Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams

 

In The Palace of Dreams, an extraordinary novel by the great Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, the most secret and most powerful bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire is the Tabir Sarrail, or Palace of Dreams. Its purpose is to read all the dreaming minds of the Empire and present the Sultan a Master Dream each week that will guide his actions. While readers will be reminded of Kafka's The Castle and of Orwell's 1984, and perhaps of the bureaucratized Otherworlds of the medieval Chinese imagination, this work is uniquely Kadare's own. He writes:

"In that nocturnal realm of sleep are to be found both the light and darkness of humanity; its honey and its poison, its greatness and its vulnerability. 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. Every passion or wicked thought, every affliction or crime, every rebellion or catastrophe necessarily casts its shadow before it long before it manifests itself in real life. It was for that reason that the Padishah decreed that no dream, not even one dreamed in the remotest part of the Empire on the most ordinary day by the most godforsaken creature, must fail to be examined by the Tabir Sarrail..” 

Dreams are recorded, by hand, at the behest of the dreamers. There is no electrical method of reading brain waves, no mechanical content analysis. You may be punished for dreaming a certain dream, but not (apparently) for concealing a dream. If the Tabir Sarrail represents the ultimate totalitarian dream – of controlling the subconscious mind – it is very imperfect in its execution. The hand written reports travel a long and weary journey through collection, copying and selection to interpretation.

The protagonist, Mark-Alem, is the scion of a noble Albanian family that has contributed viziers and generals to the Empire, including the current prime minister in the novel. (The family is historical, called Quprili in the novel, Köprülü in Turkish). Mark-Alem, rising in the Palace of Dreams like a meteor going up, comes to understand that in the bowels of the vast complex there are places where dreamers are made to undream inconvenient dreams:  

 “The copyist had said that it was obvious the prisoner couldn’t remember anything about his dream. That must be the real object of his incarceration: to make him forget it. That wearing interrogation night and day, that interminable report, the pretence of seeking precise details about something that by its very nature cannot be definite – all this, continued until the dream begins to disintegrate and finally disappears completely from the dreamer’s memory, could only be called brain-washing, thought Mark-Alem. Or an undream, in the same way as unreason is the opposite of reason… the more he thought about it the more it seemed this was the only explanation. It must be a question of flushing out subversive ideas which for some reason or other the State needed to isolate, as one isolates a plague virus in order to be able to neutralize it.”