What drives that a person interrupts his dream to walk, speak, do things asleep- from elementary to terrible- and that when he wakes up he does not remember anything, it is the enigma that Nicolás Hochman Illuminate in “The part of sleepwalking” (Culture Fund) Adding your personal experience, literature and science, fiction and non -fiction unexpectedly. Hochman He is a novelist, doctor of social sciences, and cultural manager, we dialogue with him.
Nicolás Hochman: It is just a newspaper that I was writing for many years, where there is a bit of everything. One day I decided to transform it into something else, and bifurcó. Thus a traditional newspaper emerged, and a diary of my sleepwalking.
NH: It is difficult not to do both. In any type of text both fiction and non -fiction are present. A historian, a sociologist, an anthropologist when writing, something narrative is usually filtered. Similarly, I don’t think fiction can be written without putting one’s reality, experience, subjectivity, in the middle. I grew up reading Philip Roth and Gombrowicz, in which the boundary between fiction and autobiography, non -fiction and story, blur. My book responds to those experiences of readings and training.
Q.: Has the sleepwalking of nineteenth century novels back to literature?
NH: It is always. Telling the sleepwalking act or using sleepwalking as a metaphor is present in the history of literature. In much of the current Latin American literature appears as a ghost.
Q.: Zombies have to do with that?
NH: The zombie is halfway between being alive and being dead, as the sleepwalker is halfway between being awake and asleep. I never saw that the sleepwalks walk with the arms raised forward, but in the sleepwalks and zombies they walk like this.
Q.: To count cases of sleepwalking, did you take as a model those who, from Freud to Oliver Sacks, used literature to count clinical cases?
NH: I worked a lot on that. Psychoanalysis, neurology, journalism, literature have a lot to say. What there is not is a truth. There is no truth or lie about sleepwalking. There are things that happen, which are more plausible than others. And it is above all is the other, who looks at the sleepwalker trying to discern that it is happening to him, that the sleepwalker is being made so much and that he is so sleepy.
Q.: Is the sleepwalking thing of men?
NH: For me that was a finding. It is clear that it is not so. But I find it disturbing that most of the people I know, who are sleepwalks, are men. The same is seen in literature, and in the clinic. Could it be that men talk more about sleepwalking than women? Is a sleepwalking man the same as a sleepwalker? They are issues worthy of a thesis.
Q.: Count shocking situations that show how the sleepwalker enters a real and not real space …
NH: There is a being between, a kind of “in Between”, being in the middle, that makes it difficult to understand what happens. One is not awake and is not asleep, he is awake and is asleep. What does that mean? In my case I add a layer of complexity, my sleepwalking is not only traditional, but is often accompanied by night hallucinations. That situation is very strange, especially when I wake up and discover that I was, and it is to recognize myself in another that is impossible for me to recognize. That is not me. We enter the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Q.: Are there cases like Stevenson’s character?
NH: In literature the sleepwalker appears as someone capable of doing anything. In the investigation that I was doing a lot of those cases, where the crime is not absent. Some are plausible, others serve an attempt to justify barbaric acts. There are cases that scare and refer to the fictions of the strange and terror.
Q.: In the list of symptoms that characterize sleepwalking, who has not experienced some. Does that get the sleepwalker from its uniqueness?
NH: I have fun how diverse the studies are. There are those who argue that the percentage of the population that at some point in their lives lived sleepwalking is 7 percent, while others consider that it reaches 80 percent. In the presentation of “The part of sleepwalking”, scientist Diego Golombeck said: After reading that list of symptoms we all have two or three, and in your case, Nicolás, you have ten. Sleeping we all sleep, what matters is that so much and how.
Q.: Why at the end of his book wonders what would happen to him if the sleepwalking of his life disappears, if he would miss him, and that unites him to his mother’s memory?
NH: My mother’s disease and death was very parallel with the writing of the book. I found in that fact a way of giving a book to a book that could otherwise be writing it all my life. Not that I stopped being a sleepwalker because I wrote the book. I was sleepy the night before the presentation. Never since when my mother died had dreamed of her, and that night I dreamed her, and it was a very nice, very happy dream. It is not my thing to believe in spiritual mystics but in the power and recesses of the unconscious, which were perhaps showing me the end of a cycle, the closing of something that needed to be closed.
Q.: What are you writing now?
NH: A novel I started a few years ago, I am excited. Be call “literary competitions.” It is pure fiction, but I serve my experience organizing them, when I was a jury, advisor, the contests I won, and especially those I did not win. I have fun that underworld and its paraphernalia.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
