... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  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.

  -7-

  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.

  -8-

  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, car
yatid, 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.