When Jorge Luis Borges was a child, his father was the head librarian of Buenos Aires, and little Jorge went from library to library with his father, judging the libraries based on the pictures of tigers in their encyclopedias.

When he got older, he went blind. By the time he was an old man, he dreamed the dreams of a blind man, but every now and then could conjure up a visual image. The following is an excerpt from his prose poem, "Dreamtigers":

And so as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.