...And Dreams Are Dreams

However, next to the purely individual dreams we find their collective counterparts: the nonliberating dream of the great idea; the dream of a free, independent Greece; the dream of a happy youth and a dignified old age. The swallows bring the dream each spring, hacking at the air like tailors; the swallows’ tails look like miniature tuxedos and the flowers that people love transport them, with their smells, to other lands, other gardens of Eden, of dreams, where the ugliness of the wall does not exist, nor the finality of the tomb, nor the flat surface of an oblong table, because a simple vase with flowers placed upon it will transform it into an upside-down foot, and it becomes the sole of the foot of the sky. This is why, in the dream-like state in which we live while awake, instead of the mushroom of a nuclear disaster, we offer our next nightmare a dream flower in the shape of a sunflower, which, even though it might die, will at least leave us its seeds to eat, and, since dreams are conductors of the whole, as in a hologram, we will be able, through its seeds, to keep bringing to mind over and over the flower in its entirety.

“Take my life,” said the defendant to the court,

“but don’t take my dream. That you cannot do. Even if you wanted to.”

And so, the frowning assessors thought about it over their law books, which were ossified dreams, white seashells of dreams that went away, carpets upon which dreams bled in losing their virginity, and concluded:

“If we can’t take his dream, what’s the good of taking his life?”

So they commuted the death sentence to life in prison. That way , the convict could dream inside his prison cell, undisturbed by the countless parasites of life.

We don’t want to speak of Freud. We are almost completely indifferent to his interpretation of dreams.

As far as we’re concerned, Freud did nothing more than to lower their high frequency to a household level. The same way that Edison took sunlight and, with technical knowledge, courage, and intelligence, made it into a lightbulb. What we’re saying is different: from the time man started walking on two feet, he has been dreaming continuously. The position of a biped is one that keeps pulling him higher. And this dream, that it is himself in the dream, gives him the energy he needs in his state of vigilance, in order to continue on earth his dreamless and otherwise mortal existence.

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When my dreamologist friends and I (our