When enabled at length to attend to the information which my senses afforded, I was conscious, for a time, of nothing but existence. (779)

Edgar Huntly's bizarre (and, to him, embarrassing) habit of sleepwalking is introduced in the subtitle "Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker" and acts as a catalyst in the novel: scenes which normally contain contradictions irrevocable by reality (such as waking up in an unfamiliar place - with no memory of how you arrived there or the best track to freedom) come about through the act of sleepwalking. The preface marks the beginning of sleepwalking's role in the novel:

It is the purpose of this work to ... exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country, and connected with one of the most common and most wonderful diseases of affections of the human frame. (641)

In her essay "Language as Live Burial: Thomas De Quincey," which appears in her book The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines the writings of Gothic novelist Thomas De Quincey and, in particular, notes a theme throughout his novels of characters in positions resembling that of a live burial. Charles Brockden Brown's use of sleepwalking is similar. Sedgwick asserts, "The almost inextricable association of depth with sleep and dreams is further reminiscent of the Gothic" (38). Sleep's metaphorical connection to death implies an entrapment of spirit; sleep entraps consciousness while sleepwalking as death (or, supposed death) buries consciousness in a live burial. In reference to another work by De Quincey, Sedgwick continues:

The real vertigo of the story, though, is not in its Gothic spaces but in its postulating of a semiotic situation of dizzying instablilty, one in which the pure fact of meaning exists in the absence of any reason to mean or to interpret, or any context for meaning or interpretation. (53)

This vertigo is precisely the sort Brown targets in Edgar Huntly, a character waking up in a strange cave with no idea how he arrived there, no context to help form meanings. Sleepwalking removes context and thus hinders interpretation. It is this creepiness refered to by D.H. Lawrence (by way of Eric Savoy's essay "The Rise of the American Gothic") when he writes of the American Gothic "All we are left with, ultimately, is the image of the monster's 'red eyes in the dark'" (Savoy 171). In Edgar's case, however, Lawrence's "red eyes" become literal as sleepwalking tears everything else away from that image in a traditionally Gothic moment.