I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. I’m not sure if I’m not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.

Sometimes, when I’m actively engaged in life and have as clear a notion of myself as the next man, my mind is beset by a strange feeling of doubt: I begin to wonder if I exist, if I might not be someone else’s dream. I can imagine, with an almost carnal vividness, that I might be the character of a novel, moving within the reality constructed by a complex narrative, in the long waves of its style.

I’ve often noticed that certain fictional characters assume a prominence never attained by the friends and acquaintances who talk and listen to us in visible, real life. And this makes me fantasize about whether everything in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones, everything being a story made up of stories, like A Thousand and One Nights, unreally taking place in the never-ending night.

If I think, everything seems absurd to me; if I feel, everything seems strange; if I want, it’s something in me that does the wanting. Whenever there’s action in me, I’m sure I wasn’t responsible for it. If I dream, it seems I’m being written. If I feel, it seems I’m being painted. If I want, it seems that I’ve been placed in a vehicle, like freight to be delivered, and that I continue with a movement I imagine is my own towards a destination I don’t want until I get there.

How confusing it all is! How much better it is to see rather than think, to read rather than write! What I see may deceive me, but I don’t consider it mine. What I read may distress me, but I don’t have to feel bad for having written it. How painful everything is when we think of it as conscious thinkers, as contemplative beings whose consciousness has reached that second stage by which we know that we know! Although the day is gorgeous, I can’t help but think this way. To think or to feel? Or what third thing among the stage-sets in the back? Tedium of twilight and disarray, shut fans, weariness from having had to live…