sleepwalker

American  

[sleep-waw-ker] / ˈslipˌwɔ kər /

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.

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Etymology

Origin of sleepwalker

sleep + walker

Example Sentences

“Like a sleepwalker … I know what I have to do,” Crimo narrated in another rap video posted late last year.

From Seattle Times • Jul. 7, 2022

It is an aria from Bellini’s opera “La Sonnambula” — the sleepwalker — and the words to that aria are fraught with nostalgia: “Oh remembrance of scenes long vanished . . . where my childhood serenely glided.”

From Washington Post • Mar. 13, 2020

Emma Walton, 25, London: At university I always locked my windows and doors at night I’ve been a sleepwalker my whole life.

From The Guardian • May 24, 2016

"He was a sleepwalker as a kid. I told Carl Reiner about it, and that's why he wrote it into the script."

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 22, 2015

Trudging forward like a sleepwalker in the bitter cold, I make my way down the driveway, then turn left and plod up the rutted dirt road to the falling-down bridge.

From "Orphan Train" by Christina Baker Kline