...And Dreams Are Dreams

friendship was saturated with dreams like hydrophilous cotton) decided to publish a newspaper, the Almanac of Dreams, in large format like papers used to be, and not a tabloid with badly printed color photographs (because dreams are black and white, and, fortunately, the cameras have yet to be made that would color them), we were, naturally, confronted with the primordial problem of all newspapers, which is the financial one. We had no capital to speak of. But even if one of us had had any, none of us would have dared suggest he invest it in an enterprise as uncertain as our own.

There were four of us in all. Zissis, a former partisan who still lived with the dream of a Greece of popular rule; Thomas, who had realized his dream of becoming an industrialist three times and three times let it slip through his fingers; Zenon, who was a dream professional (he wrote in Dream Interpreter magazine); and me, Irineos, a writer who had spent his life recording other people’s dreams as if they were his own, or his own as if they were other people’s. The fact that we called ourselves dreamologists was anything but a joke.

Then one day, we found our Maecenas: Dimitris, an acquaintance of Zenon’s, who had worked abroad and returned to his country with the sole dream of investing his money in a publishing company. We were a match made in heaven. Just as in dreams sometimes, when we come across the most improbable situations and then wake up and say, “It was only a dream,” so were we living our dream. But this one was real. We had found our dream financier, who not only liked our idea that “dreams avenge themselves!” but also found it very marketable.

“The Almanac will be a hit,” he concluded, after hearing us out. “It’s something that’s been missing.

Man can’t live by soccer alone. He needs dreams and videotapes. I have found the videotape market to be saturated. Fortunately, dreams are intangible — they cannot be imported, they are not material goods — and as such, they have been scorned by the unimaginative neo-Hellenes.”

Thus Dimitris was to provide the money and the machinery; we were to provide the grey matter. Our first step was to request that our newspaper be exempt from the paper tax. “No doubt,” said the clerk in charge when we handed in our application to the Ministry of the Presidency (at 3 Zalocosta Street), “dreams are tax free. But I don’t know if the paper they are printed on can also be tax free. You should probably see the general manager.”

We made an appointment with the general

manager (Zissis knew him from the Association of Resistance Fighters), who received us with joy and told us we were definitely entitled to tax-free paper since we were publishing a newspaper. He only asked, without seeming too concerned with the answer, what its political affiliation would be.

“Dreams have nothing to do with politics,” all four of us replied with one voice. Our motto, at the upper right-hand corner, would read, “Dreams of the world, unite.” And our countersign in the opposite corner would read, “We dream in Greek.” We hoped to avoid provoking any political division among our readers by eschewing mottos like “Our dreams have been vindicated” or “Our dreams are enduring,”1 even though, as I suggested, “Our dreams have been 1 During the elections of 1981, the slogan of the Greek Socialist Party was “Our struggle has been vindicated,” while that of the Greek Communist Party was “Our struggle endures.” Trans. educated” solved the problem, if only as a play on words.

“I see,” he said. “It’s really the dream of progress that you want to support. And you couldn’t have picked a better time, since the state is thinking of opening the first dreamfirmary, which would be integrated into the National Health System.”

He even promised us a small contribution out of the obscure resources of the Ministry. All newspapers were subsidized by the state. Why not ours?

Delighted, we ran and told Dimitris, our

Maecenas, the good news. He was thrilled. And so, without wasting another moment, we got to work preparing the first issue. It was going to be four pages long, on glossy paper.

“Like the Lonely Hearts Classifieds paper,”

Thomas remarked dreamily.

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