—Aeschylus, Agamemnon, v. 82
—Pedro Calderdόn de la Barca
There are dreams that are sold in the market, packaged or fresh, at sale price, dreams that are imported or indigenous, tax free, made locally; dreams that come out according to the seasons, like fruit; others, frozen, you can find all year round; dreams sold in farmers’ markets or department stores; dreams grown with chemical fertilizers or with manure—that is to say pure dreams, greenhouse dreams, and grazing dreams—dreams sold in installments and at half price (in the flea market on Sundays you can find old dreams coveted by collectors: antique dreams, like old gramophone records or rare books); there are political dreams, propaganda for a certain party or ideology, dreams about catastrophes like those earthquake movies that make the whole theater shake (or at least that’s what the audience thinks), that soak you in their drowning waters and make you wake up screaming: dreams of the frost, and the clouds, and the snow, crystalline like snowflakes, silken like hair; dreams with staircases and dreams with scaffoldings, dreams with leaves and dreams with foliage; there are also musical dreams: jazz, blues, and hard rock dreams, opera dreams with sumptuous stage scenery that seems to be three-dimensional, or the one-dimensional kind that unfurls before a plain black background; stereophonic dreams and videotaped dreams; you will find dreams everywhere, in all five continents, even in space (where they are weightless); diuretic dreams and digestive dreams, dreams of Pepsi and dreams of Coke, dreams as painful as colic and others that bum slowly: pyromaniacs’ dreams; Eskimo and eqtiator dreams; dreams that are arranged like the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper; there are also visual dreams, and architectural ones, dreams about the art of logic and the logic of art, with innumerable corpuscles incorporated inside them like the insides of transistor radios; one can also buy metaphysical dreams, paraphysical dreams, dreams on tape, dreams on cassette, postage stamp dreams, rubber-stamped dreams, and other dreams that have as their receiver their very transmitter; dreams that you can pick up on AM or shortwave radio, FM dreams; dreams printed on one hundred-gram paper, on chamois paper, dreams by photosynthesis, in Roman characters, or Shakespearean or Dreyer’s characters; Balkan, Ottoman, Palestinian dreams, Holocaust dreams; fragments of dreams that go off in your sleep like fireworks and others that go whistling by but never explode; you can buy dreams that have been cleared through customs or you can buy dreams on the black market; dreams of oil wells: petrochemical dreams, either from Europe or from colonies that have become independent; dreams of the enslaved, dreams of the free, dreams of slaves, and of Slavs and Albanians; dreams of exiles and of homecomings; migratory dreams; carbohydrate dreams that make you either lose or put on weight; drunken dreams like boats, dreams stoned on anything from Lebanese hash to opium, that is to say dreams of an artificial paradise, dreams brought on by shooting heroin, that lead you little by little to death; snapshot, Kodachrome, caffeinated or decaf, detoxified dreams; rococo, baroque, Etruscan dreams; jackpot dreams; group sex, monogamous, onanistic dreams called nocturnal emissions; slushy or granular dreams; dreams that make you go back, that reverse you or push you forward; mobilized dreams or dreams without character, anonymous, odorless, and cheap dreams; there are volcanic dreams and dreams of boredom, of stagnation; twin dreams, Siamese twin or egocentric dreams; you can also buy two-wheeled dreams, three-wheeled dreams, four-wheeled dreams, and that’s as far as it goes, because after that they take off and become balloons, gliders, Dakotas, Caravelles, multiengine, and turbo powered; there are Porsche and Maserati and Concord dreams; there are fizzy or flat dreams, soda pop dreams that explode in your sleep like champagne corks and scare you, while others have silencers and go off on the sly; crucified, Buddhist, Confucian dreams; dreams of Mao and Mao’s widow, dreams of the tigress; elephantine, lionine, canine, and pantomime dreams; dreams of bouzoukis and of other smaller instruments, like the baglamadaki; dreams of rembetika, dreams like Argentine tangos; folkloric and cosmopolitan dreams, repeating themselves like Hilton or Holiday Inn hotels, changing only according to the architecture of our sleep, while essentially they are identical; perjured, empty, Leninist dreams; dreams that Trotsky would have rejected but that his descendants call Trotskyist; in China you will find Japanese dreams and in Japan granular dreams like Chinese rice; dreams of superb meals, of palaces, of dukes; incestuous and purebred dreams like the horses at the race track, where the outsider dream might just win; dreams of football fans, of tennis and ping-pong that resound monotonously inside your head since you can’t see the players; dreams that win prizes like in beauty pageants; Eurocommunist dreams, gangster dreams, and dreams of poor people who see pizzas in their sleep. Finally, there are dreams of dreams that make you wake with a start and cry out; “No, that can’t be true. I dreamed it.”
Precisely because they are so terribly lucid, dreams have become the objects of our waking lives and are used as slogans in advertising; dream spots often interrupt a dreamy series or adorn the pages, when they don’t take up an entire page, of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, like those dreams that recur on fixed dates. This is why there are chairs of Dreamology at the universities and why Dreamography has its dream interpreters. And this is why holders of degrees in Dream Studies are sought after by large corporations, by dream multinationals, and by the large dream trusts and consortiums. This is why the Common European Market of Sleepers obliges students, starting in grade school, to write essays based on their dreams, and instructs teachers, before starting class, to present on the blackboard or on the screen the dream they saw the previous night; and at college entrance exams, essay topics concern dream phrases by writers who dreamed not to interpret the world, but to change it.
This is why Marx speaks of the surplus value that the boss steals from his worker’s dreams of becoming the boss, and the boss always fools him, just like in those dreams in which you’re always on the point of having it all but you never quite succeed, once and for all. This is why the political parties play with the dreams of their voters, i.e., how to get a tax-free car or how to make their shit travel through a dream pipe to the sea, rather than amass in the garden sewer. Thus, dreams become a vital substance, the main one that keeps you vigilant in this miserable existence, in which you can’t wait to run, to lose yourself in a dream film or a book of dreams or in love, where the dreams that lovers have are so often the opposite of the reality they are living; and they emerge from love rejuvenated because they were able to dream. They hate all those things that keep them grounded in life: their time cards, the rent, illness, nagging, and they live in dreams of traveling in dream vacations, in dreamy states of cohabitation, or they might go and unwind in a football stadium dream or in a dream church. However, next to the purely individual dreams we find their collective counterparts: the nonliberating dream of the great idea; the dream of a free, independent Greece; the dream of a happy youth and a dignified old age. The swallows bring the dream each spring, hacking at the air like tailors; the swallows’ tails look like miniature tuxedos and the flowers that people love transport them, with their smells, to other lands, other gardens of Eden, of dreams, where the ugliness of the wall does not exist, nor the finality of the tomb, nor the flat surface of an oblong table, because a simple vase with flowers placed upon it will transform it into an upside-down foot, and it becomes the sole of the foot of the sky. This is why, in the dreamlike state in which we live while awake, instead of the mushroom of a nuclear disaster, we offer our next nightmare a dream flower in the shape of a sunflower, which, even though it might die, will at least leave us its seeds to eat, and, since dreams are conductors of the whole, as in a hologram, we will be able, through its seeds, to keep bringing to mind over and over the flower in its entirety.
“Take my life,” said the defendant to the court, “but don’t take my dream. That you cannot do. Even if you wanted to. ”
And so, the frowning assessors thought about it over their law books, which were ossified dreams, white seashells of dreams that went away, carpets upon which dreams bled in losing their virginity, and concluded:
“If we can’t take his dream, what’s the good of taking his life?”
So they commuted the death sentence to life in prison. That way, the convict could dream inside his prison cell, undisturbed by the countless parasites of life.
We don’t want to speak of Freud. We are almost completely indifferent to his interpretation of dreams. As far as we’re concerned, Freud did nothing more than to lower their high frequency to a household level. The same way that Edison took sunlight and, with technical knowledge, courage, and intelligence, made it into a lightbulb. What we’re saying is different: from the time man started walking on two feet, he has been dreaming continuously. The position of a biped is one that keeps pulling him higher. And this dream, that it is himself in the dream, gives him the energy he needs in his state of vigilance, in order to continue on earth his dreamless and otherwise mortal existence.
When my dreamologist friends and I (our friendship was saturated with dreams like hydrophilous cotton) decided to publish a newspaper, the Almanac of Dreams, in large format like papers used to be, and not a tabloid with badly printed color photographs (because dreams are black and white, and, fortunately, the cameras have yet to be made that would color them), we were, naturally, confronted with the primordial problem of all newspapers, which is the financial one. We had no capital to speak of. But even if one of us had had any, none of us would have dared suggest he invest it in an enterprise as uncertain as our own.
There were four of us in all. Zissis, a former partisan who still lived with the dream of a Greece of popular rule; Thomas, who had realized his dream of becoming an industrialist three times and three times let it slip through his fingers; Zenon, who was a dream professional (he wrote in Dream Interpreter magazine); and me, Irineos, a writer who had spent his life recording other people’s dreams as if they were his own, or his own as if they were other peoples. The fact that we called ourselves dreamologists was anything but a joke.
Then one day, we found our Maecenas: Dimitris, an acquaintance of Zenon’s, who had worked abroad and returned to his country with the sole dream of investing his money in a publishing company. We were a match made in heaven. Just as in dreams sometimes, when we come across the most improbable situations and then wake up and say, “It was only a dream,” so were we living our dream. But this one was real. We had found our dream financier, who not only liked our idea that “dreams avenge themselves!” but also found it very marketable.
“The Almanac will be a hit,” he concluded, after hearing us out. “It’s something that’s been missing. Man can’t live by soccer alone. He needs dreams and videotapes. I have found the videotape market to be saturated. Fortunately, dreams are intangible— they cannot be imported, they are not material goods—and as such, they have been scorned by the unimaginative neo-Hellenes.”
Thus Dimitris was to provide the money and the machinery; we were to provide the grey matter. Our first step was to request that our newspaper be exempt from the paper tax.
“No doubt,” said the clerk in charge when we handed in our application to the Ministry of the Presidency (at 3 Zalocosta Street), “dreams are tax free. But I don’t know if the paper they are printed on can also be tax free. You should probably see the general manager.”
We made an appointment with the general manager (Zis-sis knew him from the Association of Resistance Fighters), who received us with joy and told us we were definitely entitled to tax-free paper since we were publishing a newspaper. He only asked, without seeming too concerned with the answer, what its political affiliation would be.
“Dreams have nothing to do with politics,” all four of us replied with one voice. Our motto, at the upper right-hand corner, would read, “Dreams of the world, unite.” And our countersign in the opposite corner would read, “We dream in Greek.” We hoped to avoid provoking any political division among our readers by eschewing mottos like “Our dreams have been vindicated” or “Our dreams are enduring,”* even though, as I suggested, “Our dreams have been educated” solved the problem, if only as a play on words.
“I see,” he said. “It’s really the dream of progress that you want to support. And you couldn’t have picked a better time, since the state is thinking of opening the first dreamfirmary, which would be integrated into the National Health System.”
He even promised us a small contribution out of the obscure resources of the Ministry. All newspapers were subsidized by the state. Why not ours?
Delighted, we ran and told Dimitris, our Maecenas, the good news. He was thrilled. And so, without wasting another moment, we got to work preparing the first issue. It was going to be four pages long, on glossy paper.
“Like the Lonely Hearts Classifieds paper,” Thomas remarked dreamily.
There are dreams of outer space, disinterested dreams; dreams that stay for years locked in a safe-deposit box in a bank; submissive dreams, and others that are like draft dodgers, that never return to the land of our sleep but grow old far away, until an amnesty allows them to be repatriated; then they suddenly find themselves overtaken by other dreams that have grown up meanwhile, because the nature of a dream is such that it does not accept the void: the dream vegetation does not save an empty seat for the dream that’s away; and there are other dreams that have been bought off, like someone paying in order to avoid his military service; bald dreams in a corrupted language; there are toxic dreams like the ones that grow inside reactors, and that, despite all protective measures, manage to expel a little of their poisonous steam and harm the people living nearby, because it is possible, and such thing happen in life, that one persons dream is another persons nightmare; there are gypsy dreams, that wander around, and dreams that are centuries old, like trees; others that last only one night, that are gone before the day breaks; and also those that come out at sunrise because they need the sunlight in order to exist; dreams of the open sea, sailboat dreams, indelible as the tattoos on a sailors skin, dreams on the waves, immured and not handmade; mosaic dreams, and dreams of Byzantine emperors; Protestant and Catholic dreams, dreams of Emperor Hirohito, fascist, gandiose dream that disappear one day, leaving their shells like fossils for the researchers of history, like a work of architecture that is empty on the inside, marking an era; pocket dreams, credit dreams—American Express, Diners Club, and Visa—dreams that can be cashed anywhere in the international market, and others, like the ruble, that are only accepted in their own country; dreams that the dreamers are eager to exchange at a rate of one to five with other dreams whose official prices keep them at a rate of one to one; there are also illegal dreams that change appearance in order to survive; scab dreams, and others that plan the big white strike called death and last as long as death does before transmuting into something else; cross-dressing dreams, that is to say transvestite dreams, amphibolous, amphigenous, dicotyledonous, frog dreams, amphibious dreams, useless like mosquitoes in the mire of sleep; dreams like seagulls that follow the fishing boats, eating whatever the fishermen discard from their nets; antiracist dreams of coal miners who dream of coming out into the light of day; computer science dreams, terminal and interminable dreams like soap operas; brochure dreams that wake you up from your lethargy; manifesto dreams; semiotic dreams that are signifiers without a signified; ostrich dreams, because they hide their heads deep in the sand, thinking you cant see them, but the dream hunters hit dozens of them, like thrushes, with their automatic rifles each September; dreams that run like rock partridges in deep ravines; sandy dreams into which your feet sink as you walk them, until a dream within the dream emerges, an oasis in the Sahara of sleep; helicopter dreams, remote control dreams, SS-20 and Hawk, intercontinental, low-flying dreams that cant be picked up by the radar of vigilance and appear suddenly before you, and make you wonder how you didn’t remember them upon waking; dreams like hermits and ascetics, Capuchins, Franciscans, Pre-Raphaelite dreams. Modiglianiesque dreams, dreams of Chagall, Marco Polo, and Genghis Khan; Mongolian, Iraqi and Iranian, ironic dreams; dreams of the pyramids, Mycenaean and Aztec dreams; and also dreams of rain, of hail; lottery dreams, gambling dreams, good luck or bad luck dreams, dreams of the number 13, astrophysic dreams, blue collar and intellectual dreams, organic or inorganic, that flourish like tropicalplants in our sleep; dreams of the lost homelands, Ionian, Pythagorean, geometrical, decimal, and pure wool, like hides that keep us warm; nylon, plastic, liquid gas and smog dreams, choking dreams that raise the air pollution indicator to dangerous levels; abyssal, medieval, paleolithic, nomadic, and Georgian; dreams like sheafs of wheat or like corn popped at the movie theater; dreams that burst like pomegranates and others that fall under the apple tree, dreams with apples and dreams without appeal; structuralist dreams, computer-era dreams, and barometric dreams that guide seafarers who are usually superstitious; barbiturate dreams, nepenthean, agapanthean dreams, dreams of love and loneliness, dreams...
All of these would have their place in our newspaper. All of these would be the material, the stuff, the stuff dreams are made of, Dantean dreams, of Purgatory and Paradise, even though Dante himself became a synonym for his Hell; dreams of Ovid and avid dreams; screws that wedge themselves into the unprotected skin of sleep and suck your blood like leeches (it’s not dreams that avenge themselves, but realities that appear like dreams and latch onto you indelibly, forever); I mean to say that there are no Dracula dreams that suck your blood, but there is a blood of dreams that nourishes them, made of the white and red blood corpuscles of Morpheus, nothing to do with the blood that circulates in our veins. The body supports our dreams, that’s true, but it has nothing to do with them (the same way bankers who support the enterprising dreams of artful merchants avoid paying taxes); there are paternalistic dreams and patronizing dreams, of the Holy Word and the Unholy Word, announcing better days to come; dreams according to the Julian calendar; monastic dreams and dreams of monasteries, Catholic and cathodic dreams, vine-arbor dreams over the ledge of sleep, offering their cool shade to the worker, the grape harvester, the woodcutter, the woodpecker; marble dreams that drip blood, bright red blood, the blood of statues; and dreams that saw away at your brain, like cerebral episodes; acupuncture dreams deodorizing the day’s sweat and anesthetizing, with chloroform; cicada dreams that gnaw at the light, cricket dreams; dreams that are sweet, neat, eat...
All of these would be welcome in our newspaper. They would appear in a special column devoted to the dreams of our readers (a column that truly—and here I will get a little ahead of myself in the telling of my story—grew rapidly and came to occupy almost half the newspaper, since—as soon became apparent—what people needed more than anything else was to communicate their dreams, which they had seen all alone and exclusively, not sharing them even with the person lying next to them in bed). And so, little by little, through our newspaper—whose sales, I can’t resist telling you, surpassed those of Avriani*—a new tendency developed, almost a trend, for people to talk among themselves of their dreams, to relate their dreams to one another and to urge one another to share their dreams: it became the “in” thing for people to talk of nothing else all day long but of what they had dreamt of the night before, and even if they hadn’t dreamt of anything, to make up the dreams they would like to have had. That way, all that had, up until then, constituted peoples daily bread (i.e., politics, soccer, crimes, and the ordinary life that develops around each one of us and feeds off of us like a parasite) were replaced by the important news we would bring to the surface: the dream that Reagan had, the dream that Gorbachev had, and Ching Yu Xe’s dream of modernization, since the Great Wall of Isolation has been abolished and the Chinese are now writing on the wall their most daring, even their most Confucian dreams; and they are now allowed to dream of the return of the great emperor, the same way we used to dream of the revival of the Petrified King, the last emperor of Byzantium. And so our readers got into the habit of putting their dreams in the foreground too.
The effect we were having was evident in the paper’s circulation, which was increasing in leaps and bounds each week. We inaugurated an artistic column, in which actors and directors, poets and writers, stage designers and singers, would share with the public, one at a time, the dreams that had most affected their lives. Soccer stars and movie stars and big names in politics also gave interviews about their dreams, thus revealing sides of their personalities about which the public had been unaware. Thus, we found out about Caramanlis’s dream of mountain climbing (he had wanted since childhood, it seems, to climb Mount Everest); the dream Papandreou had of becoming the conductor of a symphony orchestra; the dream of the general secretary of the Greek Communist Party to take sheep out to pasture and sit in the shade playing a shepherds pipe; Mitsotakis’s dream of being a croupier j|c at the casino; the dream of Anastopoulos* to be Giorgio Armani; Armanis dream of being a soccer player; and other dreams of pedestrian malls, of the Athens metro, dreams of suburbs, of ambulances, of a National Immortality Service . . . until finally, there appeared on TV a game show with dream crossword puzzles, where the contestants had to solve the clues with desires, unfulfilled wishes, inhibitions, that is to say with dreams and not with their knowledge; and all this, thanks to us, to our little newspaper.
Of course, the reader of this strange tale should not imagine that the transformation of the public was accomplished overnight. As with AIDS, it took time and hard work for the panic to spread, for the dream seed to germinate. The dream is also an epidemic but instead of killing it gives birth, instead of hurting it encourages, and it strengthens instead of weakening. Feeding the new fruit of forgetfulness took hard work, great pains, clever public relations, and the blood of many volunteers. At first, the dream lotus with which our readers went beyond themselves and revealed the other sides of their personalities, hitherto hidden away, would only emerge in secret sighs and private confidences, because, as the poet of the avenger dreams says, it takes a lot of work for the sun to turn and become the moon.
That was what we did, we five (four dreamologists and our Maecenas). We started off unsupported by any kind of substructure. Very soon, however, much sooner than even we ourselves expected, that which existing socialism hadn’t achieved in seven decades was achieved by its utopia, which became fashionable again because it expressed, finally, the deeper desire of people to be outis (no one) in ou topo (no place). Every place ties one to a tomb, whereas the death of the soul is a utopia: no one knows where the soul goes after death. Dreams don’t need land to bear fruit, or plots upon which to be built, or fires to thin out wooded areas; they need instead an inner flame. It was this flame that our fellow human beings, with our initiative, managed to develop. The notaries were the first to pay the price of this transformation, since dreams don’t need to register with the Public Records Office. They don’t need a birth certificate or, hence, a certificate of death.
Contracts were also superfluous. Since the egg that is a dream does not need a chicken to lay it, thus circumventing the age-old question of which one came first (matter or spirit, body, or soul), there was no chicken coop fenced in by logic. Dream railroad tracks bore trains of dreams, unloaded dream passengers; dreams were dropping anchor at seaports, taking off at airports; the farmers of Thessaly organized themselves into dream cooperatives and started managing their dreams themselves; Larissa became the dream of Larissa, and Salonika that of Byzantium; Athens again became the dream of Pericles, who descended from where his biological death had exiled him and was once more among us with Phidias. Then Pericles himself recognized the mistakes of his previous life and no longer demanded a tribute from the other cities of the Athenian league or robbed their treasuries to develop the Acropolis and build the Parthenon, or asked his fellow citizens to make sacrifices for the war; he was dreamy and peaceful, he now said that both men and women, not only illustrious men, can be fittingly buried in any land, because the earth contains the idea of destruction, whereas dreams are indestructible. Thus differences are solved in dream jousts, attacks are met with dream defenses. Two thousand one was proclaimed the first year of dreams, because at that exact time all dreams would come to fruition, would become actions, so that later, people would be able to accept successfully, with courage, having been prepared for it for a long time, their destruction; they would be convinced that they themselves were just a dream that was coming to its end. After all, it had lasted long enough—a few tens of millions of years—so there went their earthly existence, and that was the end of that.
However, things didn’t happen so quickly. Things never happen as quickly as the simplifying process of our memory would like to present. Of course, in the beginning, I was so involved in the daily occupation of publishing our newspaper, of which I was editor in chief (contradictory though it may seem, dreams do need editing, organizing, and, like a nursery, they need attention and vigilance: in order for it to blossom, a dream needs fertilizing, watering, pruning), that I didn’t have any time to keep notes on the side. But now that I recall the reactions of the press tycoons in this country, I don’t remember them having one good word to say about our paper.
A few days after the first issue came out (number one, of the first volume, of the first year), and after the unexpected welcome it received by people thirsting for something different (that first issue, as the reader may guess, has a special value, now that the State of Dreams has established itself and the Dream Police guard the borders against any enemy violation of our ethereal space), a few days later, there came to Dimitris’s printing office (located in Alimos across from the famous bakery, it was more than perfect, with the latest in technical equipment, built with the money Dimitris had made while working abroad, all of it foreign currency, the dream of the immigrant realized and our Maecenas found, given to us so our dreams too could be fulfilled) an inspector from the Ministry of Labor in order to check—or so he clamied—whether it was operating according to regulations. Mr. Inspector proceeded to observe that the cylindrical machine, a gigantic electronic monster on which we had printed our first issue, maintained a distance of, not two meters from the ceiling, as the law dictated, but only sixty centimeters. This constituted sufficient cause for the removal of the press’s operating license.
Dimitris was puzzled. Recendy back from Australia, he was ignorant of Greek bureaucracy and unaware of Mama Greece’s longing to draw to the very last drop the blood of any immigrant who made the faux pas of being repatriated and bringing back, like seamen do, all his foreign currency. He didn’t know that this Greek state of ours, during these two hundred years since its birth, had learned to live not by blood transfusions but by drinking blood like Dracula, so he didn’t pay much attention. But we knew and right away were suspicious. How much had the press bosses paid Mr. Inspector to show up out of the blue? The printing office had been operating smoothly for the past year. Why was there a problem now and not before?
Therefore, it was the very success of our newspaper—the first issue never even made it to the kiosks, but disappeared, as happens in dreams, right from the distribution vans—that had worried the smooth operators of the press business (who were used to making and breaking governments) enough to send their henchman just in case, as an initial scare tactic.
“And what law is this?” asked Dimitris.
“A law of 1968,” the inspector replied, and pulled out an official document.
“But at that time, these cylindrical machines didn’t exist,” said our friend, relieved. “This law refers to Linotypes, which indeed, for safety reasons, had to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling. Electronic machines are a different matter. And they weren’t put on the market until 1978.”
“Unfortunately, the law is always the law,” said the inspector, bowing his head.
“But you’re going to ruin us!” cried Dimitris. “We can’t raise the ceiling, nor can we lower the machine.”
“Good heavens, we don’t want to ruin anyone,” said the inspector. “All we are doing is enforcing the law. If only the law would change, then there would be no problem. But until, then, I would advise you to start looking for another place. And do it quickly.”
Of course, I think to myself now, if only they had been able to imagine the success of our Almanac, which became a daily paper within a few months, the press tycoons would have acted differently. That same day they would have kicked us out onto the street, thus drowning the yolk in its own shell. Dimitris would have sold everything and gone back to Australia. (It’s not uncommon for an immigrant to be forced to take that road again, because of the deep hatred every wretch who stayed home shows toward the successful repatriated immigrant.)
And who knows what the rest of us would be doing now? However, progress is accomplished in life thanks to the establishment’s predictable inability to deal with the threat of novelty. After all, isn’t that the way it happened in czarist Russia with the revolution? If they had known of the October Revolution, wouldn’t they have, before that in 1905, exterminated the revolutionaries down to the last one, the same way that the Americans, seventy years later, did with the leaders of the Black Panthers, leaving only one of them alive, a zoo specimen?
However, I’ll say it again: fortunately, the old order can rarely see the dangers in something new, and that is why they let innovations take root. We ourselves were almost uprooted, but by then, dreams were too advanced in people’s psyches, and whoever tried to attack us fell on his face. Meanwhile, people had started sprouting wings.
Even so, that first, unimportant litde side effect we bypassed—I will tell you how—came very close to shaking us up.
Mr. Inspector showed no sign of leaving. It was as if he were waiting for something. Dimitris understood straight away.
“As you can see,” he said, “we are publishing the Almanac not to make money, but because it’s something we love to do. We are selling dreams. Not feta cheese. And not parliamentary bills. Why don’t you do us the favor, if you believe our effort is worth it, of letting us get on our feet first, and then we’ll move to another building. I promise.”
The way he spoke seemed to be doing the trick. Because it was the right way. If Dimitris had mentioned something about the laws of the dictatorship still being in force, his argument would have had the opposite result: the inspector was a career civil servant who had loyally served all governments. So as far as he was concerned, the determining factor of a good or a bad law was not the political background of the government that had decreed it. Rather, all laws were either right or wrong, in relation to the laws themselves. Thus, in our case, the distance of two meters could only be contested because our machine was new. The law had been intended to regulate Linotypes; he could not contest the law by the political criterion that it had been decreed under a dictatorship. If Dimitris had used the latter argument the inspector, a man of the right, could say to himself: “What’s the difference between a socialist government and a military dictatorship?” However, even though Dimitris had played it exactly correctly, the inspector was not convinced.
Bribing him didn’t work either. When Dimitris hinted, very smoothly, about a gift, perhaps a kangaroo from Australia, the inspector snapped that he was no animal lover. He didn’t have cats and he didn’t have dogs. He wasn’t about to take in a kangaroo.
The boomerang effect is well known, especially to someone who has lived in Australia. So when Dimitris began to fear that all these things—bribes, politics—could end up turning against him, he chose to tell the truth about the dream we four had of publishing a newspaper of dreams, and about Dimitris’s offer, which provided us the means to do it for free. And now along comes the state and says, what? That the bed on which the dreamers lay had to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling in order for them to be allowed to dream? With this tack, he touched the Achilles’ heel of every man, harsh bureaucrat though he may seem: that is, the need to express the hidden part of ones’ self, the part that dreams, while the other part acts.
That was how the inspector appeared to me: a certain gentleness came over his face, something seemed to yield. As was proven later on, civil servants, and especially the older ones, are our most loyal subscribers, since they all spend their lives sitting at their desks, dreaming. He said, with the difficulty of a man used to enforcing the letter of the law, and not its spirit:
“All right then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re okay. But you’ll have to take care of this matter eventually.”
We don’t know, from that point on, what that man went through. When after a couple of years I tried to find him at his office, I learned that he had taken a leave of absence. It seems that, during those two years, when we kept stealing readers from other newspapers, the big bosses had taken care of him.
One evening, a month after that incident, the police showed up. The reason: a tenant on the third floor had complained that he couldn’t get to sleep because of the noise of the machine at two in the morning.
It was true that we printed on Friday evenings. Dimitris had his machines booked up all week long with jobs that brought in some money, and then he would turn them over to us at five P.M. on Fridays for as long as it took.
But that night, we didn’t finish at eleven o’clock like we usually did. It was our fifth issue, and we had made some last-minute changes in the layout. We kept going until two A.M., and thus disturbed the tenant on the third floor. The printing office was on the ground floor of a small apartment building. The floor right above it was used as a storeroom, and then there were three floors of apartments. Never before had anyone complained about the noise. The soundproofing was perfect and the electronic equipment silent. It was only when we printed posters on the two-color Roland that one heard the traditional racket of the printing press. In many respects, the operators of the cylindrical machine looked more like nurses than printers—dressed in white overalls, holding remote control boxes, they made the enormous machine move, with its flashing lights, its dials, and little screens—it looked more like a monster from the Apocalypse than a printing press. But now we had to face the charge of disturbing the peace.
This tenant of the third floor, as he confessed to us later, had been forced to call the police. He didn’t say who had forced him, but we knew. When we told him what we were trying to do, he turned out to be on our side. He withdrew the complaint. He too found the kind of life that was imposed upon him to be unbearable. He too believed in dreams as his only escape from the dead end they had built for us.
All this is coming back to me, now that people are preparing to celebrate the first Dream May Day. And I recall it all, the same way veteran fighters of a just cause recall the first years, when they were still searching blindly for a way to overthrow the establishment. Because with dreams, we undermined a sham that was suffocating people. How we succeeded in achieving victory, I will tell you immediately: we worked like termites. We ate at the furniture from the inside. We filled it with holes. And when the time came, the furniture collapsed on its own. No violence was needed.
Of course, things had come to an impasse everywhere. This phenomenon of asphyxiation, of crisis, did not concern Greece alone. Man needs faith to support him. A vision. It used to be religion. Then socialism. And when that too retreated from the visions it had once proclaimed, people no longer had anything to believe in, and thus had no reason to suffer. For better days? Days would never be better; they couldn’t be. People knew that. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, told them that their lives would only get worse. It was inevitable.
After an ideology goes bankrupt, there is always a void before something else comes along to take its place. It was that void that we took advantage of. It was that void that our newspaper aspired to fill.
From the start, we gave a very broad meaning to the word dream. We didn’t refer solely to what people see when they are asleep. Rather, we implied that everything desirable, visionary, spiritual could, with a restructuring of the means of production, become tangible. Just as the accumulation of capital creates capitalism, we proclaimed, so the accumulation of inhibitions creates a new force that is surpassed only by the capacity of man to want something he doesn’t have and acquire it. For us, a dream was every possible and impossible human desire. All was fair, since everything belonged to the realm of the dream.
Every organization needs support, so we established a Dream Bank, where our customers deposited not their money but their dreams. The interest rate was high, and the initial capital could not be touched. Soon, all mortals came running to us to deposit their dreams. Next came donations, and the first trust funds. Our profits from the newspaper formed the consolidated capital of the Dream Bank, which soon issued shares. Thus, like the diversion of the river Achelous, the Aegean bridge that connected all the islands by road, and like the satellite that was sent into space and, like an umbrella, covered the entire ancient Greek empire with television programs in our language, the first publicly financed dreamworks were built. All these works attracted more deposits and our dream credit grew in the market.
Dreams, we kept saying, constitute our physical being. Conversely, metaphysics is the life we live outside dreams, because it is beyond reality. Dreams crush death underfoot, because there is no death for a dream: one dreamer continues the other’s dream, which is made the same way as a cloud: the earth emits it in the form of a vapor, the sky compounds if into a nebula, then it falls back and waters the earth, only to be reabsorbed by the attractive power of the sun. The dream and the cloud, always somewhat synonymous in the souls of the people, were thus explained scientifically, along with the deeper dream meaning of space. And we gave the dream its proper place: the dream was man’s true life, and his work was simply his time to rest after dreaming.
There are dreams that are difficult to find, and others that are being sought by the International Red Cross; Cambodian dreams of the Khmer Rouge that used to be those of Sihanouk; jungle dreams and swamp dreams, firepro of dreams and firearm dreams; dreams of Saint Barbara and of All Saints, Name Day dreams, and nameless dreams; there are dreams covered in sweat and dreams that are dehydrated, salt pan dreams where the salt collects in crystals, sleet dreams and mortgage dreams; crucifix, half-moon, Star of David dreams, infrastructure dreams, sewage system dreams and campaign promise dreams, builders of bridges of a state of vigilance; feudal dreams and dreams for themselves; magnetic, miserly, playing card dreams and dreams that trap you; evergreen and withered dreams, edible, pdtable like table water dreams; dreams that travel in bottles like messages from shipwrecks and those orchidaceous ones that writhe like snakes; ivy dreams that suffocate sleeping trees by growing furiously around their trunks; and dreams of contact, like the lenses that color the eyes; hormonal dreams that change the sex of the dreamer and other harmonious ones that keep pace with his life, because when life becomes a dream then the dream acquires flesh and bones. Dream skeletons, like prehistoric mammoths, are still studied by dreamologists, because the origin of dreams is searching for its own Darwin, the economy of dreams for its Marx. The dictatorship of the dream proletariat wants its Lenin and its Trotsky, but has no need of a Stalin in order to survive. All dreams have a place on earth, since the earth is a huge brain that studies the universe. No dream is excluded, no dream is oppressed by another. Dream minimalism, which was espoused by some, mostly harmed people, because the saying “small is beautiful” doesn’t always apply to our dreams. There are porcelain dreams as well as steel dreams, dreams of fiberglass and plasterboard. All dreams are legitimate because they don’t lay claim upon anything or anyone. All they want is to exist. Therefore, all dreams are existential. However, there are also dreams that are phenomenological and deterministic.
Dreams are us, you and I, reader, and I wouldn’t go to the trouble of telling you this story if I didn’t want to tell you, to make you understand that a dream subscriber who receives his dream newspaper every day can better support himself on his—and our—strong conviction that we are worthy of a better fate, in this “pocket of the Balkans,” on this continent, on this earth, on this planet. And it is time for dreams to avenge us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our newspaper started off like one of those small grass-roots movements that go unnoticed in the beginning but get stronger and stronger (like the Greens, whom nobody considered a threat and so they were left alone), little by little, with time, precisely because they represent a deeper human desire: to grow by themselves, without publicity’s artificial fertilization; to take root and acquire depth. All that this process requites in the beginning is a team to join hands and cooperate, while the initiates, few but fanatical, go out among the people, until, once the appropriate conditions have been established, the explosion takes place. In this way, with our little newspaper, we proceeded to win over readers and followers, day by day, almost without realizing it.
We had rented a small office at the foot of Strefi Hill. People would come by every day, because, they said, they found in our newspaper an answer to their longtime problems and thus a sense of hope. It seems our slogan, “Keep the dream alive, don’t let it die,” made some sense. Then, as election time approached, the big parties wanted us to join them. They each sent a representative to offer us financial help in return for our support. But we refused every offer, because we were after something bigger: the limitless right, in the words of the poet, to dream. “What should interest you above all,” wrote the poet Napoleon Lap-athiotis, “is the elegant use of your life and the limitless right to dream.” And then he killed himself. We left out the first half of this maxim, which did not concern us and implied a certain dilettantism, and adopted fully the second half, the limitless right to dream, which hadn’t been included in any party’s campaign promises.
And while the expression “I belong to the branch” took on a disparaging connotation during the first period of our socialist government, since it meant, “I’m a card-carrying member of the party in power,” we rebaptized the word branch, returning it to its original meaning by inaugurating a column in our paper called “Branch Dreams.” In this column, society was viewed as a tree with many branches, and every professional branch was given the podium. We would publish the dreams of taxi drivers, builders, tailors, umbrella makers, pastry makers, upholsterers, book binders, railroad workers, carpenters, sales clerks, printers, tobacco workers. They all had a place: the flour mills, the carpentry shops, the potteries, the olive presses, the soap works, the woolen mills, the textile works, the food factories, the shipyards, the mines. The white collars of data processors and computer scientists, video store clerks and CEOs went alongside booksellers, funeral directors, restaurateurs and waiters, florists, bakers, butchers, travel agents, jewelers, record store clerks, night club bouncers, shipping clerks, cobblers, and milliners. Representatives of all these branches of production began to pay us visits.
Around this time, we founded the first mutual aid fund, based on the cooperative model, for those who believed that dreams need support. The wheels of this mutual aid turned mainly on family ties, neighborhood and village ties; it was the fund used in the case of accident or illness. A dream is always the best remedy. It’s homeopathic.
There are hypersensitive dreams that can dissolve at the slightest provocation, and others sprinkled with hoarfrost that will cover you like flour or cotton falling from the great pines; dreams without identity cards whose residency permit is renewed each month by the prefecture; invertebrate dreams, and dreams in small episodes, like the vertebrated films of the silent cinema; and dreams in costume where everyone runs instead of walking. Your sleep has flood-proof banks to protect you when your dream rivers overflow and wet the sheets. Microscopic dreams and dreams on giant posters, raucous dreams that sound as if they’re coming over a loudspeaker and you’re a small unit lost in the crowd; dreams of indigestion, gossamer dreams that wrap you in magic veils; submarine dreams, in which you wear a mask and are enchanted by the world of the deep, breathing with difficulty, until suddenly your air supply is cut off and you suffocate. You want to come to the surface but your “friends”are waiting for you there with a gun to send you back to the bottom again, food for the sharks. Dreams of dolphins, in which you, another Arion, sing as you ride on their backs, while they tear through the nets, which the fishermen, in straw hats, have to mend on the piers. Silver-plated dreams and dreams of heavy lead, dreams of silver, dreams of one kilo of gold that equals 999.9 grams; tidal dreams, dreams smudged with gunpowder, wearing a muzzle, like dogs that bite; philharmonic, philosophic, philanthropic dreams of gladness and consolation; dreams about Idi Amin conversing with the crocodiles. South African dreams of blacks struggling for their freedom; dreams in which the self becomes nobody and at the mouth of the cave you laugh at the Cyclops Polyphemus; coastal dreams, jet propelled, anarchist, and anachronistic; mastodon, chandelier dreams, transcribed from tape, literally about your fate and your generation; reptile dreams, in other tongues, of other races; waterproof dreams, plagal mode dreams; contraceptive dreams, cocaine dreams; lobed, cut in half, fragmented, lavish, porous dreams; purulent dreams that discharge their liquid as soon as you wake up, and other heraldic dreams. There are salamified dreams, eggplant and potato, tomato dreams, cucumber dreams (it’s the cries of the wandering greengrocer outside your window that make you dream); stud dreams, dreams that contain ammonia, dreams that put you in front of the firing squad and others that discharge you, but which, like the army, never really demobilize you; prison dreams, entombed dreams, propaganda dreams and utility dreams that you pay for once a month; expense dreams, all numbered, which the God/taxman wants validated. There are untranslated dreams, whose riddles remain enigmatic even to the best dream interpreters; consumer dreams whose wrappers you throw in the trash next morning, and others that stay with you, like the pear inside the bottle of kirsch or the branches covered in crystallized sugar, that make you wonder how they got in there. Autumn dreams, with leaves fallen from the large trees by the river; summer dreams on the rocks by the beach with the solitary swimmers; floating dreams, boat-people dreams, winter dreams by the fireplace, the snow outside six feet deep, blocking your windows. There are also dreams confined in cages and living in a stupor, like circus lions, and domesticated dreams—dreams of chickens, rabbits, ducks—the dream of the wild goose that you know from the fairy tale, and swan dreams, on which you cross the river Acheron with Hades as your boatman and get stamped like a cow approved by the county vet for slaughter; dreams of slaughterhouses where the blood of thousands of pigs flows into the same ditch; dreams of restaurants, their showcases decorated with wild boar and pheasant; stuffed dreams that are preserved as long as the ancient aqueducts in fields now irrigated mechanically, with water that spurts up in the shape of palm trees to the rhythm of a pacemaker; amphitheatrical dreams, in large halls where for centuries the same anatomy lesson has been conducted with interchanging corpses: in your sleep you become both corpse and anatomist. There are fordable dreams and unexplained ones like the galaxies, the ones they call universal and those that only affect themselves; dyslexic dreams, Flemish dreams, dreams with no batteries, malformed, hunchback, lame, on crutches, leaders of choruses, choirs with voice-overs because they’re only lip-syncing; compassionate dreams, with stomach ulcers; dreams that have settled on the plains of your sleep like the foreign military bases you’re not allowed near; exit dreams in which you walk upon your own Dead Sea; dreams as sweet as ice cream that melts in the cone, and mulberry dreams, both black and white, that fall on the ground because nobody wants them: they stain your hands, like walnut dreams with their fresh kernels, milky and not yet congealed. You break them and paint your fingers, while walnut preserves in your grandmother’s ancient jars hang from the eyelashes of your sleep like laundry hung out to dry with clothespins that remind you of swallow’s tails: panties that hide the dreams of adolescent girls; blue jeans dreamed of by young men from Eastern European countries; skirts dreamed of by the evzones of the presidential guard. Fugitive dreams, marble-worker dreams, trout dreams, long-lasting dreams, dreams that aren’t satisfied with just being dreams but aspire to become action, work; dreams of the prefecture, of the settlement, of the village, of the province . . .
“You, my friend, are living in a dream world.” How these words came to mean something unfeasible, something unattainable, was the first thing we tried to explain to our readers. We wanted to transform that phrase, to change its negative sense to a positive one. So we changed it to the imperative: “You, my friend: live in a dream world!”
We did the same with the expression that implies that someone has given false information or has altered the truth: “You must be dreaming.” To our readers it came to mean, “You must be telling the truth.” As for “The fool had a dream and saw his destiny,” we changed that to, “The wise man had a dream and saw his destiny,” although that came only after we had convinced our readers that the only practical people in life are dreamers. The so-called technocrats who live in the abstract world of numbers and statistics, opinion polls and quotas, we told our readers, are actually the lotus-eaters, the fantasists, the mythmakers.
These transformations of a language that concentrated the habits of centuries, naturally, could not be achieved overnight. As with every true change, they had to first be acquired by the public through experience. And experience proved that real poverty was the absence of dreams. Every poor person was potentially rich by virtue of his dreams, whereas a rich mail without dreams was forever indigent.
It wasn’t easy; I’ll say it again. First, the ground had to be removed from under the feet of the privileged in order to weaken their dominance, in order for a fortune not to be able to guarantee some power or other.
In the beginning, the socialist government (with its programs for social tourism, senior citizen shelters, group sports activities for men and women, European youth meetings, and the new employment organization) was eager to accept our propositions. For a while it supported such initiatives, but soon, without a dream, without a vision, it backed down. That was when our big chance came along.
Yes, the circumstances were in our favor. When the first general strikes began, our newspaper showed an unexpected increase in sales. It was as if the newly unemployed had more time to devote to their dreams. Because dreams need time and space in which to develop. They need air. A general strike makes them multiply at an extravagant rate. It allows them to take their rightful place in this life, which is otherwise so prosaic and wretched, so full of minor worries.
What was it people wanted, after all? No more repression of their dreams; no more dream cutbacks. And they hoped to use the strike as a lever to raise off them whatever weighed them down. When they realized that the best strike was not to be absent from work, but to be there and to dream wide awake, then they achieved that undermining of the system that we had envisioned from the beginning. Power in unity. Yes, comrades. The people united shall never be defeated. The people are dreaming; the government is steaming. A people that dreams doesn’t negotiate its acquired rights, especially its “limitless right to dream.”
During this general strike, a closing of the ranks of dreams was observed. The only scab during the strike of dreaming can be the alarm clock. A strike is expressed by workers not coming to work; dreaming takes place at the workplace but in another sphere. Because of this, it cannot be sabotaged or persecuted. There can be no absentee list of dream strikers.
So when the agro-citizens of the capital started to group dream, everything came to a standstill. In an attempt to investigate the phenomenon, journalists started asking passersby not why they were on strike, but why they were dreaming. And the answers were strange.
“I dream,” said one housewife, “because that is the way I was brought up.”
“I dream,” answered an office clerk, “because the time has come to abolish the private sector of work, and for us all to become employees of socialized dreaming.”
“Me, dream?” asked a college student. “You’re dreaming the question. I have both feet on the ground. You’re the one with your head in the clouds.”
“To dream,” said a pensioner, “is the best antidote to the poison that you, the press, feed us every day.”
“Dreaming is the only thing that helps me to live,” said a taxi driver. “Dreaming of going back to my village.”
“I dream, therefore I am.”
Finally, a cleaning woman at the Ministry of Labor replied that unless she dreamed, she couldn’t mop the staircases and clean out the minister’s private toilet.
At long last, as the reader will appreciate, our newspaper had arrived at its golden moment. It kept climbing higher every day. Like some birds that unfold their wings until they hide the sun, so that the rays of the sun must filter through them, revealing their insides. From the study of these we forecast the future: the entrails of the birds boded well for us. Surely we were going to do better as a country, as a people, as a nation, as a planet, starting at the moment when dreams became action. “Do what you dream, so you don’t dream what you do” was our slogan. In short, the time of the great dreamification had arrived.
For there are indisputable dreams, incestual dreams, dreams in which you are sleeping with your mother or your father and you wake up, just when you’re starting to feel good, drowning in guilt; and dreams that hatch other dreams (killing a dream before it gives birth to another one is a sin); dreams bloody with the wounds that life inflicts on you; snotty dreams that run like a nose during a head cold, teary dreams that soak your pillow; upon waking you don’t remember crying in your sleep. Vineyard dreams with crooked vines, crippled and yet with such sweet grapes; parade dreams with ten brass bands playing; ruminant dreams that chew themselves over and over; dreams with triremes, without a hearth; river dreams and others that lead you to faraway lands, in which you’re always carrying the same tortoise shell; like the city, you drag it with you wherever you go, Cavafian, Solomian, Calvian dreams that surprise you with their own language; Cretan dreams, tavern dreams, dreams of large soccer stadiums in which thousands of people spell out your name on the field; always moving, fluorescent, gaseous, self-contained, self-reliant, self-propelled dreams in which you can’t run away from your pursuers: they catch up with you, they arrest you, and you wake up caught inside the net of your love, with the comforting armpit at your side, the few hairs of her tenderness biting you with their toothless mouths. Futile dreams, superficial dreams with a few Calamata olives as garnish; ferry dreams that take you across without a ferryboat, dreams of Nafpaktos, of Rio Antiorio, dreams and antidreams, dreams of the Patras carnival, dreams of skeleton rocks, of Good Friday, with lots of flowers, funereal, fasting; resurrecting, triumphant dreams of life winning over death; dreams on a par with European ones, polydreams of furniture; polyphonic, polymorphous, polyhedral, polyanthic, palimpsestic, and palinodic, that recur like a curse: you ate killed by a stray bullet at the age of thirty-three like Christ and you keep seeing the same dream even if you’re in your fifties—oh, what harm Christianity has caused us by asking us to dream of the life to come and just let this one go by. Pastoral dreams, Visigoth, Hun, Ostrogoth dreams, chimney dreams that smoke in your sleep and stain the satin of the sky;Mono-physitic, of Cerulaire, Belisaire and Narses. When a star falls, a dream is bom in its place, a sea star that stalks like a crab with cloud claws. Septic, separate, sepia dreams, like old photographs from before the great fire, with Armenians, Turks, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, one single Greece, with all the fish; dreams of eunuchs, of the wood of the Holy Cross, of the blood, of the crown of thorns, of the lance, of the unsewn cloak; nail dreams.
We kept gaining ground, or rather sky, since that was what counted for us. “At every step, they gained six feet of sky to give away.” That verse was our only strength: we didn’t keep any revenues gained, but returned them to our readers and followers to make them richer. We seemed to grow taller overnight, like adolescents: we had to constantly buy new clothes. Our newspaper was growing in dream pages. Dream upon dream, brick upon brick, we were building our pyramid.
The “Architecture of Dreams” column was soon established, as was the “Cooking of Dreams.” “A Dream in Trousers” became our heading for poetry. Our “Dream Culturing” column gave advice to farmers. Under “Stock Market News,” we inaugurated the exchange rate between Greek dreams and foreign dreams. And since we were the most ancient country in the production of dreams (hadn’t the first dream democracy blossomed in Greece?), we decided to separate the notion of the idol from that of its object. There are many idols of dreams, and they threaten to become celebrities, like pop singers. However, we insisted, each individual should be a creator of dreams; there was no point in his transferring his ability to dream to others, to dream through them. We fought the tendency to reduce dreams to mass symbols or to idols (people who would express collective dreams). In other words, we opposed the idolization of our dream lives, insisting that we would achieve our aim only when each individual, separately and by himself or herself, expressed that self absolutely. A collective dream would be one that gathered more than 10 percent of the total votes of the dream deputies . . .
However, our newspaper could no longer adequately cover the whole of that area. Neither could the Mutual Aid Fund, nor the Dream Savings Bank where people deposited their dreams. The Living Crossword Puzzle of Dreams on TV and other programs devoted to us had opened up the market considerably. Dimitris, our Maecenas, never said no when it came to business. So we opened agencies and co-ops, where the indispensable condition for the acceptance of a product was that it contained dream plasma in its composites.
This plasma was extracted from a flower called dreaman-thus, commonly known as the dream flower, which flourishes on the moon and in the lunar regions of our planet: the deserts. In our country, one can find dreamanthus in abundance in the Mani and certain areas of Kilkis, on plantations that the large supermarket trusts tried to have declared forbidden, as if they were plantations of hashish, but the Supreme Court beat them to it and declared the plantations protected, since the flowers did not contain any toxic substance and did not cause addiction. On the contrary, read the Court’s decision, they contain the essence of life, which consists of such stuff as dreams are made of: the life-giving force of the sun.
Our coffee and tea were made of dream plasma, our oil made with dream lipids, our legumes and other vegetables grown with fertilizers of dream plasma, and our fish came from the dream Sea of Messolongi, where the plankton in the water was fortified with dream-flower plasma. Our trout, our snails, our marsh frogs, were all snapped up. People preferred our products, partly because in them they found what was lacking in terrestrial foods grown with chemical fertilizers, but especially because they could pay for them in dream drachmas, that is to say coupons that they would cut out of our newspaper and that covered the cost of production. So when the third devaluation of the drachma took place, and all goods went up in price yet again, our prices remained firm, because the ratio of the dream drachma to the dream dollar remained the same.
Our business was a resounding success. Even though I am a writer, I can’t think of a better phrase to describe it. We hardly understood how we had opened such a chain of agencies, in Athens and Salonika to start with, and then all over Greece. We were competing with video stores. But as we kept growing, the business got more difficult to handle. The four of us had begun to tire. Young people had now taken over the gigantic enterprise, which made Dimitris rub his hands with glee and regard the big supermarket trusts as if they were insects.
The other newspapers kept printing embittered comments, because of the money they got from advertising the trusts, even though the journalists, as individuals, were on our side. The truth is that not one of us became rich. We didn’t buy luxury cars or build villas in Ekáli. So as far as “making it big” went, there was no question of that. On the contrary, we were always quick to denounce through our paper and our weekly TV program any attempt at commercialization, starting with the key rings and T-shirts printed with the slogan, “I dream, therefore I am,” and ending with the phoney stores that tried to imitate us by selling products made of dream sperm—they changed the word plasma to sperm so we couldn’t sue them.
The public was on our side, because we were protecting its dreams. Whenever skits in theatrical revues tried to parody us, they were booed by the public. Whatever dream plays were dug up from the archives never made it on stage. People knew that our movement expressed serious ideas, and that these dream plays were diseased dream fantasies of the past. We raised the right to dream onto the pedestal of real life. We were terrestrial, and that is why we dreamed. We were not extraterrestrials, propagandists of a new technology or some multinational conglomerate of supermen. Our trust, if one could call it that, had to do with individualization, the way Alvin Toffler had predicted in his early books, and not at all with the turning of people into sheep, as the multinationals of the third wave would have liked. We accepted technology to the extent that it increased the potential of the dream. We did not fight technology, but neither did we contribute, in any way, to its development.
And the more the politicians went downhill with their antiquated programs, the more our movement grew among the people. Because existing political structures are like a radio station whose signal you cannot receive because, while you move along in your car, it remains immobile.
Then one day, the prime minister asked to see us. He sent one of his personal secretaries in person to invite us. We accepted most eagerly what was for us a great honor, especially since we supported his efforts.
The meeting was set for Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock. We had decided that only Dimitris and I would go. The others didn’t want to go: if there were a lot of us, we would look like a union. At the entrance of the old parliament building, our names, written in the appointment book, awaited us. They kept our identity cards, and a guard led us to the office of the secretary who had invited us. He offered us coffee:
“Not your kind,” he said, smiling, “ours.”
“There is no yours or ours,” Dimitris replied; “we are all one people.”
We watched various people come through, asking for favors. It gave us an idea of how tiring the job of a personal secretary can be: answering phones, dealing with persistent requests of citizens wanting to see the prime minister in person, with powerful people trying to intervene in the prime minister’s work, and others shirking their duties.
The prime minister apologized when he opened his door to let us in. The delay was not his fault, but the fault of the United States ambassador who had stayed longer than the time provided. The date was approaching for the military bases to be disassembled, so the prime minister must have had all kinds of worries on his mind, worries of a quantum nature: the foreign military bases had to go and stay at the same time.
He explained various problems to us, confidentially. Times were very hard, as always in this country, which we knew as well as he did. Then, taking a paternal interest, he asked us about our movement: where did we feel its success came from? To what did we attribute this success, and did it contain elements that he, as a governor, could promote?
“Unfortunately,” I replied, “dreaming could never become an affair of the state.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said, “but I would like to know whether you have any concrete demands with which we, as a socialist movement, if not as a state, could help.”
“Unfortunately,” I repeated, “we grow in power as you lose yours. It’s simple: not having any place else to go after abandoning you, people come to us, where they are given nothing more than the right to dream, which is the right to hope for better days.”
I used his campaign slogan on purpose, as if to tell him that people felt their expectations had been lamentably betrayed, and that the responsibility for this failure lay, if not with him, then with his colleagues.
“They’ve declared war on us on all fronts,” he said.
I responded that for me politics was like human relationships: unless you offer the other person a vision, a horizon, a prospect, it won’t work. Otherwise, however large a gift you may give a worker, he will not respond. He will accept your gift only as a tiny bright spot in the general darkness. But if you offer him a prospect, then even a slap will seem like a caress. In this case, heavy taxation weighs on him less than a tax exemption with no horizon. That’s what had happened to the movement during its second four years in power. It wasn’t working, because it had no dream, no vision, no prospect. The sacks of Aeolus had deflated. Of course, I was quick to admit, as I saw his face grow dark, a lot had been achieved. Undeniably. Things that no one had even dreamt of. And yet—and I explained to him that I was speaking from my experience as a printer—the most beautiful page can seem stifling without a margin. Dreaming makes life wider, the same way a frame gives another dimension to a painting. It is the border, the shade. The depth of the world.
He listened to me thoughtfully. He was the modernizer, the renovator, the restorer, the reformer. I told him so. And immediately I added that we were not competitors in any way. We would like him to view us as complementary. My partners and I worked a system of buying and selling that didn’t hurt the economy. However, like the parallel economy that thrived in our country, our system was beyond state control. As an economist (and once quite a famous one), he could surely understand that if our dream drachma was unshakeable, it was because it had a celestial clause.
There are transferable dreams, washable and exchangeable, like in primitive societies where commerce was a bartering system; floral dreams like Kyra Katina’s dress; Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, 1000 cc dreams that explode in the corridors of your sleep; flagship dreams, fire ship dreams, and others that last for years that seem as unending as the dictatorships of Franco or Salazar: suddenly you wake up in the midst of a revolution with carnations or a regime with democratic processes but under which people are only interested in porno dreams that escape from the security of dreams. Clandestine dreams in which you have to show your counterfeit passport to pass through the security gate and you’re afraid they might discover you; dreams that have failed their exams; experimental dreams, in the test tubes of your memory; fickle dreams, tousle headed, grumpy or stormy; kidney dreams, transplant dreams, with cellulite; reprehensible dreams, unvoted-on dreams, parliamentary, figurative dreams, and dreams that drop like unpicked fig and explode like hand genades on the sheet iron, muffled; dreams of your brain damage, brackish dreams that border on the ravines of the sea, dreams that bum like dry branches, and others that won’t light no matter how much pure alcohol you soak them in, until the room fills with smoke and you wake up choking. “I don’t dream” means “I don’t live”: “I dream” means “I exist”; not I, but the legendary bunch of so many keys to doors you never opened, houses you never lived in, loves that you never took even though, at one time, they offered themselves to you in profusion. Dreams with freckles, flooded, with zebra stripes on their bodies, lashed by the sun; and dreams, caryatid, dreams of kouroi sculpted in marble, supine; dreams where you experience the anxiety of the goalkeeper before the penalty kick, strictly confidential, bottled in fruit juices, without preservatives. (“I drink fruit juices and dream of fruit.”) Newspaper-eating dreams, engraved in stones; constrictor dreams; fuchsia, psychedelic dreams, of Moluccans, flying; Siamese twins who marry themselves; critical dreams, dreams that ratify bills from the presidency of the republic; beautiful-ugly dreams, chained bears dragged along by gypsies, delphic; dreams from which you finally wake up richer, because they have charged your batteries with the energy of the life-giving sun.
I don’t know what the prime minister did afterward, because meanwhile I died and became a dream of myself. I died on the exact date I was born; November 18, Scorpio. It was the same day that the big guys weren’t able to come to an agreement in Geneva. So nuclear war was just a matter of time. What I mean to say is, I dreamed I died, since it was the date of my birth. Since birth is the death of a dream, death is an opportunity to be reborn. So at last I found myself living in my dream, from where I am writing to you, happy, because truly, when life becomes a dream, then the dream also can become life.
Postscriptum dreams and warning dreams exist; they blossom on the steep slopes of Mount Olympus; mountain climbers, tightrope walkers try to reach them without always succeeding, and they wake up soaked in sweat, screaming, as they fall into the void of the ravine that is illuminated by a dream moon that was conquered but not abolished because they still haven’t been able to figure out its biocomponents. Spaceman dreams are the ones where there is no severing of the umbilical cord of communication between the spaceship and the spaceman walking on air, certain that the rope of mother earth will someday bring him close to her.
* During the elections of 1981, the slogan of the Greek Socialist Party was “Our struggle has been vindicated,” while that of the Greek Communist Party was “Our struggle endures.” Trans.
* Populist left-wing daily. Trans.
* Famous Greek soccer star. Trans.