HYPNOPHILIA

Nor I haven't always known when I was sleeping. There are nights that begin before you close your eyes, and days that don't end when your body rises from bed. For a long time I believed this was fatigue, a flawed way of inhabiting the world. Later I understood that no: there are states that respond neither to the clock nor to the names we give them, and that confusing them with wakefulness is a slow form of danger. The first time I noticed it, nothing extraordinary happened. No vision. No revelation. Just an uncomfortable certainty: something had already begun without me. Everything seemed the same—objects in their place, people true to their gestures—but the world had shifted a tiny, almost imperceptible fraction, as if it had adjusted its distance from me without asking permission. I couldn't say how I had noticed it. Only that something no longer fit my body exactly. As if the place had recalculated me. I didn't tell anyone. Silence is a form of survival when you don't yet have the language to explain what's happening to you. Silence commands. Silence allows you to hold on to what has not yet taken shape. But it also accumulates. Sometimes, in that ambiguous state, the words arrived before the meaning. Some weren't mine. Not because they came from outside, but because they hadn't been thought. They had been activated. they seemed to recall something I hadn't lived yet. Other times it was the opposite: the meaning was there, dense, compact, and the words arrived late, clumsy, as if they had to translate an experience that didn't entirely belong to them. I started writing undated fragments. They weren't diaries. They didn't explain anything. They just recorded: an image that was too clear, a sentence that didn't fit into any conversation, the persistent feeling that something was being prepared in a place I hadn't entered yet. I wasn't doing it to understand it, but to not lose it. Because there are things that, if you don't look at them, don't go away. They accumulate. And when they return, they do so with weight. Over time, I understood that a dream isn't a place you enter, but a place that opens. And that it doesn't open the same way for everyone. Some pass through it like they're crossing a dark room. Others stay in it for too long. And there are those who, unintentionally, leave the door ajar. I still didn't know what this meant. I only knew that, from a certain point on, the dream was no longer just mine. That the images were beginning to have consequences. That the words spoken without a concrete language left a trail. That what I had always considered intimate was demanding an attention I couldn't sustain on my own. I tried to live as if nothing had happened. It's surprising how much the world allows this fiction. But there is a subtle—and irreversible—difference between ignoring something and not being able to stop knowing it. When that difference takes hold, there's no clean return. What was once a private experience begins to demand judgment. And judgment, when it arrives, almost never does so in time. If you're reading this, it's because something has also shifted a little out of place. Not enough to scare you. Enough for you to notice that sleep—that state we believe to be harmless—might not be so harmless after all. Or maybe it is too harmless. I won't ask you to believe anything. Just keep going. Because what comes next is not an explanation, but an approximation. And because all of this began long before the first memory, the first conscious dream, the first attempt to wake up. It started the day I realized I didn't know if I had slept.