24 Dec A Somnambulist
Somnambulism is not mere sleep-walking. It is also an active state of physical expression of dreams, causing one to dive into one’s distant past and act under the impulses of dormant desires and latent knowledge.
Amplified, it can be said that in dreams the physical body remains senselessly passive, whereas, in somnambulism it unconsciously and partially acts. People very often are able to recollect their dream experiences on waking up. But sleep-walkers who generally work in that state don’t remember anything done by them under the somnambulistic sway. Nor do they complain of fatigue after coming to wakefulness.
Somnambulating in its plain form is more common in the exerting children of nervous disposition. Such children just walk over unconsciously and lie down close to their mother or elders in whose nearness they may be used to feeling more secure. Because infantile somnambulists don’t perform abnormal or supernormal feats in that peculiar state, sleep-walking tendency in children pass off for ordinary childish pranks.
It is only when the adults are found sleepwalking and somnambulistically performing different works do we take it seriously and View them with astonishment.
There are in the sleep-walkers’ world old-men and women, young people of both sex, children who are on various age steps in the ladder to adolescence, intellectuals and dullards, the physically strong and the weak, persons living in extreme climates and those inhabiting the temperate parts and also the non-vegetarians and the vegetarians. But, to what extent of time, how often and what order of somnambulistic performances come to be displayed by each of the above category of persons hasn’t been adequately probed into by those who are doing research work in para-psychology.
One thing, however, is certain that somnambulistic attacks occur only during the nights and never when the individuals who are susceptible to it happen to be in sleep during the day time. Though in a stray case I did notice a lady preparing jam during the day time with her eyes closed and snoring all the while. She did it as skilfully as she used to do the same when wakeful.
Temperamental analysis of somnambulists reveals that they are generally irritable, emotionally sentimental, nervous and that they usually swim in the deep seas of negative imaginations. They are light sleepers but distinctly different from those who can be awakened by a slight touch or sound.
Sleep-walking is not hereditary as some physical and mental diseases are.
While we do come across people talking or babbling in sleep, sleep-walkers on the other hand are never somniloquous. Some are however found to be amenable to orders. They can be commanded to do something silently.
We should be very cautious in dealing with people when they happen to be in a somnambulistic state. If they are aroused tactlessly and made to know of their performances in sleep, it might shock them, make them more nervy, generate in them apprehension of personal harm and also induce bad feelings of embarrassment.
It can be dangerous to leave alone people who are prone to somnambulism. For, we hear now and then such unprotected persons losing their lives during the course of their night adventures in sleep.
Herebelow I place before you a mysterious account of a judge friend of mine who acted clairvoyantly and composed good pieces of poem in Persian. On earlier occasions I have seen him preparing hot beverage, dressing vegetables, typing, starting his car, and once he actually donned a saree and painted himself with all the nonsensical make-up materials which SENSELESS ladies and those women who lack the beauty of virtue lavishly use to attract attention and actuate foul feelings in themselves and others.
My friend Justice shri. Satya Prem, a High Court Judge with whom I have very often stayed in his bungalow happens to be one of the odd somnambulists I have come across and observed them acting too very strangely in sleep.
The knowledge of his somnambulistic feats have been wisely withheld from him and his children. His scholarly wife has been very cautiously attending on him during the nights with a view to especially seeing to it that he came by no physical harm while sleep-walking and working somnambulistically.
Justice shri. Satya Prem acted somnambulistically, only during the bright halves of the months and generally between the hours of 3 and 6 a. m. Sometimes, 3-4 months passed without a single attack.
Whenever I happened to be his guest, Justice Shri Satya Prem used to particularly allot for my use, the room next to his bedroom. The urinal and the bathroom being on the other end of his apartment, the door which connected our rooms were kept open during the nights in order that I may also be able to make use of the same when necessary, by passing through his room and without disturbing him.
During the course of my one such stay with him, early one morning at about 4a.m., I clearly saw him with the aid of the moonlight which spread in our rooms, getting up from his bedstead and advancing into my room. Shri Satya Prem could have had no cause to come into my room, much less at that opening hour of the day. But, he came all the same, walking with the graceful gait of persons holding high position. He went past my bed on the ground and seated himself near the place where I had stored my books and stationery material. He then removed a foolscap paper, took my pen and began to write. After few seconds, he stopped, jerked the pen and moved it over the paper. I found the paper in which he had made writing motions completely blank. Evidently, there wasn’t ink in the pen. Little later, he rose with the pen in his hand and went into his bed room. From the flashes of my torchlight which I directed into his room, I saw him filling the pen with ink. After that, he returned back seated himself at the place where he had left the paper which he had earlier taken to write on and resumed writing.
He wrote with the seriousness and swiftness of a person who is jotting down some memorised matter. His eyes were all the while closed and he breathed like one in sound sleep. Unusually enough, however, he was writing from right to left. He wrote in what appeared to me as Urdu. After he finished writing, he folded the paper, placed it on a book and laid the pen beside it. Thereafter, he rose, crossed over me and going to his bed laid himself over it-covering his body with the quilt.
Immediately, after he left, I removed the paper on which he had written and switching on the torchlight I saw the matter thereon. I couldn’t make out whether it was Arabic. Persian or Urdu.
When after sunrise I took it to a friend of mine who happened to be well versed in Arabic and Persian, I was told that it was a poem in chaste Persian, exhorting people to keep away from bad persons. My Muslim friend Mr. Seedat translated for me the Persian verses in English prose and I have attempted to versify them as follows in acrostics :—
KEEP AWAY FROM THEM who lack in true love.
Entirely avoid them who without cause pick-up a row.
Ever-remain aloof from them who with contempt treat,
Pass-over them who bow too low and greet.
Always shun them who are masters in outward shows,
Watchful be, don’t near those who sing songs of woes.
Attention pay, mingle not, with them who are fools,
Yes, befriend not those who are devils’ willing tools.
Flee from them who just talk but don’t act,
Run away from them who cheat others with tact.
Of them beware who pride’s drums fastly beat,
Mix not with them who aren’t clean and neat.
Turn away from them who arn’t their salt worth,
Have no intimacy with them who lack healthful mirth.
Eschew their companionship who only value money and gem,
Malevolent, these persons are, so, KEEP AWAY FROM THEM.
In his normal life, Justice shri. Satya prem didn’t know even the ABC of the Persian language, so, his exquisite composition in sleep, in that rich lingo of the Moghul courts openly suggests that in that subconscious state he was transported into one of his distant past lives. For, it stands to reason that what is not in store in the deeper most part of one’s consciousness can never come to be expressed or demonstrated. This is a fundamental law of mental recollection.
The most wondrous part of the whole feat was that, he must have been clairvoyant in sleep. Or else, he couldn’t have known that the movements which he made with the pen, on the paper, didn’t produce any writing.
I have not been able to get as to why he should have chosen to make use of my writing material when there was a good deal of them on the table so very close to his bed, in his very room. Could it be that he was semi-consciously adding strangeness to his super performance in sleep?
A serious search of the occult significance of somnambulism-particularly with a view to probing into the possibilities of cultivating and developing this unique and non-fatiguing technique of working in sleep-in all its dangerless aspects should make our life here on earth very much interesting, richsome and tensionless.
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