Imprisoned, the last surviving member of a mystic religion passes his time by trying to remember every detail of his life. After years of this process, the man remembers an obscure bit of knowledge: when the gods created the world, they foresaw its demise, and they created a single sentence that could be uttered that would prevent the end of the world. The sentence is encoded somewhere on the earth, and it will never change. The man tries to fathom the possible places the message could appear: mountains, earth, on his own face, or even on the fur of the jaguar in the cell next to him--the message passed down from generation to generation of animals; always preserved. Certain that the jaguar is the key, and that he, being the last of his religion, is the one who is to interpret the code, the prisoner devotes all his time to solving the mystery. He dozes off, and notices a grain of sand in his cell. Later two, then three, and so forth until the sand is so deep that he is suffocating in it. As he was dying, someone said to him that escape from the dream was futile, since he could only return to a previous dream, which were equal in number to the grains of sand. The prisoner professed: "A sand of dreams cannot kill me nor are there dreams within dreams." He awakens, and is surrounded by rings of fire and ice. The mystery becomes clear to him, and he comes to understand the design on the jaguar's back. He understands the words that will make him omnipotent and immortal. Yet, he does not say them, for he has forgotten who he himself is, and he lets himself die in the prison.
Other Stories With Theme of Meaningful Dreams
The Circular Ruins (Full
Text)
The Circular Ruins (Summary)
The Secret Miracle
(Summary)
The Waiting (Summary)
The Zahir (Summary)
Other Stories With Theme of Infinite Interpretation
Averroes'
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The Garden of Forking Paths
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The Immortal (Summary)
The Library Of Babel (Full Text)
The Library Of Babel (Summary)
The Theologians (Summary)
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Summary)