AS SOON AS YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES, the adventure of sleep begins. The familiar half-light of the bedroom, a dark volume broken by details, where your memory can easily identify the paths your eyes have followed a thousand times (retracing them from the opaque square of the window, eliciting the washbasin from a shaft of reflected light and the shelving from the slightly less dark shadow of a book, distinguishing the blacker mass of the hanging clothes), gives way, after a while, to a two-dimensional space, something like a board of indefinite extension set at a very shallow angle to the plane of your eyes, as if it were propped not quite vertically on the bridge of your nose; the board might at first seem evenly grey, or rather, neutral, that is to say shapeless and colourless, but probably quite quickly turns out to possess at least two properties: the first is that it becomes more or less dark depending on how tightly, or loosely, you screw up your eyes, as if, more precisely, the force brought to bear on your eyebrows when you close your eyes had the effect of altering the angle of the plane in relation to your body, as if it were hinged to your eyebrows, and, consequently, although the only proof of this consequence is the evidence of your own eyes, had the effect also of altering the density, or the quality, of the darkness you perceive; the second property is that the surface of this space is not at all regular, or, more precisely, that the distribution, the allocation, of the areas of darkness is not homogeneous: the upper area is manifestly darker, whereas the lower area, which, to you, appears nearer (although, of course, the notions of proximity and distance, above and below, in front and behind, have already ceased to be altogether precise) is, on the one hand, much greyer, not, that is to say, much more neutral as you initially believe, but actually much whiter, and, on the other hand, contains, or supports, one, two, or several bag-like objects, or capsules, a little how you imagine, for example, a tear gland to be, with thin, ciliated edges, and within which, quivering, twitching, writhing, are some intensely white flashes, some of them extremely thin, like infinitely fine stripes, others much thicker, almost fat, like maggots. These flashes, although 'flashes' is a quite inappropriate term, have a curious quality: they cannot be looked at. As soon as your attention lingers on them too long, and it is virtually impossible to avoid this, since, after all, they are dancing in front of you and all the rest scarcely exists, indeed, all that is really perceptible is the hinge of your eyebrows and the very vague, more or less perceptible two-dimensional space in which the darkness stretches away unevenly, but as soon as you look at them, although this word, of course, no longer means anything, as soon as you attempt, let us say, to satisfy yourself a little as to their form, or their substance, or a detail, you can be sure to find yourself back again, your eyes open, across from the window, itself an opaque rectangle becoming a square again, in spite of the fact that these little bags bear no resemblance to it whatsoever. However, they reappear almost as soon as you close your eyes again, and with them the more or less sloping space hinged to your eyebrows, and, in all likelihood, they haven't changed since the last time. But you cannot be absolutely sure on this last point, for, after an interval of time which it is difficult to estimate, and although nothing enables you to affirm that they have actually disappeared, you are able to note that they have grown considerably paler. Now you are dealing with a kind of streaky grey drizzle, still part of this same space which is an extension more or less of your eyebrows, but distorted, apparently, to the point where it is constantly veering to the left; you can look at it, explore it, without shattering the whole, without causing yourself to wake up immediately, but this is not in the least bit interesting. It is on the right that something is taking place, a plank as it happens, somewhat behind, somewhat above, somewhat to the right. You can't see the plank, obviously. All you know is that it is hard, although you are not on it, since, precisely, you are on something that is very soft, and that something is your body. Then suddenly a truly amazing phenomenon occurs: first, there are three spaces which it is quite impossible to confuse, your body-bed which is soft, horizontal and white, then the bar of your eyebrows which controls a grey, mediocre, slanting space, and finally the plank, which is immobile and very hard on top, parallel to you, and perhaps within reach. Indeed, it is clear — even if by now this is the only thing that is - that if you clamber up on to the plank, you will sleep, that the plank is sleep itself. The principle of the operation is simplicity itself, even though you have every reason to believe that it will take you quite some time to accomplish: you would have to reduce the bed and the body to a single point, a marble, or perhaps, which amounts to the same thing, boil down the flaccidity of the body, concentrating it into a single spot, into one of the lumbar vertebrae, for example. But now the body no longer exhibits the fine unity that it possessed a moment ago: in fact it is spreading out in every direction. You try to draw in a toe towards the centre, or your thumb, or your thigh, but each time there is a rule you are forgetting, and this is that you must never lose sight of the hardness of the plank, that you should proceed with stealth, drawing in your body without it suspecting anything, without even knowing it yourself for certain, but it is too late, every time it is too late, and has been for a very long time, and, a strange consequence this, the bar of your eyebrows breaks in two, and in the middle, right between your eyes, as if this hinge had held everything else together, and as if all the force of the hinge were focused on this one spot, a precise and unmistakably conscious pain suddenly starts up, a pain which you recognise immediately as being nothing more extraordinary than a headache.
