sleepwalker

1. (archaic) One in a state of magnetic or mesmeric sleep; someone in a hypnotic trance.Examples: "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."archaic

2. (figurative) One who goes though life in a state of obliviousness.Examples: "Perhaps he should have killed the white man, who, after all, is the dangerous one, the sleepwalker, the blind man . Getting rid of him would have protected " the higher interests of society " on three counts : It would have made this dreamer and sleepwalker "pay the price" for refusing to awaken to the truth of human identity; it would have destroyed the dreamer's "dream world," which excludes blacks; and it would have carried out the narrator's " responsibility," as "invisible victim," for " the fate of all"—for those both within and without the sleepwalker's dream world."; "These lines, stylistically reminiscent of Dante's guided tour of damned souls in the Inferno and written in a similar terza rima meterical pattern, survey the human condition, seeing hellish lineaments written on the faces of human souls—not because of any particular sin but as the after-effect of a staining caused by submitting to the triumph of life, suggesting the notion of existence as a process of unabating lapse and disfiguration, a hopeless enterprise where human action, bereft of beauteous shape, has not meaning, and all are, or soon will be, sleepwalkers oblivious to poetic truth."; "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."figuratively