Vassilis Vassilikos: ...And Dreams Are Dreams

— 6-

“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.

These transformations of a language that

concentrated the habits of centuries, naturally, could not be achieved overnight. As with every true change, they had to first be acquired by the public through experience. And experience proved that real poverty was the absence of dreams. Every poor person was potentially rich by virtue of his dreams, whereas a rich man without dreams was forever indigent.

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.”

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 are 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; Monophysitic, of Cerulaire, Belisaire and Narses. When a star falls, a dream is born 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.