In Ficciones, many of Borges’s stories make the point that reality can be indistinguishable from illusion and, thus, that reality itself is fragile. For example, in the story “The Circular Ruins,” a wizard attempts to dream a man into existence. Already, this mission speaks to the power of dreams to influence reality. After the wizard spends an unspecified amount of time attempting to dream up this man, he finally manages to create one within his dream world, and the wizard feels that this man is his son. When the wizard believes his son is ready to be released in the real world, he erases his son’s memory so that he will not know that he is simply a product of the wizard’s dream. This action suggests that for one to acknowledge that their life doesn’t fall into their own definition of reality would be extraordinarily difficult—if the wizard’s son realizes that the wizard dreamed him up, he will most likely be thrown into a deep existential crisis. By erasing his son’s memories, then, the wizard believes that he is giving his son the gift of ignorance. However, at the end of the story, the wizard realizes that he himself is a product of someone else’s dream. Thus, the story invites readers to consider the fact that reality itself isn’t as reliable or tangible as one might think, since even people who feel they have a solid grasp of reality sometimes find that this is not the case.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Reality vs. Illusion ThemeTracker
Reality vs. Illusion Quotes in Ficciones
In the classical culture of Tlön, there is only one discipline, that of psychology […]. This monism, or extreme idealism, completely invalidates science […]. Each state of mind is irreducible. There mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it [….]. The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, not even an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.
He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything—almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.
It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front).
For his sake, God projected a secret miracle: German lead would kill him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would elapse between the command to fire and its execution. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.
They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.
