In the Borges story “The Circular Ruins” a man sleeps in a secluded Mesoamerican structure and has strange dreams. He awakens to find his wounds have healed…his obligation was to dream….he attempts to dream a man…to model the stuff upon which dreams are made…like trying to weave a rope out of sand…or mint coins from the wind. He succeeds — first he dreams a heart, then a whole man…and eventually he, like the magicians millennia before him, succumbs to death, realizing that someone dreamt him, too.
In Mayan culture there are indeed circular ruins:
And there was a kind of dream magic that was practiced as well. Specific places were set aside and even built expressly for serious dreaming. This all sounds very new agey, but it’s not.
The Maya believe that one has an alter ego, a spirit double, which is called a way (pronounced “why”.) The word also means sleep. These dream creatures are often animal — or even a mixture of three animals. A feathered serpent with jaguar claws and spots, for example. They believe these doppelgängers can be contacted during sleep. They give advice, amongst other things.
The Maya count years in what is currently called the Long Count. They believe time doesn’t exclusively run forward, as we do. They sense that it is circular, that it runs in a series of cycles — as do the Hindu. There are short cycles and there are very very long ones. The current Long Count began in 3114 B.C. (that’s early Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian times for handy reference — civilization in the middle east was taking shape) and the Long Count will end…get this…on Dec 23, 2012! Save the date.
At that time the “universe” (our world) will be annihilated by a flood (always with the floods!) and then the sky will fall upon the earth (an asteroid?) and darkness will cover the earth (dust from the impact?)
Then comes a relatively short age of myths and heroes — heroes whose job it is to clean up the awful mess and the metaphorical debris from the previous age — as each age starts with a clean slate. It’s all good. It will all be built up again.
(Reference M. Coe: The Maya, Thames & Hudson.)
