Sleepwalking

I’ve written for years. But in the beginning, it was science fiction. Rarely did I look at the human condition much. Instead, I looked outward.

But writing my Lawman novels has forced me to mine things I’d just as soon have forgotten. Trouble is, you never really do forget those things.

You can ignore the past.

You can deny the past.

You can never talk about the past.

But it never leaves.

Instead, it sits locked within the room you pushed it into. And like the monster it is, we refuse to confront it. And it will demand out attention. It will growl and howl in the night.

And eventually, you’re forced to listen to it.

It will get you attention.

And one of those ways is through sleepwalking.

Writing Deadman has forced me to mine that piece of my past.

As a child, I was a sleepwalker. I know as a fact that I’m not alone in that. Millions of humans have been afflicted with that sometime during their lives. And it something we rarely talk about because it’s more often than not, it’s a manifestation of things we’d just as soon not admit. It the Monster we locked away, and it demands our attention.

There are two stories I remember of my sleepwalking days.

One was in the middle night of my standing in the bathroom. We had a metal expandable towel tack that ran from floor to ceiling. Apparently, I ws trying to climb it like one a rope in the gym. I seem to have some recollection of waking from that and screaming in terror. I had no idea how I got there, much less what I was doing.

One another occasion I got up, knelt on the couch, and gazed out through the living room picture window into the moonlight. On that occasion when I was found, I simply looked at my father and said, “Dad, what are you doing here?’ And I walked back to my bed.

I’ve no recollection of that incident.

So, what causes sleepwalking?

I checked it out at the Mayo Clinic websirte, and what they said there’s three things that cause sleepwalking.

One is caused by sleeping hygiene. Translation, your bed is dirty.

A second can be caused by medications.

The third is, in my opinion, the most common. Stress and lots of it.

In short, we took the monster, locked it away, and its clawing at the door looking for an outlet.

Our monsters are all different. Mine was school.

We didn’t have psychologist back then, and the closest we came was Granny and home spun wisdom.

She recommended putting a cross under my pillow, and to me, to start walking.

In my case, treatment was running. I started burning the stress out by running miles. The road became my therapy.

But in the case of the book is things I learned alter. Sometimes the easiest way to make it go away is to acknowledge the monster. To drag it out of the room or cage by the scruff of the neck and stare into its ugly face.

And it might have fangs.

It might be big and ugly.

We may look at and be convinced it can destroy us.

But if we stop, and look into it eyes, we’ll see tears there.

The monster is our hurts.

And many of us have found all we locked away the very thing that can free us. We have to acknowledge it.

And we need to cry for it.

And we need to pray for it.

We have to do the work.

And we’ll never really forget it or leave it.

But we’ll discover it loses its power and the crying and howling can come to an end.

And if we do the work, it becomes something that walks with us and makes us stronger.