La girandola degli insonni

Aurora has been unable to sleep since Lupo, her last love, left her without a word. Sometimes at night, it is as if she forgets to breathe. She can no longer trust herself: sleeping frightens her – “fear and night are twin sisters” – so she has simply stopped doing it. During the day, she teaches Italian in Marseille, where she went to have a coffee… which lasted ten years. Now she is forty-two and turns to the Sleep Centre to find a cure. However, the specialist reveals something she did not expect: she will have to spend a night at the Centre, where she will be filmed by an internal camera, but she will never be able to see the footage because “it might frighten her”. What does sleep hide? What does it protect us from, what does it reveal? Who do we become when we sleep? Perhaps to find an answer, Aurora instinctively takes three DVDs with recordings of other patients from the doctor’s desk and hides them in her handbag. Thus begins a journey into the nights of three strangers: Ismael, the boy with restless legs; Marius, the old luthier who lives his dreams; André, the sailor who falls asleep while sailing. Soon, this nocturnal journey from the film spills over into real life, because Aurora decides to meet these sleepers, carving out time from her Italian students – the two elderly twin sisters, the child who only learns animal names, the Belarusian student who hates exceptions, the old man who always imposes his own reasoning. But how can she do it? On each of the three DVDs there is a name and a phone number. So she calls pretending to be an employee of the Sleep Centre… Arianna Cecconi, anthropologist and writer, blows on a pinwheel that intertwines the destinies of her characters with popular traditions linked to sleep and insomnia – fairy tales, nursery rhymes, myths, folk tales – illuminating our days with the secrets of the night.