sleepwalker

noun

1. A somnambulist; one who walks, or is active, while asleep.

   “Edward Churchill still attended to his work in a hopeless mechanical manner like a sleep-walker who walks safely on a well-known round. But his Roman collar galled him, his cossack stifled him, his biretta was as uncomfortable as a merry-andrew's cap and bells.”

   “Ashley looked dull as a sleepwalker and, as he came to her and put his hand upon her arm, he spoke like a sleepwalker.”

   “Second, in the "hypnotized" subject, but not in the sleepwalker, characteristics such as a blank stare, a rigid facial expression, and an unwillingnes to talk have been produced by suggestions to become relaxed, drowsy, and sleepy and they can be easily removed by suggestions — for example, by suggestions to be alert.”

   “I was a sleepwalker, incapable of controlling or recalling my nocturnal activities.”

   “Consider, for example, the sleepwalker who goes into her neighbor's yard, takes an apple from the tree, and eats it .”

2. (archaic)One in a state of magnetic or mesmeric sleep; someone in a hypnotic trance.

   “Though the sleepwalker sat with closely bandaged and wadded eyes, and his back to the grimacing part of the company, he described everything they were doing with the most comic humour, and he asked, 'What in the world is that gentleman in the chair making such faces for, and what is he giving himself such trouble about? […]"”

   “But the sleepwalker does much that is correct . The magnetic somnambulists are not dreaming ~ such that there is an accidental connection of images;~rather they know of themselves what they are, but as feeling beings they know this through their genius.”

   “CALIGARI (Relaxing a bit.) I would like to apply for a permit to present my exhibit at your fair. CLERK. Oh. Then you're here to make money rather than to spend it. (Sighs) What kind of exhibit? CALIGARI. A somnambulist. CLERK. A somn-what? CALIGARI. A somnambulist, a sleepwalker.”

3. A person from whom a voodoo practitioner (a bocor) has taken over control of their mind, making them a zombie who must do the bocor's bidding.

   “But don't zombies exist in real life— such as the Haitian zombies called “sleepwalkers" ?”

   “These were not the rotting corpses of the modern zombie apocalypse; rather they were laborers and sleepwalkers that served their masters dutifully.”

   “However, I suffer the loss of slumber with waking dreams of what I am to become, a sleepwalker, living a nightmare, and that's the way it goes .”

4. (figuratively)One who goes though life in a state of obliviousness.

   “Thus the Republicans, meeting in Philadephia in June to pick their candidate for president, passed over such party favorites—all conservative isolationists—as senators Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, men whom Walter Lippmann had called "sleepwalkers” oblivious of the nation's crisis.”