I am battling a winged bull on the place du Trocadéro, in front of the entrance to the Musée de l'Homme, but as I move in for the kill I realize it is no more substantial than an inflatable toy.

Upon waking, this adventure leaves me with the optimistic conviction that we tend to make too many mountains out of molehills.

In another dream (which preceded this one by some 14 years and which was in turn a later version of an earlier dream), I was supposed to fight a boxing match for the benefit of the Museum. I was not at all happy with this set-up and at the very last minute I chickened out, unabashedly declaring that I had no intention of being punched around.

The idea that fighting should be linked to my profession as an ethnographer no doubt has to do with the fact that in 1931 the world bantamweight champion, Al Brown (a Panamanian black who was so elegant in the ring that the working-class fight crowds used to tauntingly call him "twinkle toes"), fought a benefit match in the Cirque d'Hiver to raise money for the Dakar-Djibouti Expedition.

There is also my memory of the admission a professional boxer once made to Picasso, and which Picasso reported to me as very revealing of just how a boxer feels when he climbs into the ring: "It's as if you were going down to the bottom of the sea."

EDITOR'S NOTE

Winged bull: a motif seen all over Mesopotamia and Persia. Was some museum project about this region competing for funds with sub-Saharan Africa, Leiris's area of expertise? I wonder because both dreams are associated with the museum.

All his life, Leiris had recurring dreams with variations--and Bullfight wasn't the last in this chain. Seven years later, he dreamed again of a corrida (as a benefit, of course!)--only this time he was the planned, sacrificial Five-Horned Bull.

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth) p.142-3.

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