Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

“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.

— 4-

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 requires 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 big 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 Lapathiotis, “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.

— 5-

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 lipsyncing; 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….