Dream Seminar

Four billion people on Earth. And all of them sleep, all of them dream. Every dream is crowded with faces and bodies— there are more dreamed But they don’t take up any space… You might happen to fall asleep at the theater. In the middle of the play, your eyelids sink. A moment’s double exposure: the scene up there is superseded by a dream. Then there’s no scene anymore, there’s you. The theater in its honest depths! The mystery of the overworked stage manager! The interminable new rehearsals… A bedroom. It’s night. The dark sky flows through the room. The book that someone fell asleep to is still spread open and lies wounded on the edge of the bed. The sleeper’s eyes are moving, they’re following the letterless text in another book— illuminated, archaic, quick. A breathtaking that’s printed behind the eyelids’ monastery walls. A single copy. It’s right here and now! Tomorrow it will all be deleted. The mystery of the great extravagance! Obliteration…Like when the tourist is stopped by suspicious men in uniform— they open the camera, unroll his film and let the sun kill the pictures: so the dreams are blacked out by the light of day. Obliterated or just invisible? There’s an out-of-sight dreaming always going on. Light for other eyes. A zone where crawling thoughts learn to walk. Faces and figures are regrouped. We’re moving along a street, among people in the blazing sun. But there are just as many or more we don’t see who are inside the dark buildings that rise up on either side. Sometimes one of them goes to the window and glances down at us.