The sleeper often wakes up when called by name, but he generally obeys without waking, all commands of a sensible character, such as to go back to bed.
The sleeper often finds his way and locates the objects he may need for the purposes of his dream with his eyes closed, but noises and collisions with objects often fail to bring him back to waking consciousness.
Sadger has attempted to point a connection between moonlight and sleep walking, which he calls at times “moon walking.”
The conclusions which he reaches at the end of his book on the subject are as follows:
“Sleep walking, under or without the influence of the moon, represents a motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind which, however, infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves in all the cases analysed more or less completely as of a sexual erotic nature.
“Also those wishes which present themselves without disguise, are mostly of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that the sleepwalker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved object as in childhood. The love object need not belong necessarily to the present; it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood.
“Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or imitates his manner.
“Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child pretends to be asleep, that it may be able without fear or punishment to experience all sorts of forbidden things, because it cannot be held accountable for what it does ‘unconsciously in its sleep.’ The same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it.
“The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this, these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, sadists and hysterics, with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus.
“Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy; yet they are found frequently in conjunction with the former.