In Bed - excerpts

1.

It is a place of exchanges: internal and external, pleasure, suffering, the mundane and the extraordinary, remembering and forgetting, being tortured by consciousness or anticipation (sleeplessness) or escaping them into the void (almost death) or into the dream. It’s a place to collapse and to regain strength. It is for the body in its entirety: it is felt with the skin, it’s all touch and movement, even if you are simply lying still. It is a place where gravity reigns and is allowed, but then it is also a place of flight—metaphorical, but entirely physiological, as all our mental processes are.

It is a place where boundaries are questioned and reestablished. It is a place to loosen (lose) oneself, to relax. Often this haunting desire of relaxation is not granted: then it is suffering, or overexcitement. “I cannot sleep, nanny, I cannot sleep. I wait for a letter,” says the love-stricken Tatyana in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. We read in bed, don’t we? Sleepless, restless, or exhausted, falling out—the boundary of consciousness, of being in control, fading into dream, or hallucination, on the border of consciousness, on the threshold. Bed is a liminal place.