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everything inside remains asleep. They leave their beds and walk around in the dark in a way that they might well be unable to do when awake. They wander through the house, picking their way around the furniture and finding many jobs to do.
It has frequently been observed that the families of such people think they have a ghost in the house; the simple fact is that the ghost creating all the disturbance is living in the family. He also does not remember, and in the morning he will deny any part in what he alone did during the night. He was as unaware of his actions as a drunkard wandering along a road.
Sometimes drunkards are so at home in their drunkenness that you may not recognize their condition. Sleepwalkers share this same ability to wander over great distances, and to perform tasks that can only be considered as miracles when a person is asleep. There are even people who have committed murder in their sleep, and then returned to bed; and of course, in the morning they have no knowledge of what they have done.
In New York in 1940 there was the case of a man who used to jump from the roof of his house to the roof of his neighbor's house in his sleep. Fifty stories high, and he would leap from one roof to another! People got to know about it, because punctually, on the stroke of one o'clock at night, he would make the leap, and the return leap, and go back to bed. Before long, crowds were gathering each night to watch his death-defying jump -- the distance from one roof to the other was excitingly great! Thus it happened that one night people began cheering as the man made his roof-top leap. They cheered so loudly that their noise brought the man out of his sleep. Now he was not in danger, because he had already finished his first jump, but the moment he awoke he was flooded with fear. Finding himself standing there on the roof, with the crowd below, and the noise, he was so terrified that in the return jump he fell to his death. The very thought that he had made such an impossible leap led him to his death. The jump that he had made so many times in his sleep was, to his conscious mind, impossible!
Learning can take place in a
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