![]() ![]() ![]() But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. ![]() Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. “In ‘that all-possible realm,' he felt that he could release the hold on his thoughts and fears, and that these could, in all freedom, act out their own stories.”ĭreams recur persistently in Borges’s work, from the “Dreamtigers” he conjures in his literary imagination to the nightmarishly nested dreams within dreams in his short story “The God’s Script." One of his favorite dream stories was the thought experiment posed by the fourth-century BC Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu: He was “a keen dreamer, and enjoyed telling his dreams,” recalls the writer Alberto Manguel, who was one of many young friends who read to Borges. He relied on disembodied readers’ voices and was forced to compose his letters, poems, and short stories inside his head, memorizing them and then waiting for a willing amanuensis. The distinction between dreams and reality must have been especially blurred for Borges, who was blind for most of his career. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian, liked to quote Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book: “to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream.” ![]()
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