... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  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, pruni
ng), 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.