A man arrives at a ruined temple determined to dream another man into existence, creating him feature by feature through disciplined dreaming. He succeeds, fears that his creation will discover he is not real, and then discovers that he himself is dreamed. Borges's story is four pages of crystalline prose that contain infinite regress. The dreamer dreamed: the phrase captures the metaphysical vertigo Borges specialized in. The story raises questions about reality, about creation, about the nature of consciousness itself. There is no bottom to the regress. There is only the fire that does not burn.