Shaking Sleepwalkers

Wake responsibly

Mike Birbiglia spent years making one of the strangest possible premises understandable to an audience: your body can get up in the night, leave the bed, follow a private logic, and put itself in real danger while your mind is somewhere else entirely. The details are funny until they are not.

I’ve always enjoyed his standup on the topic and the movie they made. Sleepwalking is absurd in the way many dangerous things are absurd, which is to say it is almost slapstick right up until the body meets the furniture, the staircase, the locked door, and, in this case, the window. You laugh at first because the image is ridiculous. A grown man, deep in dream, wandering into the built environment with the confidence of a person who has mistaken one world for another. Then the laughter catches in the throat because confidence is exactly what makes it dangerous. That is how you end up broken and bloodied, having mistaken a window for part of the dream.

The phrase “wake up” has always enjoyed an unearned moral prestige. It presents itself as the plain speech of courage. Wake up to what is happening. Wake up to corruption, collapse, manipulation, drift, technological transformation, institutional decay. Wake up and see things as they are. The slogan flatters the speaker. It suggests bravery, lucidity, and impatience with illusion. It also suggests that waking is a simple kindness, the verbal equivalent of opening the curtains in a dark room.

But a sleepwalker is not a person peacefully resting in ignorance. He is already in motion. He has left the safe place. His body is acting inside a dream and against the world at the same time. That is what makes the metaphor useful, and what makes the usual rhetoric around social awakening feel childish. The problem with collective delusion is not merely that people believe false things. It is that whole societies can continue to move, build, automate, govern, consume, reassure, and plan under assumptions that no longer fit reality. They are not asleep in the sense of being still. They are asleep in the sense of being active without renewed contact with the room.

This is why the fantasy of “shaking people awake” deserves more suspicion than it gets. Waking a sleepwalker is not obviously benevolent. A person startled out of dream can panic. He can lash out. He can lose what little orientation he had. A body already close to the edge can go over it. The moral problem is not solved by sincerity. It is possible to be right about the danger and wrong about the interruption. It is possible to mistake shock for rescue.

There is a great deal of vanity hidden inside the desire to wake other people up. Some of it is understandable. To see something clearly while others continue on as if nothing has changed is lonely. It is infuriating. The old scripts keep circulating. People continue to praise dead institutions, repeat obsolete assurances, conduct their meetings with the grave professionalism of a civilization that assumes its categories still hold. There is a natural temptation to seize the nearest shoulder and shake. To insist that everyone stop speaking in this muffled managerial register and admit where we are.

But where exactly are we? That is part of the difficulty. A person jerked awake in darkness is conscious, perhaps, but not oriented. He has not been given reality. He has merely been deprived of the dream. We speak as if the opposite of delusion is truth, when often the more relevant opposite is orientation. A destabilized person can know more facts and be less fit for judgment. A destabilized society can pierce one illusion only to become captive to uglier ones. The collapse of a false story does not automatically produce courage, responsibility, or discipline. Quite often it produces rage, humiliation, and appetite. It produces a new hunger to be soothed by something louder.

This is one of the things that makes our own moment so eerie. Public life is full of people who are not exactly asleep and not exactly awake. They sense that something in the inherited arrangement no longer holds. They know the institutions are thinner than they pretend. They know the language of stability conceals a tremendous amount of improvisation. They know technological change is not just another policy issue to be harmonized with existing categories. They know trust has become both indispensable and scarce. They know the future is arriving through organizations that still speak as if the ground beneath them were settled.

Yet this knowledge has not matured into shared judgment. It hangs in the air as mood, as irritation, as a thousand private recognitions with no civic metabolism.

A half-awake society may be more dangerous than a sleeping one. The sleeper at least follows the dream consistently. The half-awake person is divided. He still carries the dream residue but now feels the coldness of the room. He can sit bolt upright while still obeying some nonsense from a place he cannot explain. He can become conspiratorial, erratic, sentimental, cruel. He can crave the relief of stronger fictions because the weaker ones no longer sedate him. That is part of what makes the politics of exposure so unstable. Every revelation is greeted not by a neutral public reasoning toward better institutions, but by a population with frayed nerves and preexisting distrust. Truth arrives already damaged. It enters a room where many people no longer trust one another enough to stand up without reaching for a weapon, a slogan, or a savior.

This is why not all illusions are alike. Some are predatory. They are maintained by people who benefit from managed sleep, who depend on the body continuing to move in directions they have chosen. Consider the official assurance, repeated across decades of deindustrialization, that the losses were local and temporary, that retraining programs would come, that the market was correcting toward something better. The people delivering these assurances often knew they were insufficient. The euphemism was not innocent confusion. It was a mechanism of rule. It kept people from organizing around a shared recognition of what was actually happening to them. So has process served this function: the soothing insistence that everything is complicated and therefore best left to experts, or that visible failures are isolated exceptions to systems that remain fundamentally sound. These are not the dreams of the bewildered. They are the administered sedatives of the comfortable.

But some illusions are simply what allow ordinary people to get out of bed. A certain amount of continuity, trust in the day ahead, narrative coherence about one’s work, one’s country, one’s future: these are not always lies in the sinister sense. They are often load-bearing fictions. A man who has spent thirty years in a particular kind of work needs to believe that work meant something. A woman raising children in a struggling town needs some story about why staying is not surrender. These beliefs may be partially false. They may paper over real structural failures. But they are also what makes it possible to keep faith with one’s life, to extend trust to neighbors, to participate rather than withdraw. Strip them away without offering anything in their place, and you have not liberated anyone. You have merely left them exposed, and exposure without orientation is not freedom. It is a different kind of trap.

This complicates the morality of disclosure in ways that the rhetoric of awakening rarely acknowledges. To pierce a predatory illusion, the managed story that serves power at the expense of those it governs, may be an act of justice. To pierce a coping illusion, the story that lets someone inhabit their life with enough dignity to keep going, without offering any means of reentry is something closer to vandalism. The distinction is not always clean. The same revelation can do both at once, liberating some people and pulverizing others.

But the distinction is real, and any serious politics of awakening has to grapple with it rather than treating all disillusionment as equally clarifying.

That possibility should make the self-appointed shaker less self-satisfied. There is a type of person who does not really want an awake public. He wants the vindication of having seen first. He wants the emotional reward of being confirmed by catastrophe. He wants history to lean over and whisper that he was right all along. Such people often speak in the tones of moral urgency, but urgency is not the same thing as responsibility. To tell a disoriented population that its maps are fraudulent, its leaders unserious, its work increasingly provisional, its institutions brittle, and its future ungoverned may be necessary. It may also be theatrical. The question is whether the speaker has done anything to remove the sharp objects from the room.

The real civic art is harder and less glamorous. It is the work of introducing truth at a human speed. Making reality bearable enough to face without falsifying it. Helping people stand before demanding that they run. Replacing anesthesia not with panic but with orientation.

The metaphor grows more exact the longer you look at it. If someone is sleepwalking, the first task is not to win an argument with him about whether he is dreaming. The first task is to keep him from going through the glass. You clear the space. You lower the risk. You guide rather than grab, if guidance is still possible. You understand that his confusion is not proof of bad character. You understand too that his condition can still do tremendous damage. You do not romanticize the dream, but neither do you fetishize the violence of interruption.

A serious politics of awakening would begin there. It would ask about sequence, timing, dosage, setting. It would distinguish between revelations that enlarge agency and revelations that merely pulverize trust. It would care less about the intoxicating moment of exposure and more about what comes after. How do you help people inhabit a world after their inherited simplifications have broken? How do you tell them what is real without making unreality even more attractive? How do you preserve judgment in a culture that converts every shock into entertainment, every warning into brand identity, every disillusionment into freelance despair?

Much of modern life is being conducted in a state of managed dissociation. Our systems continue to optimize, summarize, automate, and reassure with the eerie competence of a body moving under a script it has not consciously examined. We are told to keep adapting, keep integrating, keep trusting the next layer of mediation. We are also told, by another camp, to wake up, open our eyes, reject every anesthetic at once. Both impulses can be childish. One mistakes continued motion for health. The other mistakes destabilization for wisdom. What neither offers is the thing most needed: a way back into the world that does not require pretending the dream was never the world.

The better image is smaller and less heroic. Not the prophet with the bullhorn. Not the manager dimming the alarm. A person at the bedside who knows that consciousness is not the finish line. A person who can say, with as little melodrama as possible: you are here. This room is real. There is a window to your left. Do not move too fast. We need to get you back into the world without pretending that the dream was the world all along.

Civilizations do not always destroy themselves in grand acts of will. Sometimes they simply continue a movement begun in sleep. They mistake the dream for the room and momentum for judgment. The job of serious people is not merely to shout at them from the doorway. It is to learn the harder discipline of interruption without vanity, truth without sadism, clarity without the thrill of watching someone else stagger. The sleepwalker must not be left to wander. But neither should we congratulate ourselves too quickly for laying hands on him. Not if we have not first considered what our shaking may set loose.