How will you dream?
I heard Massimo Cacciari say something that scared me: “We will wake up in September and it’s going to be a tragedy”. It got me thinking that if we’re going to wake up, this is a time in which we are dreaming, a collective dream that is forever changing the lexicon of the world. Even if we are gradually trying to go back to normal (which will never be the same as before), our experience is still fragmentary: an REM phase not allowing us to have a clear view of what will happen in the future, but only to scrape through the present. But I then want to believe that I will dream in a different way, that we will all have to learn to. “I will be everybody or nobody. I will be the other who I am without knowing it, he who has peered into that other dream”, Borges wrote, and this is how I wish to dream, becoming the other, their problems and their hopes. I would like waking dreams not to be hallucinations, but new interpretations of reality, and I would like them to be contagious.
I can’t help thinking about the European dream, about a European homeland as opposed to a Europe of homelands, where the Mediterranean serves as a welcoming threshold rather than as a field of unmarked graves and desperation. Art teaches us that different worlds can meet and coexist, because the emphasising of differences is a manifestation of the highest quality of the human being. And since it’s in the intimacy of the night that we are really sincere, that we speak to be completely understood and not to convince, we will create an emotional visual continuity between morning and evening: a constant dream, as therapy and solution. Neurology tells us that in the course of a year we dream for almost a thousand hours (and children for over three thousand): I think about a dream education, about teaching this practice, since dreaming is a time that we unconsciously spend exerting pure imagination. It’d be nice to learn a method and I hope that this strange period has at least taught us that we need to spend more time imagining, dreaming, exercising our visionary muscle.