I am a sleepwalker and I have been for a long time.

In my sleep I have dressed and undressed, gotten into very loud verbal fights (with lots of cussing) with people. I am an absolute BITCH when I am sleeping. A few eons ago when I was at horse camp I got up to leave and walked into a wall. With my face. I didn’t wake up but I was cussing up a blue streak apparently. Even though it was an unfamiliar place and it was dark I was somehow able to walk around the other beds on the floor and not trip on anything.

I have never falled down a flight of stairs and at one point I found evidence that I had DRIVEN MY CAR over five miles. While sleeping. I set up a night shot camera to see what I was doing in the middle of the night. I got up in the middle of the night and stopped the video from recording. The next night I put electrical tape over the sensor for the remote and I watched myself get up and try to turn off the recording. It scared the hell out of me because it looked like something from a horror film. The lights were on but no one was home.

When I was in the military I had a LOT of problems with this. A wonderful Captain I saw regarding the issue told me about his friend’s wife. She’d get up in the middle of the night, strip naked, and then go to the apartment complex’s laundry to wash her clothes. So he put a lock on the top of the door. She got a chair, unlocked the lock, and went and did her laundry buck naked in the middle of the night because that’s what she did.

Sleep walkers are often violent if you try to wake them up. In their mind, whatever the hell is going on, they have a task to perform, such as the instance of laundry above. She would not be stopped from her task. A guy that was sleepwalking broke into his in-law’s house in the middle of the night to fix something and wound up killing his mother in law. He cut his hand down to the bone and didn’t wake up.

Before my husband deployed I was TERRIFIED of being home by myself with my sleepwalking issue, which manifests itself SEVERELY when I am stressed. I discovered through a few tests that I have seizure activity in the left frontal lobe of my brain, which is most likely the cause of the sleepwalking.

Can I say that the sleepwalking rapist/groper was actually sleepwalking? No. Is it possible? Yes.

And to be honest, if I was sleep walking and did something horrific (which I doubt I’d do because in theory you don’t do things while you’re sleeping that you wouldn’t do while awake) I would hope that my history of sleep walking and sleep talking would be taken into account. Especially since I would be absolutely HYSTERICAL about it. I have nightmares that the reason why my Uncle took “liberties” with me was because I was sleepwalking and asked him to.

I am not trying to play devil’s advocate (ironically, the movie of that same name shows what scum sucking bottom feeders lawyers are and what kind of havoc they can wreak) but I did want to point out that sleepwalking is a real medical condition and no one really knows how to stop it. My neurologist recommended “tricyclic antidepressants” but I passed.

The courts are crowded and my general impression was that your crime doesn’t matter to anyone – DAs included – unless it’s a really big deal. There are no Law and Order show downs between prosecutors and defense attorneys. Sure, some have personal problems with each other and overall they stayed away from each other, but not always. There was definitely a lot of laughing across the aisle while waiting for a judge. They’d talk about family or vacations, argue for a bit over a case and walk out of the courtroom chatting again.

The point is that, in my humble opinion, the entire system is in shambles. most people just take the plea and there’s no real individualized assessment, no real look at how dangerous a particular person may be if they get the oh-too-often probation offer. Sentences have become so seemingly random that it’s maddening. While sitting in open court one day just observing, I actually saw a man get actual jail time for possession of marijuana (and he had 1 prior…for pot also) followed by a man who got probation for getting up on a stage and beating another man’s head in with a microphone stand. literally…beat the man about the head with the bottom end of a mic stand.

Sure, some defense attorneys are worse than others. but some judges are terrible and some DAs are jaded and disinterested. It’s all just so, so messed up.