Adrien works as a TV manuscript reader for a busy producer. One morning, he floats in limbo, between sleep and awakening, and still dreams for a few minutes: he is in a large bed with lions' heads, in a blue room, with, above him, a yellow painting with a red hand. . On the verge of holding back the young girl present, when he feels he could seduce her, he fails, when the phone rings. Yoska, a Slavic intellectual, employed illegally as an interior painter, is Adrien's confidant. It is to Yoska that Adrien confesses that he wishes to conquer the young woman, in reality this time. He knows her, it is an ethnologist who entrusted him with a scenario that he only reads occasionally. He decides to completely reconstitute the conditions of his dream, to also get out of a sickly shyness. Adrien tries to seduce her while he supports the advances of a homosexual whose companion committed suicide for a refusal of a manuscript.