Sleepwalker (comics)

During the confrontation, Sleepwalker pretended to destroy Rick's mind as a means of protecting him from Cobweb's minions. Unfortunately, the authorities retrieved the "mindrake" weapon Sleepwalker had used to store Rick's mind, preventing the alien from recovering it, also gathering up one of Cobweb's demons that was left behind after the Avengers drove them away. The demon and the mindrake were both taken to a federal prison and research facility where serial killer Jeremy Roscoe was also being held as part of a psychiatric experiment. Roscoe staged an escape from the prison hospital and became fused with the demon in the process, transforming into a nightmarish creature calling himself Psyko. The monster began spreading mass insanity across New York, until Sleepwalker managed to defeat him and retrieve the mindrake Psyko had taken with him.^[volume & issue needed]

Later, Sleepwalker thwarts Cobweb's second attack and banishes his archenemy once and for all, before seemingly dying to save Rick Sheridan's life.^[20] However, Sleepwalker would later turn up alive and still trapped in Rick's mind.^{[volume & issue needed]}

Sleepwalker eventually gains the ability to interact with the real world again. He is seen investigating the after-effects of an explosion caused by the villainous Ringmaster.^{[volume & issue needed]} He had attempted to become more involved in the situation but was foiled by Rick's sleeping schedule.^[21]

Sleepwalker is seen as having become a registered superhuman under the

Sleepwalker possesses superhuman strength, exceptional durability and resistance to injury, and flotation-like flight. He is also capable of the projection of crude images of what he's seen from his eyes. His only offensive power was his "warp gaze". With this vision-based power, Sleepwalker could alter the shape of physical objects and twist them to his purposes. He could also modify the physical characteristics of the objects he affected-making them harder or softer, for example. Sleepwalker initially demonstrated this power by using it to distort a sidewalk to capture a criminal. He also used this ability once on air molecules to create a wind tunnel for faster aerial travel. Owing to an oath sworn by all members of his race due to the great physical and mental pain it could cause, Sleepwalker tried not to use his warp beams on living entities.^[volume & issue needed]

The effects of the warp vision on living entities was demonstrated when Rick, trapped in Sleepwalker's body after an encounter with the Chain Gang, inadvertently used the beam on his former girlfriend Alyssa Conover, who was about to kill Sleepwalker in Rick's body. Sleepwalker's vision causes living bodies to twist and contort, causing intense physical agony in the process, although this effect is only temporary. The beam also has the side effect of breaking the mental control of any outside entity possessing the victim's mind, expelling the controller in the process. As a result, Rick unintentionally freed Alyssa from the domination of the Chain Gang, a tactic Sleepwalker himself would later adopt when freeing other people from the mental enslavement of Cobweb's minions, using his ability to detect

Sleepwalker's warp vision had different effects on demons and other extraplanar creatures not from Earth, often incapacitating and banishing them back to their native planes, as he did to dispatch Cobweb's minions back to the Mindscape and also to defeat Mr. Jyn. His ability to use his warp-beam diminishes as he uses it; the greater the intensity of its usage, the faster it is used up. His warp-beam power is replenished by rest.^{[volume & issue needed]}

As an alien resident of the Mindscape, Sleepwalker had exceptional visual abilities, being able to see over a much farther distance than an average human, as well as being able to see and follow energy trails, and see wavelength colors invisible to human eyes. Sleepwalker shares a mental link with the human Rick Sheridan that facilitates Sleepwalker's entry into Rick's mind. Instead of food, Sleepwalker fed on mental energy, needing to periodically return to Rick's mind to be able to regain his strength. When Rick appeared to be dead, Sleepwalker formed a temporary bond with a homeless man named Pike to borrow some of his mental energy, although he did this only with Pike's express permission. His training as a warrior of the Mindscape makes him skilled tracker and an expert in the combat use of his powers, and also gives him a certain amount of knowledge about various

Being a resident of the mental plane also gives Sleepwalker a resistance, but not an immunity, to various mental attacks. When battling the monster Psyko, a creature that had the power to instill madness in his opponents, Sleepwalker briefly suffered from insanity, although he managed to resist and overcome Psyko's madness to finally defeat him. At the same time, Sleepwalker was shown as able to absorb the energy of the attack and use it to increase his own strength and power, although he still suffered its effects.^[volume & issue needed]

Sleepwalker had several notable weaknesses. The first was his bond to Rick—whenever Rick awoke or regained consciousness, Sleepwalker would automatically disappear from the human world and return to Rick's mind. At the same time, Sleepwalker's strength was related to his connection with the ground and the Earth—the higher he levitated, the greater his loss of strength, although he gained his full strength when actually standing on the ground itself. Similarly, Sleepwalker would weaken if he did not return to the mental plane or Rick's mind to rest and renew his supply of mental energy, which happened both when Rick was killed during the

Sleepwalker also used the Imaginator device, which was in the shape of an amulet. The Imaginator was capable of teleporting Sleepwalker and other targets into, out of, and to different locations within the Mindscape. Sleepwalker's Imaginator was at one point lost within the mind of Rick Sheridan.^[volume & issue needed]

During an Infinity Wars tie-in, Sleepwalker began to discover underlying truth about his peoples place in the universe and their worlds denizen's connection to the Infinity Stones. As the six gems of ultimate power form a circuit, being an entity begotten of the Mindscape; revealed to be an inner realm within the Mind Stone, enables Sleepwalker to tap into that crucible of virtual omnipotence without need of using said regalia and their adjacent manacle crucible directly. Meaning he can access unlimited supertropical capability thru Mind's hold over power, supplant inter-relative distances with or without his Imaginator using Space's confluence threshold via power, traverse the river of Time and its streams of myriad possible outcomes through its subservice to space, alter the very texture of localized to universal Reality using his understanding of time and finally deviate the physical, moral or characteristic quandaries of the Soul by his comprehending reality.^[26] Making the Sleepwalkers powers veer on the limitless scale.^{[citation needed]}

Enemies

Sleepwalker possessed a colorful gallery of mostly original villains, with a new one introduced each issue during the title's beginnings. They include:

• pool.^[6]
• Nelson Gruber / Bookworm: An angry, bitter social misfit who gained the ability to channel energy from the Mindscape into creations of whatever he read after an encounter with Sleepwalker, and used his abilities to get revenge on his tormentors.[27]
• The Chain Gang: Four convicted felons linked together in a chain gang who escaped during the upheavals caused by the Infinity Gauntlet, gaining superhuman powers in an accident, that lasted only as long as they stayed chained together. It consists of Master Link (Willis Hayworth), Missing Link (Ray Morgan), Uplink (Hector Fuentes), and Weak Link (Ernest Mills).^[9]
• Mr. FX: A mysterious
  special effects designer who was known for his stunningly lifelike displays, which he actually achieved by kidnapping people and imprisoning them within specially designed costumes.^[7]
• Nightmare: Usually a Doctor Strange villain, Sleepwalker faced off against the living embodiment of bad dreams. He promised the reward of sending Sleepwalker back to his home realm, but he fought back when he threatened Rick Sheridan.^[11]
• Selena Slate / Spectra: The assistant of a scientist who was studying the properties of a strange form of diamond, and planned to steal it and split the proceeds with her junkie boyfriend, until Sleepwalker's obsession with the light produced by the diamond led her to be imbued with its energies, allowing her to emit a rainbow of colored lights with many different powers.^[28]
• Mr. Jyn: A demonic genie that tricked humans into letting him manifest on Earth by pretending to serve them, even as he manipulated them into letting him cause more and more mayhem until he would be released.^[14]
• Edward "Eddie" Cicala: A young boy traumatized by his father murdering his mother, who became
  possess innocent people and make them kill each other in a re-creation of his mother's death.^[15]
• Cobweb: Sleepwalker's nemesis, a demon of the Mindscape that could cause madness in his human victims, responsible for trapping Sleepwalker in Rick Sheridan's mind as part of a plot to invade Earth without being thwarted by his enemy.[4]
• Felicity Hopkins / Lullaby: A teenage mutant who discovered she had the ability to sing people to sleep and put them into zombie-like trances, where they would obey her every command.^[29]
• Carl Wilkinson / Crimewave: A crime boss who plotted to embarrass the
  Kingpin and replace him as the top crime lord on the East Coast by capturing Spider-Man.^[30]
• The Thought Police: A special team of government agents assembled to capture Sleepwalker, led by the obsessed Agent Tolliver Smith.[31]
• Jeremy Roscoe / Psyko: A human serial killer who became fused with a monster from the Mindscape and transformed into a hideous creature with warping powers similar to Sleepwalker's and the additional power to cause insanity in his opponents and victims.^[32]