The theme of self-generation of oneself from oneself also is part of complexity theory, the most recent thinking about evolution. These stories share a common theme the relationship between the brain's emotional and reflex centers and the more awake and volitional cortex. The brain makes an image of the body and then asks the body to animate it. Borges' story deepens the theme of human participation in the formation of the shapes of our existence from youth to full adulthood to maturity and then old age. We can learn from dreams because we can reorganize meaning and association as well as influence somatic-emotional structure.
Dreams have an emotional matrix that dream characters, or objects, are embedded in.
Although we try to decode dream images and representations, we do not learn to experience them as an inner environment and to see them as expressions of a bodily state. Dreams are part of the mystery of somatic wisdom, the process of the soma's becoming self-aware, of having a subjectivity. As the body grows its subjectivity, the cortex forms images and motoric expressions to match. As the body dreams, it uses the soma's cortical imaging, or futurizing, to influence its way to be present. Two aspects of our body' s process, the inherited and the socially experienced, organize and form an intermediate subjective realm.