Writing

Short stories like The Paper Menagerie or Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (really good stories I highly recommend.) I also need some new short story recommendations.

I love the author Jorge Luis Borges. He seemed to write about stuff like he was on acid, but what he wrote always turned out to be mind-boggling and lyrical in ways that challenge a reader's conceptions of reality. I always wish an artist would adapt one of his insane stories to a manga or better yet, a webtoon with full color pages...

Borges once wrote about a man called Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had a daydream in 1797 on a summer day in a farm town near the British town of Exmoor. He'd just begun to read a non-fiction history book, when he fell asleep almost immediately. The section he'd read just before nodding off described a man from ancient Persia called Kubla Khan. Kubla Khan was an Ottoman Emperor made famous in the West by Marco Polo (who traveled from Europe to Asia between 1271 to 1295 AD). In Samuel's dream, the words on the pages of his book began to sprout and grow like a living thing. Asleep, he saw realistic, vivid images of Kubla Khan's magnificent palace along with words describing them. After a couple of hours, he woke up and was completely, utterly sure that in his dream he'd created an extraordinary, detailed 300-line poem called "Kubla Khan" (persumably Kubla was an important character in Samuel's dream - this is important!). He tried to write the poem down, but his smartphone buzzedd with a tweet (lol that part's not true). While he was writing, someone interrupted him, and when he tried to finish writing down the poem, all he had left were vague images that made only 50 lines but were nonetheless very beautiful. He called it "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment."

Now let's talk about what's in the poem, Kubla Khan and his palace, who was a very real person. Years after Samuel lived, translators discovered some information about Kubla that Samuel had never known, and nobody in Europe could have known until the early 19th century. Kubla (remember, he was a real person) had done something strange, that makes sense to me but may scare you. You're about to hear something like a ghost story, except these ghosts lived and probably are still out there, doing something strange in someone else's dream (or dreams), as if they themselves are unceasing poems that will continue to hop from person to person until the end of time (please god, do not let t be like Being John Malcovich).

Remember I just said that Samuel dreamed of Kubla (who lived in the late 13th century) and he wrote his dream-poem in 1797 AD (the late 18th century). That was published in 1816 AD (the 19th century). Then, about 2 decades after he published Kubla Khan, Europeans got a hold of the translation of an ancient Persian book called Compendium of Histories by Rashid al-Din. The Compendium of (Persian) Histories was published in the 14th century (1300-1400 AD). There are only small bits of the Compendium left, but there is a certain line written by a descendant of Kublai (the Persian spelling of Kubla), Ghazan Mahmud. It reads, "East of Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory." There is absolutely no evidence to show that Samuel could have ever told Ghazan or Rashid to write or publish that. There is also no evidence to show that Kubla and Samuel knew each other.

However, IF one built a palace shown to him in a dream, and his descendant later writes that he actually did it, AND another person made a poem about that palace, including the actual name of that person who dreamed of and built the palace, it makes logical sense to say that at some point Real-Kubla and Real-Samuel did cross paths in perhaps something like Dream-Persia. Now who came back from Dream-Persia -- was it the Dream or Real Kubla, the Dream or Real Samuel? Because, how can one dream of oneself in a dream, without anyone being a counterpart to you in a Dream-Land? Perhaps, Dream and Real Persia are exactly the same, but mirror images of each other?

Basically, the story written by Borges was based on historical fact and uses his creativity to highlight how sometimes dreams can mess with reality. I personally wish I could see a badass webtoon based on this story, in which Samuel meets Kubla in a dream (maybe BL, maybe not hehehe) and Kubla is so impressed by Samuel that he makes some changes to his life in the real world when he wakes up....this is a little like an isekai but not really? Kudos to those who have read the story I'm referring to, I think you can find it in Borges: A Reader but I forget...