Little nighttime habits: “I dive and wrap my naked body in my sheets”

Reflecting on his nocturnal gestures takes Laurent back to his early childhood. "While I'm not Superman during the day, I become Superman the moment I dive into my bed," describes the fifty-year-old. "My transformation takes place the moment when, after having twirled my clothes to the other end of my room, I dive in and wrap my naked body in my sheets." He then unrolls this way he has of wrapping himself. At this "tipping point" moment when his body allows his brain to "switch," he "turns his back on his day." A sign for him that the night can begin, and, he confides, that he can "finally reclaim" who he is.

The part of the duvet that belongs to him in the bed he shares with his wife, Laurent (the people cited by their first name only requested anonymity; he did not wish to give his last name) tucks it under his body, to feel like he's in a sleeping bag. "It's been like that since I was little," he says from Bayonne (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), where he works in the management of a high school. Naked, "more vulnerable, but finally protected," tasting the coolness of his duvet the moment he slips into it, he is "finally free to [ disengage] from the system of constraints and injunctions of [his] rich, but stressful daily life." So that nothing escapes from his cocoon, he tucks himself in tightly. "I lost my mother very young, I lacked maternal love, I don't remember being rocked, now that I think about it. Maybe I had to learn to wrap myself up?

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