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In the last decade citizens of Serbia have described their bewildering social world in the idioms of magical realism, conspiracy theories, amorphous substances, katkian burocratic parables, twilight, in-between states of consciousness. The social world was also likened to a dream or nightmare. Taking this cue from informants, I ask whether the Serbian "imaginary" might not be more fruitfully figured as a "dream" than as a "text," or a "depository of dialogically intertwined narratives" -- "stories Serbs tell themselves & others about themselves" -- , as is frequent in "interpretative anthropology." In order to extract its maximal figurative potential, I thread the dream trope through Marxist social theory as a site of its most fruitful use -- from its anticipation in Marx's varied figurations of modern capitalism's peculiar enchantments to its full development in the work of Siegfried Kracauer & Walter Benjamin. I then turn from these ethnographers of metropolitan modernity to anthropological theory & the way it historically conceptualized the dream in the exotic peripheries it studied. By threading it through metropolitan social theory as well as the ethnography of peripheries, I seek to show the internal complexity of dream as a figure & to recommend its use to anthropology in the figuring of social thought & action. References. Adapted from the source document.