, and meditation on a text. Based on comments by Abraham ibn Ezra and others, scholar Moshe Idel has identified this text with Exodus 14:19–21, each verse of which contains 72 consonants alluding to a mystical series of Hebrew letters said to represent the true name of God.”142 God here, in gibberish to humans, exists among a nameless language strung in chains among a life, held in the image of the bodies of those in repose of their will. The pronouncement, perhaps not surprisingly, is similar to that anticipated in the occult, such as in Aleister Crowley’s rite of Eroto-Comatose Lucidity, from 1924:
Finally the Candidate will sink into a sleep of utter exhaustion, resembling coma, and it is now that delicacy and skill must be exquisite…. The attendants will watch with assiduity for signs of waking; and the moment these occur, all stimulation must cease instantly, and the Candidate be allowed to fall again into sleep; but no sooner has this happened than the former practice is resumed. This alteration is to continue indefinitely until the Candidate is in a state which is neither sleep nor waking, and in which his Spirit, set free by perfect exhaustion of the body, and yet prevented from entering the City of Sleep, communes with the Most High and the Most Holy Lord God of its being, maker of heaven and earth.143
The gate, from both ends in these instances, invokes the higher state of self available in which the self ceases to control, can be manipulated into seeing, at last, what had been at all times just right there — a vessel in which the self serves its own reflection — a space inside the self that extends beyond the self. Through this window, and by bringing it into the day via an insomniac state, one might find oneself in the fold of somewhere else — at last, perhaps, invoking access to those keyless, faceless rooms hidden in any day. Somewhere between want of everything and pleasure of nothing.
Or one might simply go crazy. The line between the real and unreal here grows thin. Automated in sleeplocked manner, by law an active sleeping person might no longer be responsible for his or her acts. Law has historically protected those found in unknowing operation of their bodies while committing capital offenses. Simon Fraser, of Glasgow, had recurring dreams of a monster that entered his home in his unconscious. One evening he dreamed that a white creature came up through his floor, and he beat it to death against the wood. He woke and found he’d smothered his infant son. He was acquitted, under the condition that he would thenceforth sleep only in rooms alone with the door locked.144 In 1987, Kenneth Parks, a twenty-three-year-old father, testified to having had no consciousness, to having been fully asleep, while he drove twenty-three kilometers to his in-laws’ home and murdered his mother-in-law by stabbing. Parks’s extremely unusual EEG readings, coupled with lack of obvious motive, and his testimony of knowing nothing between going to bed and arriving at a police station saying, “I think I have killed some people… my hands,” in sum led to his acquittal. In Manchester, England, in 2005, a man, Lowe, beat his father to death via a series of attacks in three unique locations of the father’s home, on different floors and on the front walk of the house, resulting in ninety different physical injuries to the body. Both were very drunk, and had gone to sleep in different rooms. Though the spread-out and repeating nature of the assault was found not consistent with usual sleep-violence behaviors, the court acquitted him of all charges.145
Several instances involving the acquittal of pending rape charges provide the same reasoning as in the cases of homicide: that the sleeping men did not realize they were raping, that they could, inside their sleep, perform daily acts without knowing when or where or against whom.146 These behaviors are almost across the board the result of “provocation or close proximity” in regard to the victims, true for 100 percent of acts caused by confused arousal (like sleepwalking, but not leaving the bed), and for 40 to 90 percent of those caused by actual sleepwalking (which is defined as the second an unconscious person’s foot touches the floor, and can range from “slow wandering” to running.147 Triggers in the cases of these incidences include sounds outside the body “such as snores or internal events such as apneas, hypopneas, or leg movements,” some of the most common complaints of wrecked sleep, which again recall Marcus’s distress signals from the self inside the self.
Violence against one’s own self, often by accident and resulting from dumbed motor skills, is also not uncommon, and can be manifested by “tripping over objects, falling down stairs, cutting oneself with a knife, or burning one’s hand while sleep eating,” the flesh stretched to the point of ripping. Though the average rate of success of a suicide by overdose in the United States is only 1.8 percent,148 those involving Nembutal, a former active agent in sleeping pills, have been reported as 100 percent successful throughout 840 documented cases when coupled with antiemetic drugs.149 In some, the self-destructive sleep behaviors might become so complex they result in involuntary snuffing, such as in 2010 when thirty-five-year-old conceptual designer Tobias Wong hanged himself while sleeping, the last in a series of strange unconscious behaviors that included holding business meetings, selling things on eBay, designing costumes for his cats, and mistaking his lover for a murderer. Another frequent parasomniac, Michael Cox, hanged himself inside sleep in 2001 after watching Schindler’s List before he went to bed.150 Others have jumped from windows, walked into traffic, mishandled guns, dealt damage by bumping into walls hard with the head. Though some have tried to debunk the common advice that you should not wake sleepwalkers in the midst of their procession, countless studies have shown that those shifted dramatically from the sleep-state action to the waking light are violent and negative, confused particularly in the sudden shift of self inside of self to self in direct contact with the other, crossfed with hidden terror, a translation of the night. Even in sleep, then, we are someone, waiting. We are full of our blood, and we have hands. Reality becomes then a silent question of where do the many of me in me and the kinds of air around us overlap; where might time and place inside the body be negated, turned otherwise alive.