...And Dreams Are Dreams

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.