Samizdat dreaming, part one

Special Order 192

Welcome, new readers

Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay, I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Précis

This post an account of a dream I had two nights ago about stumbling onto a samizdat network that used cash register receipts as a medium.

This is part one of a 2-part essay about how to find truth and establish trust when you’re living in a falling-apart world and fascism is on the rise. And also, you’re not sure if you’re awake or asleep.

Receipts

The first thing I remember of the dream was finding myself looking at a handful of cash register receipts like the kind you might get from a supermarket or a hardware store. In addition to machine-generated text in black, the receipts all bore handwritten marks — each piece of paper done in a style and color of its own. It seemed clear that these markings had been made by different people.

Many questions arose: What purchases did these receipts document? Who had bought what, and where? Were those colored marks just doodles or decorations, or did they carry some deeper meaning? And, most importantly, what were these papers doing in my hands?

I looked closer, but I couldn’t bring anything into focus. It was as if the receipts were aware that I was trying to read them, and deliberately obscuring themselves. I had the sense that I had stumbled upon some trove of secret communications, and that just by having these things in my possession I was now in danger. I woke up in a fright.

I got up, went to the bathroom and used the toilet, washed my hands & drank a glass of water, and went back to bed. The dream was there waiting for me.

A visit from Mr. Pynchon?

You’re an open-minded person with a broad education, so of course you’ve read The Crying of Lot 49, the novella by that enigmatic paranoid genius Thomas Pynchon.

But since it’s been a while since you read it during your pot-smoking college days, here’s a brief summary to jog your memory, helpfully generated by the inescapable AI overmind:

What is the message of the receipts? What are you hiding?

Once I got back to my bed, my dream soon resumed. The story of the grocery-receipt samizdat was now big news. It started out as a newspaper thing, like the Watergate break-in, but soon it was all over TV and the internet. People from all over the globe were reporting discoveries of similar mysterious bunches of receipts with obscure markings in various colors of ballpoint ink.

Just read the text in purple, which explains the nature of reality. That’s obvious, isn’t it? (An image from my essay Entanglement.)

Meanwhile I had made some small progress deciphering my original handful of receipts, which had made themselves legible to me. The machine-printed texts seemed to tell one story — purchases of office supplies, food, hammers and nails, nothing out of the ordinary — while the handwritten notes told another. Something having to do with sexual trysts, flirtations, betrayals — ‘but she didn’t know that I was seeing John too, lol!!’ It was all very jumbled.

And yet somehow, then, the larger story, the discourse, was not about the content of these mysterious messages, but about my relationship to them¹. Was I some kind of spy, people were beginning to ask? Was I perhaps an alien, from an astral dimension? Was bearing messages, even, from the Realm of the Hidden Imam²? Wherever I went I was hounded by a gaggle of reporters with microphones and cameras. “What is the true message of the receipts? Who are you? What are you hiding?” It was scary.

I said, “NO! Don’t you know that this is a dream? Leave me alone, this isn’t real!”

Then I woke up again.

The Next Room of the Dream

The title of Howard Nemerov’s collection The Next Room of the Dream comes from lines in his poem “To Clio, Muse of History,” which opens with the note

On learning that The Etruscan Warrior
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Is proved a modern forgery

The handwriting on the cover is reminiscent of some of the notes on those receipts

In that poem the narrator addresses the muse of history, saying, in effect, that just because the statue of The Etruscan Warrior, once thought to be ancient, has now been proved to be a forgery, that doesn’t mean that the feelings that the narrator experienced when, as a schoolchild, he first saw the Warrior are now somehow invalid. Our memories are ever churning, the poet says; we’re forever reinventing the past:

As with a dream interpreted by one still dreaming,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.

Special Orders 191, 192

During the American Civil War, about noon on September 13, 1862, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Volunteers, part of the Union XII Corps, discovered an envelope with three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper lying in the grass at a campground that Confederate Major General D.H. Hill had just vacated.³

Copy of General Robert E. Lee's 1862 "Lost Orders" displayed at Crampton's Gap, Maryland. From Wikipedia: Wilson44691 - Own work

This cigar-wrapping paper turned out to be Special Order 191 from General Lee to his subordinate commanders, containing instructions about the disposition the divisions of Lee’s army. The document — with the cigars, presumably — was conveyed to the Union commander, George McClellan, who used the information contained in the Special Order to stop Lee’s invasion at the Battle of Antietam.

So, you see, sometimes one really does stumble upon troves of vitally important and highly secret information, the mere possession of which could place you in danger. So I had to wonder, in my dream, if I had somehow stumbled upon Special Order 192, provenance unknown.

The state vs samizdat

From wikipedia:

[D]ecades prior to the early 1960s, offices and stores had to submit papers with examples of their typewriters' typeface to local KGB branches so that any printed text could be traced back to the source, to prosecute those who had used the typewriter to produce material deemed illegal. With the introduction of photocopying machines, the KGB's Fifth Directorate and Agitprop Department required individuals to get authorization to use printing office photocopiers to prevent the mass production of unapproved material, though restrictions could be bypassed by bribing employees.

Privately owned typewriters were considered the most practical means of reproducing samizdat during this time due to these copy machine restrictions. Usually, multiple copies of a single text would be simultaneously made on carbon paper or tissue paper, which were inexpensive and relatively easy to conceal. Copies would then be passed around within trusted networks.

The Jayson-Blairification of the receipts

After I awoke the second time, at around 3 AM, I again used the bathroom, and this time I washed my face with very cold water, as if I were dousing the dream itself. But it didn’t work. When I got back to bed the dream continued.

But now the dream wasn’t about the Story of the Receipts, it had become a meta-story about the Story of the Receipts, for it turned out the that whole story of the mysterious receipts had been a hoax, and I was its perpetrator.

Or, at least, that’s what everybody seemed to believe, in my dream. I now found myself being pilloried as a self-promoting fraud like Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was found to have liberally plagiarized other reporters’ work and made up lots and lots of other stuff out of whole cloth.

Photos of my cluttered writing table covered with dozens of ballpoint pens in every color of the rainbow began to appear on the internet. Sundman made this all up! the pundits cried. Have you ever seen what his notebooks look like? Illegible notes in inks of every color! They look just like those so-called ‘receipts!’ What further evidence do we need?

The incriminating box of pens

And it turned out, in my dream, that I was, in fact, writing a story about exposing the fraud of the receipts. But I was still doing research, I didn’t know all the facts — I didn’t even yet know if I was the hoaxer — and I kept tying to remind myself that I was dreaming, that none of this was real.

And so, as I was dozing off, still half-awake, I came up with tests to prove to myself that I was really awake, not dreaming. But before long I was dreaming about dreaming again. I was in the next room of the dream, and then in the next room after that.

I slept, finally, if fitfully, until dawn, and when I woke up I said to myself, ‘well, that was pretty meta,’ and quickly went to my desk to write down as much as I could remember of the dream, which is where this post originated: a dream about mysterious messages and dreaming.

Samizdat vs the state

Wikipedia:

Samizdat distinguishes itself not only by the ideas and debates that it helped spread to a wider audience but also by its physical form. The hand-typed, often blurry and wrinkled pages with numerous typographical errors and nondescript covers helped to separate and elevate Russian samizdat from Western literature. The physical form of samizdat arose from a simple lack of resources and the necessity to be inconspicuous.

In time, dissidents in the USSR began to admire these qualities for their own sake, the ragged appearance of samizdat contrasting sharply with the smooth, well-produced appearance of texts passed by the censor's office for publication by the State. The form samizdat took gained precedence over the ideas it expressed and became a potent symbol of the resourcefulness and rebellious spirit of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. In effect, the physical form of samizdat itself elevated the reading of samizdat to a prized clandestine act.

2025 is just around the corner

Although words and concepts like ‘Trump’ and ‘Thiel’ and ‘Kash Patel’ and ‘FBI’ didn’t appear explicitly in my dream, I knew as soon as I woke up that that was what I had been dreaming about.

Yes, it’s true that I had had a funny — and unrelenting —meta-dream about secret networks, coded messages, paranoia and dreaming — my very own Crying of Lot 49.

But still at the bottom of it all lurked real danger, the kind of danger that gave rise to samizdat in the first place. I woke up that morning with a very deep feeling of unease. It hasn’t left.

In Part Two of this essay I’ll take a look at what we might expect from the Trump administration and its associated vigilantes when it comes to free speech, freedom of the press and the intimidation and silencing of critics of the new regime, in light of their stated intentions and in light of modern technology for surveillance and control. We’re a long way from the days of the old USSR when the KGB collected information on personal typewriters be personally going door to door.

And I’ll take a closer look at the sense of unreality, the sense that there’s no difference between truth and falsehood, or between being awake and being asleep, that despotic regimes have always used to keep their subjects compliant.

Cheerio!

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1. This sentence, with its italics and the word ‘then’ offset by commas, is my impression of a Pynchonian sentence from his Gravity’s Rainbow phase.

2. An allusion to my essay Nadine the Travel Agent, which is about, among other things, astral sex, and which is quite explicit and emphatically not safe for work, non-adults, or people who don’t like that kind of thing.

3. Information about Special Order 191 is condensed from wikipedia.