In our upcoming January gathering, we will discuss Jorge Luis Borges's mystical, cyclical story, "The Circular Ruins," which follows a stranger who arrives at a ruined temple with a singular, quiet purpose: to dream a man into physical existence. After years of dreaming every muscle, every heartbeat, and every line of the boy's face, he succeeds, sending his "son" out into the world. Yet, in the story's final, chilling lines, as fire consumes the temple, the dreamer walks into the flames unharmed, realizing with relief and terror that he, too, is a dream, projected by another dreamer.
Borges’s circular labyrinth is a profound metaphor for the recursive nature of creation, fatherhood, and the transmission of culture. None of us are original creators. We do not invent our language, our laws, our moral codes, or our stories from scratch. Instead, we are dreamed by those who came before us. Our parents, our teachers, and our ancestors spent generations dreaming the concepts, values, and habits that we now inhabit as physical reality. We are the projects of their cognitive and relational labor. To act as a parent or a cultural creator is simply to take those dreams and pass them down, dreaming the next generation into existence.
This infinite regression—dreamers dreaming dreamers—reveals the limits of individual autonomy. We like to imagine ourselves as self-created, heroic individuals who owe nothing to the past. But a child who claims absolute independence is simply ignoring the dreamer who shaped their mind. The realization that we are another's dream is not a source of despair, but of profound humility and connection. It grounds us in a lineage of shared intelligence and responsibility.
This January, we will discuss the boundaries of this creative transmission. We will explore how to take the best dreams of our past—our art, our law, our serious literature—and dream them forward into a new scene in Denver, accepting our role as both the dreamers and the dreamed.