Summary, Paragraph by Paragraph, of "Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem"

An essay on what we know but do not believe, by David J. Frost, published in The Missouri Review, Summer 2026.

Paragraph summaries for readers of “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe” (The Missouri Review, Summer 2026)

1. Sleepwalking Confession The author recounts learning from his fiancée Kelly that he’d been sleepwalking and holding full conversations with her each night, remembering nothing afterward. He notes that the classic image of a blank, arms-out sleepwalker is wrong—sleepwalkers can perform complex acts without consciousness. The paragraph ends revealing his nightly transgression: peeing in the closet.

2. First Night’s Denial Kelly recounts waking to find the author heading toward the closet instead of the toilet; he insisted “Yes, it is” while continuing anyway. The author explains the folk wisdom about not waking a sleepwalker, since some reactive, even irritable, capacity may persist without conscious control.

3. Aloof Grunts Rather than turning angry, sleepwalking-Frost answered Kelly’s interruptions with arrogant, self-satisfied grunts on later nights, continuing to urinate in the closet regardless. He reflects that his own faux-fancy language gives him distance from the “disgusting deeds.”

4. Are You Awake? On the third night Kelly shouted “ARE YOU AWAKE?” and he answered “Yes,” effectively passing a kind of Turing test despite not actually being conscious, as confirmed the next morning.

5. Cleaning Up the Mess When asked to retell the story for this essay, Kelly’s brow furrows again; her biggest irritation, she says, was cleaning up the mess each night after he’d already gone back to bed unaware.

6. Feeling Uninvolved He responds sympathetically (”That sucks”) but immediately notices he still feels detached from his own nighttime actions, as though he hadn’t really done them at all.

7. Bloodless Guilt He contrasts this hollow, purely intellectual sense of responsibility with the visceral, nauseating guilt he normally feels when he’s done something wrong on purpose.

8. Glad for the Evidence Because his connection to his sleepwalking acts is so tenuous, he’s oddly grateful for the incident: it gives him a concrete example of taking responsibility for an act he didn’t freely choose to commit.

9. A Path Into Denial The sleepwalking episodes become his gateway into imagining what it would feel like to deny free will altogether, as some public intellectuals have done—not just for isolated lapses, but for every thought and decision a person has.

10. Sapolsky’s Slip He turns to Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, a committed free-will denier who admits he still instinctively accepts credit for compliments, illustrating the gap between intellectually knowing and emotionally believing something.

11. Living the Denial He wonders how Sapolsky’s self-conception shifts in the moments he actively remembers he lacks free will, reframing the inquiry away from classic philosophy and toward psychological effect—does denial liberate people, or does it produce fatalism and bad behavior?

12. Not Fatalism Denying free will isn’t the same as believing everything is predetermined regardless of action; the real consequences of denial are an empirical question, and an evidence-based debate on this is already underway.

13. Mapping the Research This paragraph previews where the author’s research will lead: “informational existential threats,” the link between denial and progressive politics, secretive anti-free-will research, and brain-scanning technology that can predict decisions in advance.

14. Meeting Sapolsky He describes Sapolsky’s warm public persona and his thirty years studying a troop of baboons in Africa, finding that low-ranking baboons suffer chronically elevated stress hormones with harmful health and behavioral effects.

15. Shit Flows Downhill Sapolsky’s baboon research shows aggression cascading downward through the social hierarchy after a loss in rank, and that acting out this way actually reduces the loser’s stress hormone levels.

16. Behave and Determined Sapolsky’s books Behave and Determined lay out the exhaustive causal chain behind every human behavior and argue that society’s continued belief in free will constitutes a serious, harmful moral failing.

17. Tea with Kelly The author and Kelly read Sapolsky’s and Sam Harris’s books together during a Sunday tea ritual; Harris, an independent public intellectual, likewise argues that denying free will improves ethics by increasing compassion and reducing entitlement.

18. Utopian Predictions Questioned He tells Kelly that these utopian predictions have actually been tested empirically: an early 2008 study found that priming subjects with anti-free-will messages increased their cheating and theft in lab games.

19. The Research Turns Grim Reviewing dozens of journal articles, the author finds that disbelief in free will consistently correlates with worse outcomes—more dishonesty, aggression, and conformity, and less helpfulness, learning, and job performance.

20. Hot Sauce and Recycling Kelly questions the odd inclusion of “recycling” among these harms; the author explains that lab studies rely on harmless stand-ins, like recycling or secretly dosing someone’s food with hot sauce, to simulate real moral behavior—and free-will deniers do administer more hot sauce.

21. Three Camps He identifies three competing positions on free-will denial: Sapolsky and Harris’s optimism, the pessimistic empirical findings showing real harms, and a stranger third position advocating that the truth be actively suppressed.

22. An Existential Threat Some scientists who deny free will argue the truth is so psychologically dangerous it should be classified information, comparable to nuclear or bioweapons knowledge—while quietly exempting themselves from that restriction.

23. Erasmus and Luther This panic isn’t new: in 1524, Erasmus argued the “weak, ignorant, and wicked” common man couldn’t handle Martin Luther’s denial of free will, though his worry remained abstract since the idea wasn’t yet widespread.

24. Silencing Isn’t an Argument The author argues that claiming a true idea is too dangerous to state functions as a kind of ad hominem, one that would, if applied consistently, block the discovery of any harmful truth whatsoever.

25. Born Classified Unlike Erasmus, today’s suppressionists are themselves deniers, arguing their own research should be sequestered from the public the way classified nuclear-weapons research is.

26. The Noble Lie Philosopher Saul Smilansky argues humanity is “fortunately deceived” about free will and discourages his own PhD students from studying under him, fearing depression or psychosis after disillusionment.

27. Diminishing Human Dignity The author situates free-will denial within a historical lineage of blows to human self-importance: Copernicus decentering Earth, Darwin making us animal, and Nietzsche and Freud dethroning conscious self-transparency.

28. Slouching Towards Bethlehem He connects the essay’s title imagery—Yeats’s apocalyptic phrase, later borrowed by Joan Didion—to how free-will denial is viewed either as a utopian breakthrough (Sapolsky, Harris) or a societal catastrophe by opposing camps.

29. Denial Rhymes with Progressivism The author notices a political affinity: belief in free will lets people on the right blame the poor for their circumstances, while denial supports progressive causes like prison reform and anti-poverty intervention.

30. Poverty and Baboon Stress Kelly notes that Sapolsky’s central progressive cause is ending childhood poverty, since poverty-driven stress hormones mirror those found in low-ranking baboons and damage brain development; this stress response is shared broadly across the animal kingdom.

31. Cognitive Load of Poverty Chronic financial stress burdens cognitive function in adults; a Princeton study found poor participants’ performance dropped sharply (equivalent to 13 IQ points) when preoccupied with large sums of money, while richer participants showed no such decline.

32. Impulse Control, Not Immorality Poverty-related stress damages the developing prefrontal cortex in children, and Sapolsky links the resulting poor impulse control—not moral failing—to nonviolent criminal behavior among the poor.

33. Unfair From Birth Sapolsky shows that socioeconomic effects on brain structure appear astonishingly early, even in four-week-old infants, prompting Kelly to note that the stress must originate in utero, implicating maternal poverty as well.

34. Corporate Determinists The author lists industries—tobacco, food, pharmaceuticals, social media—that effectively behave as if free will doesn’t exist, profiting from predictable behavioral manipulation via what one commentator calls the “addiction economy.”

35. Fighting Manipulation with Denial He argues that belief in free will lets corporations disclaim responsibility for engineered addiction (”people freely choose”), while denying free will would justify more effective interventions, like restructuring environments, rather than relying on willpower alone.

36. Free Will Drops Out A brief capping line: whenever we’re predicting, manipulating, or explaining behavior in practice, the concept of free will becomes irrelevant.

37. Fate Before Physics Kelly asks about the historical origins of determinism; the author reconsiders his assumption that it began with the Scientific Revolution, suggesting ancient ideas of Fate—as dramatized in Greek tragedy and the story of Oedipus—may be its true root.

38. Atoms and the Swerve He traces the philosophical lineage to Democritus’s atomism and Epicurus’s “swerve,” an early attempt to carve out room for uncaused freedom within a deterministic physical universe.

39. Libertarian Free Will Defined The author explains philosophical libertarianism (unrelated to the political ideology) as the claim that free choices are genuinely uncaused, meaning one could “do otherwise” even without any different desire or antecedent condition.

40. The Uncaused Causer Problem The libertarian “causa sui” was famously mocked by Nietzsche as self-contradictory; though quantum indeterminacy gave libertarians new hope, most philosophers argue randomness doesn’t grant freedom—it only makes actions arbitrary.

41. A Hostile Reception Despite most Americans and philosophers still believing in free will, denial is gaining prominence and provoking real hostility, illustrated by death threats against philosopher Galen Strawson and a tense confrontation the author had on an airplane.

42. Academic Hostilities The debate turns personal even among scholars: the late philosopher Dan Dennett accused deniers of causing “real harm” and told them to “shut up,” despite once being close friends with fellow New Atheist Sam Harris.

43. Agreement on Libertarianism Dennett and Harris both reject libertarian free will but sharply disagree on what that agreement means—Dennett thinks it’s inconsequential, while Harris thinks it changes everything about how society should think about responsibility.

44. Defining Compatibilism The author explains compatibilism: rather than requiring uncaused actions, this position redefines freedom as action caused in the “right” way, meeting criteria like rationality or reflective values.

45. Puppet on a String Kelly’s brief clarifying question—whether compatibilists think we’re both free and determined—sets up Harris’s rebuttal in the next paragraph.

46. Loving Your Strings Harris counters that compatibilist freedom is like a puppet who merely loves wherever its strings pull it—which, for him, isn’t real freedom at all.

47. Who’s Right? A brief transitional question from Kelly, prompting the author’s reflection on how scientific reassessments change everyday concepts.

48. Witch or Whale? The author uses philosopher Shaun Nichols’s framework—”witch” (a concept eliminated entirely) versus “whale” (a concept redefined but retained)—to ask which fate awaits the popular idea of “free will.”

49. Redefine or Discard Dennett wants to keep using the term “free will” but strip out its libertarian content, while Harris wants to discard the term entirely, relabeling the relevant mental states as mere “voluntary willing.”

50. Westworld’s Maeve The author draws on a scene from HBO’s Westworld, where the android Maeve is shown a screen predicting her own words before she says them, as a vivid illustration of what it might feel like to be confronted with proof of your own programming.

51. Crashing Like Windows 95 Maeve’s mental “crash” upon realizing her behavior is predictable dramatizes how disorienting real proof of determinism might be for an actual person.

52. Brain Scanners Predict You He introduces neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes’s fMRI experiments, which predicted subjects’ button-press choices seconds before conscious awareness, with a later replication achieving even higher accuracy.

53. Locked in a Windowless Room Further experiments show researchers predicting even math decisions purely from brain-scan data, suggesting that consciousness is populated by nonconscious processes rather than the true source of our decisions.

54. Feeling Versus Knowing Kelly asks whether the felt sense of freedom is enough on its own; the author cites Samuel Johnson’s line that theory opposes free will while experience supports it—though Harris disagrees, arguing that even our sense of authorship over thoughts is illusory.

55. Lessons From Meditation Harris argues mindfulness meditation reveals that thoughts arise unbidden from nonconscious processes, illustrated by how quickly novice meditators lose focus on their breath without even noticing they’ve drifted.

56. Identifying With Thoughts Being “lost in thought” means unconsciously identifying with thoughts that arise from nowhere; true mindfulness, for Harris, means gaining reflective distance from every thought, including apparent decisions.

57. No Sense of Otherwise Harris and Sapolsky conclude that even major life decisions are populated by nonconscious processes beyond our awareness, and Harris reports he’s personally lost the felt sense that he could have chosen differently.

58. Try to Believe It The author invites the reader to actually try believing “there’s no free will,” demonstrating how quickly the felt sense of denial evaporates and reverts back to natural, implicit belief in free will.

59. Armchair Vertigo Actively holding onto disbelief produces a disorienting “armchair vertigo,” a temporary intellectual dizziness that fades once a person returns to ordinary life and stops philosophizing.

60. Knowing Without Believing He connects this everyday lapse to the suppressionists’ prescription—knowing free will is false while choosing not to believe it—arguing that this gap requires self-deception or internal division to sustain.

61. The Sunset Illusion He offers the sunset as an everyday analogy: we know intellectually that the earth rotates rather than the sun moving across the sky, yet our language and lived experience never actually reflect that scientific fact.

62. Oedipus’s Knife The essay closes by asking what happens once the knowledge of determinism truly sinks in, comparing that reckoning to Oedipus’s horrifying shift from merely knowing to truly believing the truth about himself—after which he blinds himself.