The Dreamseller: The Calling (14 page)

Entering that young man’s world was a marvelous journey. We discovered a fantastic human being hidden behind society’s ridicule. And we were proud to have him along when the dreamseller called him to be a seller of dreams.

The dreamseller led us to an open green space and began to tell us the story of another Solomon, the great king of Israel. The dreamseller explained that King Solomon had had an excellent start in life. He didn’t want gold, silver or political power; he wanted that most coveted of treasures, wisdom. Every day, he breathed and drank wisdom. His kingdom progressed prodigiously, becoming one of the first ancient empires, and its relationship with neighboring nations was marked by peace.

But time passed, and power corrupted him. He abandoned wisdom and sought out the pleasures of the physical world. Soon, nothing satisfied him. He became profoundly depressed and was honest enough to admit that he was bored with his life. That vain existence robbed him of life’s joys.

“The great king had hundreds of wives, chariots, palaces, servants, armies, golden garments, honors and victories like few kings before him,” the dreamseller said, “but he neglected to love a woman and to regard the delicate lilies of the field,
which represent friendship and so many other fundamental things.”

As he was about to elaborate on the last lesson, my unpredictable companion chimed in and once more made everyone burst with laughter.

“Chief, may I say something?” asked Honeymouth.

“Of course, Bartholomew,” he said patiently.

“Maybe Solomon got depressed because he had hundreds of mothers-in-law?”

The dreamseller laughed and offered, “I don’t know, but I do know there are some mothers-in-law more lovable than many mothers.” And he concluded with this lesson: “Success is more difficult to deal with than failure. As Solomon learned, the danger in being successful is that the person can turn into a workaholic, forgetting to savor the small things in life and missing out on that which only dreams can achieve. The sight of an idyllic country landscape, of a flower garden, of a painting, can evoke more emotion in the man who seeks to behold it than in the man who seeks to own it. God gave us all equal access to life’s greatest pleasures. Rich are those who seek out that treasure, poor are those who seek to possess them.”

Placing his hands on Solomon, the newest disciple, the dreamseller said, “Great human beings are at the margins of society. Here is someone who has very little and yet has everything. Thank you for selling us your dreams.”

T
HE NEXT DAY, THE SUN’S FIRST RAYS BROKE OVER THE
horizon and shone down on our makeshift beds, inviting us to a new day of discovery. As always, Bartholomew was the last to get up. I imagine that if he were in a comfortable bed he’d sleep the entire day.

Before we headed out, the dreamseller extended an unusual invitation, one that would become an integral part of our story. He invited us to one of the most important tasks of the mind: to do nothing, merely experience the art of observation.

He led us to a busy tree-lined avenue. There he handed each of us a crumpled sheet of white paper and pens and asked us to write down all the sounds and images that excited us. Anything man-made didn’t count. The traffic noise was deafening, the air polluted, the commotion intense. What could excite us if not the colorful stores, the stylish cars, the shape of a stranger? And what does that have to do with changing human thinking? What does the art of observation have to do with selling dreams? To me, it was a boring exercise with no intellectual appeal.

It wasn’t long before the dreamseller prodded us.

“Anyone who doesn’t develop the art of observation is missing the fullness of life. He may be a warehouse of information, but he will never construct great ideas.”

I remembered that the day before I hadn’t seen the complex human being hidden behind Solomon’s rituals. I was a terrible observer. I saw what every “normal” person acknowledged. Edson and Dimas also didn’t know what to write. Bartholomew hummed to summon up inspiration, but none came. He looked up, then to the sides, and remained inert. Minutes passed without our observing anything interesting. Solomon was the only exception. He calmed his compulsions and began writing ceaselessly. He was excited, saying frequently, “Hmm . . . Wow, amazing . . . Fantastic . . .”

He was writing, and I was stumped. The dreamseller gave me a nudge.

“You will develop the art of observation only if you learn the most difficult art of the human intellect.” And he didn’t provide the answer.

“What is it?” I thought.

“The art of calming the mind,” he said eventually. “Minds that once were brilliant have lived a mediocre life because they didn’t calm their thoughts. Great writers, notable scientists, magnificent artists have shattered their inspiration because they had a cluttered mind. The thoughts, mental images and fantasies that can make our creativity take flight can also clip its wings, if excessive, robbing us of our intuition and ingenuity.”

“That’s my problem,” I thought. My mind was a dark cavern of disturbance. Thinking foolish thoughts was my specialty. Silence was always my enemy. But for the dreamseller, I tried to silence the voices within. It wasn’t easy; I was inundated with images racing through my mind faster than the cars on this street. My thoughts were choked by intellectual pollution.

My friends were also lost. But little by little we entered the infinite world of silence. Starting at that moment, our perception was heightened. I began to make out the sharp songs of a bird. It strummed a beautiful melody with unbelievable fervor. I
jotted it down. Then another bird sang a mournful song. Moments later, a dove performed a courtship ritual with a female.

I observed more than ten extraordinary birdsongs. They had little reason to rejoice in that concrete jungle, I thought, but unlike me they were celebrating life. I observed and noted the resilience of the weathered tree trunks, which, despite the impermeability of the soil and a shortage of water, survived in an inhospitable setting—bravery that I never had shown. More than ten million people had passed by those trees since they were planted, and maybe ten, at the most, had actually stopped to observe them in detail. I was beginning to feel like a privileged person in a societal desert.

Bartholomew, who wouldn’t normally notice an elephant in front of his nose, also began to have more luck. He contemplated five multicolored butterflies dancing across the sky. Unlike them, he noted, he only danced when drunk. Edson noted various types of sounds produced by leaves rustling in the wind, humbly applauding passersby, unlike him, who sought applause. Dimas analyzed insects that worked tirelessly preparing for winter, something he had never done. He stole and, like all thieves, was a terrible manager, believing that life was an eternal springtime.

After this gratifying exercise, we spoke one of our favorite phrases: “How I love this life!” Never had doing so little meant so much. I had never imagined that nature was present in such a meaningful way, right here, in the middle of the city. How could a specialist in society never have done this exercise? For the first time, I truly loved silence, and in that silence I discovered that I had not had a childhood.

I don’t remember any pleasant experiences as a child. Maybe I’ve become a rigid adult because I didn’t know how to relax as a child. Maybe I’ve grown into a paranoid man because I’d never experienced the innocence of childhood. Maybe I was a chronically depressive and ill-tempered grown-up because I hadn’t lived
my first years of life joyfully. The losses in my life made me into an adult very early, a young man who thought a lot, but felt nothing.

As I was recalling my childhood, the dreamseller seemed to be studying me. Taking a deep breath, he commented on the death of childhood in our time, one of the things that bothered him the most.

“The Internet, video games, computers—they’re all useful, but they’ve destroyed something invaluable: childhood. Where is the pleasure of silence? Where is the fun of playing outside? Where is innocence? It pains me so deeply that the system is creating unhappy, restless children—better suited for psychiatric care than happy, carefree lives.”

All of a sudden, the dreamseller acted in a way I’d never seen before. He turned to watch as several parents passed us, taking their seven- and eight-year-old children shopping. The children were dressed at the height of fashion, every accessory matching their outfits, and they were each carrying cell phones. But they were clearly disillusioned with life. Some whined and complained and caused a scene for a new dress or a gadget. To simply keep them quiet, the parents gave in.

The dreamseller looked furious and he confronted those parents.

“What are you doing to your children? Take them to know the forests. Have them remove their shoes and let them walk barefoot on the ground. Let them climb trees, and encourage them to invent their own games. The human species has shut itself inside a bell jar of selfishness and materialism. Instead, teach them about animals and let them learn a new way to behave.” And he paraphrased Jesus’ words: “Children do not live by shopping centers alone, but by all the adventures of childhood.”

I was impressed by his boldness in the face of strangers. Some of the parents considered his words. Others reacted brashly. One said, “Isn’t that the crazy guy we saw in the papers?”

Another, an intellectual and probably, like me, seething with pridefulness, was more arrogant: “I’m a professor with a doctorate in psychology and I won’t stand for this invasion of privacy. Let me worry about my children.” Looking us up and down he told his friends, loud enough for us to hear, “What a boorish bunch.”

Honeymouth heard the insult and couldn’t stifle his compulsive urge to talk. He seconded the dreamseller:

“Listen, pal, I’m not a ‘doctorate’ of anything,” he told the professor. “But let your children be immersed in nature. Let them play and get dirty. That way, none of them will turn out to be a crazy, no-good drunk like me.” He made a gesture, asking for patience and added, “But I’m getting better, chief.”

He turned to the children and said, “Anybody who wants to fly like a butterfly, raise your hand.”

Three children raised their hands, two remained indifferent and three hid behind their parents and answered, “I’m afraid of butterflies.”

Offended by the forwardness of the strangers, several parents called the security guards at the entrance to the large Megasoft department store they were about to enter. The guards quickly ushered us out.

“Get out of here, you bums.”

But, before leaving, the dreamseller turned to the parents who had argued with him and said, “I ask your forgiveness for my actions and hope that one day you won’t have to ask your children’s forgiveness for yours.”

For some of the parents, the dreamseller’s ideas didn’t fall on barren ground. Some, even while angry, began to realize they needed to work on their relationship with their children. Their children had received the best possible educations under the existing system; they had become experts in consuming products and using computers, but they were perpetually dissatisfied. They
didn’t know how to observe, feel and draw conclusions. These parents realized that nature may not be as important to the mental survival of the human race as it was to its emotional survival. They began to frequent forests, zoos and urban gardens.

Nature is a more invaluable teacher than all the other educational theories for expanding the mind’s horizons.

I was moved at seeing the dreamseller’s and Bartholomew’s tenderness with children. I had never thought too much about them. I was too busy criticizing society in the classroom. I didn’t understand that the true educational material was the student and not the information. I was only concerned that they keep quiet and pay attention in class.

That same afternoon, we passed through a residential district. We came upon a large, gloomy building. The garden was overgrown with tall grass. Enormous trees cast looming shadows, preventing the low plants from flourishing. The old building with its arches was beautiful, but its paint had faded. The wooden window frames were rotting and seemed painted in the green moss. Plaster was peeling from the filthy white walls. It was a nursing home, but definitely not a pleasant place to live out the last years of one’s life.

Many elderly people went there not because their families had abandoned them, but simply because they had no close relatives. The majority of those residents had only one child or at most two. When an only child died or moved to a different city or couldn’t physically or financially care for his aging parents, the elderly were sent to these institutions for their medical and daily care. They fled from the suffocating trap of loneliness to these nursing homes.

Looking at the building, the dreamseller told us, “Behold a good setting for dreams. Go and bring joy to the people who live there.”

In our “holy” prejudice we thought, “Dreams? In a nursing
home? Those people are bored and depressed. What could possibly excite them anymore?” We had been in the world of children, and now we were entering the world of the elderly. Worlds so far apart yet so alike. The problem was that the dreamseller took a step back. We were waiting for him to at least guide us with some instruction, but he simply said he was going for a walk. Before the dreamseller left, Dimas, who began stuttering and blinking uncontrollably, expressed his uncertainty: