Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

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.

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 it 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, fireproof 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, potable 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