Nightmares
By Jorge Luis Borges

 

Dreams are the genus; nightmares the species. I will speak first of dreams, and then of nightmares.

Lately I've been rereading psychology books, and I have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as I had hoped, that which is so astonishing, so strange -- the fact of dreaming.

Thus, in a psychology book I admire greatly, The Mind of Man, Gustav Spiller states that dreams correspond to the lowest plane of mental activity -- I would maintain that, at least for me, this is an error -- and he speaks of the incoherence, the disconnectedness, of the fables of dreams. I would like to recall Paul Groussac and his fine essay, "Among Dreams," in The Intellectual Voyage. Groussac writes that it is astonishing that each morning we wake up sane -- that is, relatively sane -- after having passed through that zone of shades, those labyrinths of dreams.

The study of dreams is particularly difficult, for we cannot examine dreams directly, we can only speak of the memory of dreams. And it is possible that the memory of dreams does not correspond exactly to the dreams themselves. A great writer of the eighteenth century, Sir Thomas Browne, believed that our memory of dreams is more impoverished than the splendor of reality. Others, in turn, believe that we improve our dreams. If we think of the dream as a work of fiction -- and I think it is -- it may be that we continue to spin tales when we wake and later when we recount them.

I want to recall that great book by Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, which Dante read and reread, as he read and reread all of the literature of the Middle Ages. Boethius, who has been called "the last Roman," Boethius the senator imagined a spectator at a horse race.

The spectator is in the hippodrome, and he sees, from his box, the horses at the starting gate, all the vicissitudes of the race itself, and the arrival of one of the horses at the finishing line. He sees it all in succession. Boethius then imagines another spectator. This other spectator is the spectator of the spectator of the race; he is, let us say, God. God sees the whole race; he sees in a single eternal instant the start, the race, the finish. He sees everything in a single glance; and in the same way he sees all of history. Thus Boethius bridges the concepts of free will and of Providence. Just as the spectator sees the race (albeit sequentially) but does not influence it, so God sees the whole race from cradle to tomb. He does not influence what we do. We act by our own free will, but God knows -- God knows at this very moment -- our final destiny. God sees all of history, what unfolds as history, in a single splendid dizzying instant that is eternity.

I think now of that book, An Experiment with Time -- I know no title more interesting -- by J. W. Dunne, an English writer of this century. I do not agree with his theory, but it is so beautiful it's worth recalling. In the book he imagines that each one of us possesses a kind of modest personal eternity: one we possess each night. Tonight we will sleep, and tonight, Wednesday night, we will dream. And we will dream of Wednesday and of the next day, Thursday, and perhaps of Friday, and perhaps of Tuesday. . . Each man is given, in dreams, a little personal eternity which allows him to see the recent past and the near future.

All of this the dreamer sees in a single glance, in the same way that God, from His vast eternity, sees the whole cosmic process. And what happens when we wake? What happens is that, as we are accustomed to a sequential life, we give a narrative structure to our dream, though our dream has been multiple and simultaneous.

Let us look at a very simple example. Suppose I dream of a man, simply the image of a man -- I'm using a very poor dream -- and then, immediately after, I dream the image of a tree. Waking, I can give this dream a complexity it does not have: I can think I have dreamed that a man has been changed into a tree, that he was a tree. Modifying the facts, I spin a tale.

We don't know exactly what happens in dreams. It is not impossible that, during dreams, we are in heaven, we are in hell. Perhaps we are someone, the someone whom Shakespeare called "the thing I am"; perhaps we are ourselves, perhaps we are God. All of this we forget at waking. We can only examine the memory of a dream, the poor memory.

I have read Frazer -- a supremely talented writer, but also an extremely credulous one, as it seems he believed everything reported by the various travelers. According to Frazer, savages do not distinguish between waking and dreaming. For them, dreams are episodes of the waking life. Thus, according to Frazer, or according to the travelers he read, a savage dreams he goes into the forest and kills a lion. When he wakes, he thinks his soul has abandoned his body and has killed a lion in his dreams. Or, if we want to complicate things a little, we may suppose that he has killed the dream of a lion. All of this is possible, and this idea of the savages coincides with that of children, who also cannot distinguish between waking and dream.

I will recall a personal memory. A nephew of mine -- he was about five or six at the time -- used to tell me his dreams each morning. One day, as he was sitting on the floor, I asked him what he had dreamed. Patiently, knowing that I had this hobby, he told me: "Last night I dreamed that I was lost in the forest. I was scared, but I came to a clearing, and there was a white house, made of wood, with a staircase that turned around, with steps with runners, and then a door, and out of this door you came out." I interrupted him sharply: "Stop making up things about my house!"

Everything, waking and dream, occurred for him on a single plane. This brings us to another, similar but contrary, hypothesis: that of the mystics and the metaphysicians.

For the savage and for the child, dreams are episodes of the waking life; for poets and mystics, it is not impossible for all of the waking life to be a dream. This was said, in a dry and laconic fashion, by Calderón: "Life is a dream." It was said, with an image, by Shakespeare: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." And splendidly by the Austrian poet Walter von der Vogelweide, who asked, "Ist mein Leben getr ä umt oder ist es wahr?" -- have I dreamed my life or is it real? I am not sure. It takes us certainly to solipsism, to the suspicion that there is only one dreamer and that dreamer is every one of us. That dreamer -- let us imagine that I am he -- is, at this very moment, dreaming you. He is dreaming this room and this lecture. There is only one dreamer, and that dreamer dreams all of the cosmic process, dreams all of the world's history, dreams everything, including your childhood and your adolescence. All this could not have happened; at this moment it begins to exist. He begins to dream and is each one of us -- not us , but each one. At this moment I am dreaming that I am giving a lecture on the Calle Charcas, that I am looking for things to say (and perhaps not finding them); I am dreaming you. But it is not true. Each one of you is dreaming me and the others.

We have these two ideas: the belief that dreams are part of waking, and the other, the splendid one, the belief of the poets: that all of waking is a dream. There is no difference between the two. It takes us back to Groussac's article: we may be awake, we may be asleep and dreaming, but our mental activity is the same.

There is a passage in the Odyssey where it speaks of two gates, one of horn and one of ivory. Through the ivory gate false dreams pass to men, and through the gate of horn go the true and prophetic dreams. And there is a passage in the Aeneid, in the sixth book, which has provoked innumerable commentaries. Aeneas descends to the Elysian Fields, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He speaks with the shades of Achilles and Tiresias; he sees the shade of his mother, he wants to embrace her but cannot because she is made of shadow; and he sees, moreover, the future greatness of the city he will found. He sees Romulus and Remus, a field, and then in that field the future Roman Forum, the future grandeur of Rome, the greatness of Augustus; he sees the whole imperial grandeur. And after having seen all of this, after having talked to its contemporaries (who, for Aeneas, are future people), he returns to the world of the living. What then occurs is quite curious and has never been well explained, except by one anonymous commentator who I believe offered the truth. Aeneas returns through the gate of ivory and not through the gate of horn. Why? The anonymous commentator tells us: because we are not in reality. For Virgil, the real world was possibly the Platonic world, the world of the archetypes. Aeneas passes through the gates of ivory because he enters the world of dreams -- that is to say, what we call waking.

Well, all of this may well be.

Now we come to the species, to nightmare. It may be useful to recall the names of nightmare.

The Spanish name, pesadilla, is too cheerful: the diminutive -illa makes it lack force. In other languages the names are more powerful. In Greek the word is ephialtes: Ephialtes is the demon who inspires nightmares. In Latin we have incubus. The incubus is the demon who crushes the sleeper, causing the nightmare. In German we have a very curious word, Alp, which has come to mean both the elf and the torment brought by elf -- the same idea of a demon who inspires nightmares. There is a painting that De Quincey, one of literature's great dreamers of nightmares, saw. It is a painting by Fuseli or F ü ssli (which was his actual name; he was a Swiss painter of the eighteenth century) called The Nightmare. A girl is sleeping. She wakes and is terrified because she sees lying on her belly a monster that is small, black, and malign. This monster is the nightmare. When Fuseli painted this picture he was thinking of the word Alp, of the elf's torments.

We come now to the wisest and most ambiguous word, the English nightmare, which means the mare of the night. This was how Shakespeare understood it. There is a line of his that says, "I met the night mare." Clearly he saw it as a mare. And there is another line where he says, deliberately, "the nightmare and her nine foals."

But according to the etymologists the root is different. The root is niht mare or niht maere, the demon of the night. Dr. Johnson, in his famous dictionary, says that this corresponds to Nordic mythology -- Saxon mythology we would say -- which saw nightmares as the products of demons. This would make it a play on, or translation of, the Greek ephialtes or the Latin incubus.

There is another interpretation that may help us, one that relates nightmare to the German word M ä rchen. M ä rchen means fable, fairy tale, fiction. Nightmare, then, would be the fiction of the night. Whatever the case, the fact of conceiving of nightmare as a mare of the night -- there is something terrifying in a mare of the night -- was a boon for Victor Hugo. Hugo mastered English and wrote an unjustly forgotten book on Shakespeare. In one of his poems, I think in Les contemplations, he speaks of "le cheval noir de la nuit," the black horse of night. No doubt he was thinking of the English word nightmare.

We also have the French word, cauchemar, which is probably linked to nightmare. In all of these words there is an idea of demonic origin, the idea of a demon who causes the nightmare. I believe it does not derive simply from a superstition. I believe that there is -- and I speak with complete honesty and sincerity -- something true in this idea.

Let us enter into the nightmare, into nightmares. Mine are always the same. I have two nightmares which often become confused with one another. I have the nightmare of the labyrinth, which comes, in part, from a steel engraving I saw in a French book when I was a child. In this engraving were the Seven Wonders of the World, among them the labyrinth of Crete. The labyrinth was a great amphitheater, a very high amphitheater (and this was apparent because it was higher than the cypresses and the men outside it). In this closed structure -- ominously closed -- there were cracks. I believed when I was a child (or I now believe I believed) that if one had a magnifying glass powerful enough, one could look through the cracks and see the Minotaur in the terrible center of the labyrinth.

My other nightmare is that of the mirror. The two are not distinct, as it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. I remember seeing, in the house of Dora de Alvear in the Belgrano district, a circular room whose walls and doors were mirrored, so that whoever entered the room found himself at the center of a truly infinite labyrinth.

I always dream of labyrinths or of mirrors. In the dream of the mirror another vision appears, another terror of my nights, and that is the idea of the mask. Masks have always scared me. No doubt I felt in my childhood that someone who was wearing a mask was hiding something horrible. These are my most terrible nightmares: I see myself reflected in a mirror, but the reflection is wearing a mask. I am afraid to pull the mask off, afraid to see my real face, which I imagine to be hideous. There may be leprosy or evil or something more terrible than anything I am capable of imagining.

A curious feature of my nightmares -- I don't know if you share this with me -- is that they have a precise topography. I, for example, always dream of certain corners in Buenos Aires. I'm on the corner of Laprida and Arenales, or the one at Balcarce and Chile. I know exactly where I am, and I know that I must head toward some far-off place. These places in my dreams have a precise topography, but they are completely different. They may be mountain paths or swamps or jungles, it doesn't matter: I know that I am on a certain corner in Buenos Aires. I try to find my way.

Although one might wish otherwise, in dreams what is important is not the images. What matters, as Coleridge said, is the impression produced by the dream. The images are minor; they are effects.

Let us look at a line by Petronius, quoted by Addison. (I am deliberately citing poets, who are particularly illuminating.) He says that, "The soul, without the body, plays." Gongóra, in a sonnet, expresses with precision the idea that dreams and nightmares are, above all, fictions; they are literary creations:

 

El sue ñ o, autor de representacions,

en su teatro sobre el viento armado

sombras suele vestir de bulto bello.

 

[The dream, author of representations,

in its theater above the armored wind

dresses shadows in beautiful bulk.]

 

The dream is a representation. Addison reinterpreted the idea according to eighteenth-century principles in an excellent article published in The Spectator.

I have cited Sir Thomas Browne. He says that dreams give us an idea of the excellence of the soul, seeing the soul free of the body and engaged in play and dreaming. He thinks that the soul enjoys its freedom. And Addison says effectively that the soul, when it is free of the shackles of the body, imagines, and is able to imagine with a freedom it does not have in waking. He adds that of all the operations of the soul -- of the mind we would say, now that we don't use the word soul -- the most difficult is invention. Yet in dreams we invent so rapidly that we confuse our thoughts with our inventions. We dream we are reading a book, and the truth is we have invented every word in the book. But we don't realize it, and we take it as strange. I have noted in many dreams this anticipatory process, which prepares us for the things to come.

I remember a certain nightmare I had. It took place, I know, on the Calle Serrano, I think at the corner of Serrano and Soler. It did not look like Serrano and Soler -- the landscape was quite different -- but I knew that I was on the old Calle Serrano in the Palermo district. I met a friend, a friend I do not know; I saw him, and he was much changed. I had never seen his face before, but I knew his face could not be like that. He was much changed, and very sad. His face was marked by troubles, by illness, perhaps by guilt. He had his right hand inside his jacket. I couldn't see the hand, which he kept hidden over his heart. I embraced him and felt that I had to help him. "But, my poor Fulano, what has happened? How changed you are!" "Yes," he answered, "I am much changed." Slowly, he withdrew his hand. I could see that it was the claw of a bird.

The strange thing is that from the beginning the man had his hand hidden. Without knowing it, I had paved the way for that invention: that the man had the claw of a bird and that I would see the terrible change, the terrible misfortune, that he was turning into a bird. It also happens in dreams that are not nightmares: they ask us something, and we don't know how to answer; they give us the answer, and we are astonished. The answer may be absurd, but in the dream it is exactly right. Everything has been prepared. I have come to the conclusion, though it may not be scientific, that dreams are the most ancient aesthetic activity.

We know that animals dream. There are Latin verses that speak of the greyhound barking at the hare it chases in dreams. What is curious is the dramatic order of dreams. Addison observed that in the dream we are the theater, the audience, the actors, the plot, the dialogue we hear. We make up everything unconsciously, and everything has a vivacity it does not have in reality. There are people who have weak dreams, vague ones -- or, at least, so they tell me. Mine are quite vivid.

Let us return to Coleridge. He says it doesn't matter what we dream, that the dream searches for explanations. He gives an example: a lion suddenly appears in this room, and we all are afraid; the fear has been caused by the image of the lion. But in dreams the reverse can occur. We feel oppressed, and then search for an explanation. I, absurdly but vividly, dream that a sphinx has lain down next to me. The sphinx is not the cause of my fear, it is an explanation of my feeling of oppression. Coleridge adds that people who have been frightened by imaginary ghosts have gone mad. On the other hand, a person who dreams a ghost can wake up and, within a few seconds, regain his composure.

I have had -- and I still have -- many nightmares. The most terrible, the one that struck me as the most terrible, I used in a sonnet. It went like this: I was in my room; it was dawn (possibly that was the time of the dream). At the foot of my bed was a king, a very ancient king, and I knew in the dream that he was the King of the North, of Norway. He did not look at me; his blind stare was fixed on the ceiling. I felt the terror of his presence. I saw the king, I saw his sword, I saw his dog. Then I woke. But I continued to see the king for a while, because he had made such a strong impression on me. Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible.

I want to mention a nightmare my friend Susana Bombal recently told me. She dreamed she was in a vaulted room, the top of which was in darkness. From the darkness dropped a black, unraveling piece of cloth. In her hand she awkwardly held a giant pair of scissors. She had to cut the loose threads that hung from the cloth, and they were endless. She kept snipping but she knew she would never finish. And she had the sensation of horror that is the nightmare; for the nightmare is, above all, the sensation of horror.

I have recounted two actual nightmares, and now I will describe two nightmares from literature, which possibly were also real. The first is the nobile castello which Dante imagined in the Inferno. Dante tells how, guided by Virgil, he reaches the first circle and sees that Virgil has turned pale. He thinks: if Virgil turns pale entering Hell, which is his eternal domain, why do I not feel afraid? He tells this to Virgil, who is terrified. But Virgil says: "I will go first." They go in despair, for they hear around them infinite sighs -- not the sighs of physical pain, but the sighs of something more grave.

They come to a noble castle, to the nobile castello. It is encircled by seven walls that may be the seven liberal arts of the trivium and the quadrivium or the seven virtues; it doesn't matter. He speaks of a river that disappears and of a fresh meadow that also disappears. When they reach the meadow, they see that it is enameled, that it is not a living thing. Four shades approach them: the shades of the four great poets of Antiquity. There is Homer, sword in hand; Ovid, Lucan, and Horace. Virgil tells him to greet Homer, whom Dante revered and never read. He tells him, "Onorate l'altissimo poeta." Homer comes forward, sword in hand, and admits Dante as the sixth of the company. Dante, who had still not written the Commedia because he was writing it at that moment, knows himself to be capable of writing it.

They then discuss things which Dante does not bother to repeat. We may wonder at the Florentine's modesty, but I think there is a deeper reason. He speaks of those who inhabit the noble castle: there are the great shades of the pagans, and of the Moslems too. They all speak slowly and softly, they have faces of great authority, but they are deprived of God. There is the absence of God. They know they are condemned to that eternal castle, to that castle that is eternal and honorable, but terrible.

There is Aristotle, master of those who know. There are the pre-Socratic philosophers; there is Plato and, alone and apart, the great sultan Saladin. There are all the great pagans who could not be saved because they were never baptized. They could not be saved by Christ, of whom Virgil speaks but cannot name in Hell -- he calls him the Mighty One. We may think that Dante had not yet discovered his dramatic talent, he did not yet know that he could make those figures speak. We may lament that Dante does not repeat the great words, no doubt dignified, that Homer, that grand shade, told him, sword in hand. But we may also feel that Dante understood it was better for all to be silent in that terrible castle. Dante merely names them: Seneca, Plato, Aristotle, Saladin, Averro ë s. He names them, and we don't hear a single word. It's better that way.

I would say, thinking of the Inferno, that Hell is not a nightmare; it is simply a torture chamber. Atrocious things take place there, but it does not have the atmosphere of a nightmare that there is in the "noble castle." This is what Dante gives us, perhaps for the first time in literature.

There is another example, one that was praised by De Quincey. It is in the fifth book of Wordsworth's Prelude. Wordsworth says that he was preoccupied by the fact that art and science were at the mercy of some cataclysm. (Such a preoccupation was rare at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Today, of course, we think that all of the works of humanity, and humanity itself, could be destroyed in a moment by the atomic bomb.) Well. . . Wordsworth is talking with a friend, and he expresses his horror at the thought that the great works of mankind, the sciences and the arts, could be destroyed. The friend confesses that he too has felt such fears. And Wordsworth says: I have dreamed it. . .

And then comes a dream which seems to me the perfect nightmare, for it contains all the elements of nightmare: episodes of physical ill-being, of persecution, and the element of horror, of the supernatural. Wordsworth tells us that he was in a rocky cave by the sea. It was noon, and he was reading Don Quixote, one of his favorite books, "the famous history of the errant knight recorded by Cervantes." He put down the book and began to think about the end of science and art, and then the hour came. The powerful hour of noon, a hot summer noon. "Sleep seized me," he recalls, "and I passed into a dream."

He falls asleep in the cave, facing the sea, amid the golden sands of the beach. In his dream he is also surrounded by sand, a Sahara of black sand. There is no water, there is no sea. He is in the middle of a desert -- in the desert one is always in the middle -- and he is horrified at the thought of trying to escape. Suddenly he sees there is someone next to him. It is, oddly enough, an Arab of the Bedouin tribes, mounted on a camel and with a lance in his right hand. Under his left arm he has a stone, and in his hand he holds a shell. The Arab tells him that his mission is to save the arts and sciences. He brings the shell to the poet's ear; the shell is of an extraordinary beauty. Wordsworth tells us he hears a prophecy "in an unknown tongue which yet I understood": a sort of tender ode, prophesying that the earth was on the verge of being destroyed by a flood sent by the wrath of God. The Arab tells him that it is true, the flood is coming, but that he has a mission: to save the arts and sciences. He shows him the stone. And the stone is, curiously, Euclid's Elements, while remaining a stone. Then he brings the shell closer, and the shell too is a book; it is what had spoken those terrible things. The shell is, moreover, all the poetry of the world, including -- why not? -- the poem by Wordsworth. The Bedouin tells him that he must save these two things, the stone and the shell, both of them books. He turns around, and there is a moment in which Wordsworth sees that the face of the Bedouin has changed, that it is full of horror. He too turns around, and he sees a great light, a light that has now flooded the middle of the desert. It is the waters of the flood that will destroy the earth. The Bedouin goes off, and Wordsworth sees that the Bedouin is also Don Quixote and that the camel is also Rosinante and that, in the same way that the stone was a book and the shell a book, so the Bedouin is Don Quixote and is neither of the two and is both at once. This duality corresponds to the horror of the dream. Wordsworth, at that moment, wakes with a cry of terror, for the waters have engulfed him.

I think that this nightmare is one of the most beautiful in literature.

We may draw two conclusions, at least tonight; later we can change our minds. The first is that dreams are an aesthetic work, perhaps the most ancient aesthetic expression. They take a strangely dramatic form. We are, as Addison said, the theater, the spectators, the actors, the story. The second refers to the horror of nightmares. Our waking life abounds in terrible moments; we all know that there are moments in which reality overwhelms us. A loved one has died, a loved one has left us; such are the causes of sadness, of despair. . . Nevertheless, these do not pertain to nightmares. The nightmare has a particular horror, and that horror may be expressed by any story. It may be expressed by Wordsworth's Bedouin who is also Don Quixote, by scissors and threads, by my dream of the king, by the famous nightmares of Poe. But there is something: it is the flavor of the nightmare. In the treatises I have consulted they do not speak of this horror.

We also have the possibility of a theological interpretation, one that would be in accord with etymology. Take any of the words: the Latin incubus, the Saxon nightmare, the German Alp. All of them suggest something supernatural. Well, what if nightmares were strictly supernatural? What if nightmares were cries from hell? What if nightmares literally took place in hell? Why not? Everything is so strange that even this is possible.

 

Excerpt from:
Seven Nights
by Jorge Luis Borges
Originally published in Spanish as Siete Noches
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Introduction by Alastair Reid
D. R. © 1980, Fondo de Cultura Econ ó mica
Translation, Copyright © 1984 by Eliot Weinberger
Introduction, Copyright © 1984 by Alastair Reid
ISBN 0-8112-0904-0
ISBN 0-8112-0905-9 (pbk.)