When the government keeps track of your dreams

Consider, to begin with, some recent news reports.

Apple’s recently-updated mobile operating system claims to give you control over your data, even as the company stores details of Chinese customers on servers run by a state-owned firm. Amazon’s Ring, a “video doorbell”, has partnerships with US law enforcement agencies enabling them to ask for recorded content without a warrant. And many people the world over have flagged privacy concerns with Covid-19 vaccination apps.

Not a day seems to pass without a headline dealing with intrusions into privacy and the ways in which governments can use it for their own ends. In her magisterial The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Sushanna Zoboff writes that “it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.” In an interview, she pointed out the implications: this is “a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy.”

So far, our dreams are about the only thing the authorities can’t keep a watchful eye on. This, however, is exactly what happens in Ismail Kadare’s surreal The Palace of Dreams, which is why the novel still feels so relevant.

The Palace of Dreams was banned in Albania, Kadare’s homeland, shortly after it was published in 1981. In an emergency session, the Writers’ Union met members of the Albanian Politburo to declare that the book was against the totalitarian regime of Communist leader Enver Hoxha. After some years of criticism that further raised the administration’s hackles, Kadare sought political asylum in Paris in 1990, where he still lives most of the time.

However, Kadare’s own relationship with Hoxha has come under some scrutiny, more so after the writer won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. It’s been claimed that he was never a dissident in the manner of so many other writers from Eastern Europe. Some of his early work had, in fact, lauded the system, and he was also once a member of the country’s rubber-stamp People’s Assembly.

At the time of the Booker award, critic Adam Kirsch wrote that while Kadare was a worthy recipient, he “could never have survived and published under the Hoxha regime without some degree of cooperation, the complete details of which are not yet entirely clear”. Kadare himself has asserted that the very act of writing under totalitarianism is an act of resistance and that he was “led from literature to freedom, not the other way around”.

Whichever side of the debate you take, it’s undeniable that The Palace of Dreams is a satirical, multi-layered assault on the nature of autocracy, with not a little inspiration from Kafka. It employs many elements of writing under siege: legends, allegories, allusions, and metaphors.

Interestingly, the novel was first translated from Albanian into French by Jusuf Vrioni, and from that text into English by Barbara Bray. One can only speculate about the nuances that could have been smoothened over.

It deals with the naïve young Mark-Alem who belongs to an illustrious, titled family that played a large role in the country’s politics. He is employed in a sprawling bureaucratic institution in the central vista of “the United Ottoman States”, the main part of which stands back from its wings “as if recoiling from some threat”.

This cloistered, mysterious establishment is one of the most important arms of the imperial state. Its task is to examine and classify the dreams of every citizen without exception. Officials act on the belief that “all that is murky and harmful, or that will become so in a few years or centuries, makes its first appearance in men’s dreams”.

Thus, functionaries reach out to collect the transcribed dreams of compliant subjects from each province. There are departments of Selection, of Interpretation, and, importantly, of the Master-Dream. This is the one judged to be the most significant of the thousands received, presented every week to the ruler for his consideration.

In this manner, the true state of the empire is assessed better than by periodic surveys, statements, or reports. Dreams can be subversive: a correct interpretation “may help to save the country or its Sovereign from disaster; may help to avert war or plague or to create new ideas.”

Painstakingly if nervously, Mark-Alem learns the ropes and rises up the ranks. Then, he comes across a dream with historical allusions that may or may not implicate his own family. The personal becomes even more political. The state is forced to act, and the response brings about not freedom but another stage of equilibrium.

Kadare’s grim fable is not just a murky mirror of former circumstances. It’s also a prescient allegory of mass surveillance as a tool to keep citizens in check, and the ways in which history bleeds into identity. At present, though the government may not yet have the ability to track our dreams, its handling of the pandemic is enough to cause nightmares.