Well, this is what happened. My impresario had introduced me to Miss Alice Tully from New York and Miss Tully wanted to commission a work from me for the American Bicentennial. I had no time and I said that I would be unable to accept her offer, but then she invited me to dinner. In the course of the meal, she told me how much she loved animals and that she travelled to India for the sole purpose of shaking the paw of a lion. Well, at first I laughed at this story, but then afterwards I recalled the account of the ‘Chevalier au Lion’ of Chrétien de Troyes, a French romance of the Middle Ages, and after having laughed, I cried. I said to myself, that woman is amazing, to go all the way to India just to see a lion and shake its paw, that's marvelous, and I accepted the commission.

Stravinsky said that he dreamed regularly, that his dreams were ‘the ground for innumerable solutions in my composing activity’. But it is just these composerly dreams about which he has been reticent. Instead, he has recalled the ‘time dreams and counting dreams [which] are common with me, and … dreams in which people shout, but inaudibly’. And again, ‘I am forever trying to tell the time and forever looking at my wrist watch, only to find it isn't there’. Then there was the dream of being a hunchback, which presaged an attack of intercostal neuralgia brought on by nicotine poisoning; another about the scent of Debussy's Eau de Cologne; and one more about his passport, ‘very yellow’. There are no musical portents in these dreams; but of the ones that are musical, the most practical was the one that prescribed the instrumentation of the Octet; and the most bizarre, even Freudian, was the pink dream (‘I often dream in colour’), during the time he was composing Threni, about the two warm, gelatinous, testicular eggs supporting ‘an elastic substance stretching exactly between the two notes [of an interval] I had composed.’ The tension of the stretched substance assured him that his interval was the right one.