Lions and Tigers

Borges was a dreamer.  I knew that, of course, but it wasn't until today that I read an explicit reference to his ability to lucid dream in one of his stories.

(It should be noted that at the time Borges wrote Dreamtiger, lucid dreaming was thought impossible by scientists.  To their expertly trained minds, it seemed absurd that one should awaken consciousness within a dream--it was an oxymoron, or a logical impossibility.   One cannot be conscious and dreaming at the same time, they reasoned, just as light cannot be both a particle and a wave: it's a question of p and not-p, which is the foundation of everything.  This was before Stephen LeBerge proved the existence of lucid dreaming with experiments at Stanford University in 1977.  Thankfully, Borges was not one to let the experts of his time impose a reduced set of possibilities upon him.)

The vignette is more about growing old (implicitly) than it is about dreaming.  Still, the reference to a lucid dream is clear and explicit:

As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream.  At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh incompetence!  My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for.  The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger. 

--Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, Collected Fictions, 294. 

That Borges should explicitly mention lucid dreaming in relation to tigers is uncanny: one of the most powerful lucid dreams I've ever had involved a lion--not exactly a tiger--at the top of the stairs to the NYC Public Library.  Confronting a lion in front of a library couldn't get more Borgesian, unless the dream involved a chase through a labyrinth.  It's as if I had that dream in anticipation of reading Borges a year and a half later.

I'd written a blog post about that dream of mine--it contains an extended interlude that describes the lucid dream state--and I was surprised today when I reread it and found that many details of that dream had shifted in my memory.  Nothing of any consequence: only facts.  The essential truth remained the same.

Here's the link to that post from March of 2009: La Force.