Since I was a little kid, I have been enthralled with dreams. I started my first dream journal when I was 10, not because I was interested so much in their content (as I now am), but because I was excited by having a separate, private life that was all mine.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote on dreams, and in particular lucid dreaming. His excitement mirrored my own, but his dreams became a source of dissapointment. I wonder if its more dissapointing to live a life that doesn't match one's expectations, or if its far worse for one's dreamlife to fall short of hopes, presumptions and possibilities.
Dreamtigers, by Borges
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger - not the jaguar, that spotted 'tiger' that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman's brow or smile.) My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. 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 seen to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too epemeral, or it looks more like a dog or a bird than like a tiger.
The Maker, 1960.
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