“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.
— 2-
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 people’s. 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 (Zissis 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,”1 even though, as I suggested, “Our dreams have been 1 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. 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.
— 3-
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 things happen in life, that one person’s dream is another person’s 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 sailor’s 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, grandiose dreams 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 can’t 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 can’t 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 tropical plants 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….