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Sleepwalking. Recalcitrant knowledge about a liminal state

Founded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

With Hannah Ahlheim and Nicole Zillien

The ethnographic study focuses on the boundaries of bio-medical sleep knowledge evident in the diagnosis and treatment of sleepwalking in the sleep laboratory. Sleepwalking is a liminal phenomenon in multiple respects, situated in the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, between agency and unconsciousness. Therefore, knowledge generation about sleepwalking occurs at the boundaries of measurability and somatization, at the edges of sleep research and sleep medicine, as well as in the border area of science, popular culture, and everyday life.

As an incomplete awakening, sleepwalking challenges the sleep medicine distinction between sleep and wakefulness and resists attempts at scientific disambiguation. In the everyday life of the sleep laboratory, the problems that sleepwalking presents to sleep medicine become evident: sleepwalkers often approach diagnosis in the sleep laboratory with skepticism and reluctance. The ‘doing patient’ fails because wiring and measuring sleep as part of polysomnography presuppose a resting body, thus hindering or making the diagnostic procedure impossible, especially given the nature of the sleep disorder. Sleepwalking is thus not only a disturbance of sleep – placing it within the purview of sleep medicine – it also disrupts the theory and practice of sleep medicine.

The study's focus is on ethnographic case studies of sleepwalkers seeking treatment for their perceived sleep disorders at a sleep laboratory. Their stay in the sleep laboratory is observed through participant observation. However, the visit to the sleep laboratory is just one episode in the illness biography of sleepwalkers. To contextualize this episode within their lifeworld, narrative interviews with sleepwalkers are conducted. These interviews serve not only to capture individual biographies but also to understand the knowledge bases, self-understandings, and coping strategies of sleepwalkers, contrasting them with sleep laboratory knowledge. The central question of the project is how the disruptions caused by sleepwalking in the sleep laboratory are managed, how the boundaries of sleep medicine are (de-)thematized in the everyday life of its most important institution, and which alternative forms of knowledge about sleepwalking become relevant in everyday life.