... and Dreams Are Dreams
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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.
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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 bi
g 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.
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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 . . .
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“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.
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.”