...And Dreams Are Dreams

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.

— 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