sleepwalker

[ sleep-waw-ker ]

noun

1. a person who walks, eats, or performs other motor acts while asleep and is unaware of doing so upon awakening; a person with a disorder characterized by this:

   A sleepwalker may do something that could cause injury, such as climbing out of a window or walking into objects.

2. a person who acts seemingly without awareness, feeling, aim, or will:

   My parents were sleepwalkers, moving about their world as if oblivious to it and to themselves.

Word History and Origins

Origin of sleepwalker¹

sleep + walker

Example Sentences

Especially mysterious is the story of a couple the islanders refer to as “the sleepwalkers,” who stayed at the Villa Rosa the year before and drowned.

From Seattle Times

I go outside in my pajamas like a sleepwalker to retrieve my L.A.

From Los Angeles Times

“We move through these nights and days like sleepwalkers,” the eminent Israeli novelist David Grossman, who lost his son in a previous war, wrote in a column for Britain’s Financial Times.

From Los Angeles Times

The stage, now almost bathed in moonlight, has them walking calmly, serenely, executing the same steps on different planes of space like sleepwalkers roaming the night.

From New York Times

In a 1986 essay, he compares his fellow physicists to “sleepwalkers,” who continue to extend quantum theory while ignoring its “fundamental obscurity.”

From Scientific American