The most famous work by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez is his 1967 novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), one of Latin America's finest examples of magic realism, a literary style that incorporates fantastical or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. After the international success of this novel, García Márquez went on to publish a prodigious amount of writing, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. As of 2004, he was one of the world's most influential living authors, whose broad innovations on the rules of fiction have inspired countless writers to incorporate epic, myth, and fantasy into their works, challenging the ways it is possible to perceive a story.

Some of García Márquez's most interesting, exciting, and daring work, however, was written in the years before he became internationally famous, when his unique style was still developing and he was one among many writers of a Latin American literary renaissance. In 1950, for example, he wrote an intriguing story entitled "Eyes of a Blue Dog," which takes place entirely within its narrator's dream, using the logic of the unconscious and the unique contradictions of the dream world to portray a frustrated relationship between a man and a woman. Despite their deep desire for each other, these characters are unable to meet in real life or even touch in the dream world, a situation that García Márquez uses to represent the loneliness of the unconscious mind and its desperate longings. Anthologized in a collection by the same name in 1972, "Eyes of a Blue Dog" is now available in García Márquez's Collected Stories, translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa and published in 1984 by Harper & Row.