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 Avriani2—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 people’s 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 2 Populist left-wing daily. Trans. 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 shepherd’s pipe; Mitsotakis’s dream of being a croupier at the casino; the dream of Anastopoulos3 to be Giorgio Armani; Armani’s dream of being a soccer player; and other dreams of pedestrian malls, of the Athens metro, 3 Famous Greek soccer star. Trans. 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.