COLUMN ONE : An Illusion Too Real to Fade : The California dream is an expectation, a sales pitch, an image. Even with the recession and disasters, people are drawn by their conviction that a better life is possible.

Californians dream in different languages, in shades of gray and brilliant colors, their pleasures distinct. They may not understand each other, but they understand The Dream. It beckoned them once--or maybe their parents, or their parents before that. Then it settled somewhere deep in their souls, as expectation and hope.

The California dream is an illusion, of course. It has no borders, no center that holds. It is a sales pitch, above all else.

Railroad barons hawked it with their railway tickets in the 1800s. Developers use it to sell homes. Post-earthquake, after the fires and the sliding mud, Pacific Bell threads its television commercials with the dreamy message that Californians, resilient and chipper, are somehow better than the rest.

The imagery is evolving all the time. Today it is less rosy but still pink: California is a commitment. California is an idea to be preserved. California is like no place else.

This is the very nature of the dream. It can be all things, if you believe. Not even in Texas is there such a mythology of place. California, land of the Gold Rush and home to the stars, is supposed to nurture the dreams of us all.

“California is an emotional response,” says Allen Olivo, director of advertising for Pacific Bell.

In that sense, California is America but more so. Here there is opportunity as deep as the San Andreas Fault and potential as ephemeral as the good vibes.

Many have lately declared that the emperor has no clothes, that the dream is dead. Yet the magnetic pull of California--despite the recession, the crowds and the fear--reaches wide.

People fleeing poverty in Mexico, repression in Russia and winters in Buffalo, N.Y., all end up in California. And yes--yes!--they say it is still much better than what they have left behind. This is a new breed of dreamer, resilient and realistic, with occasionally gritted teeth.

“We didn’t dare to dream about California,” says an elderly immigrant from Latvia, a former geography teacher who has been in Southern California nine years. Now she lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica and meets her friends for chats in an oceanfront park, just across the street from the Hotel Shangri-la.

Homeless men harass her and ask her for money. She is embarrassed for them, unnerved by them, annoyed. They should get a job, she says. “Of course, this is a wonderful place,” she feels compelled to confide.

The common denominator of the California dream might only be the landscape and the weather, yet even those depend upon whether the view is the Sierra or San Francisco Bay, the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, the oil derricks of Bakersfield or the graffiti on the freeway overpasses of L.A.

From any vantage point, Maria Mendez can dream. She moved to a new housing tract in San Bernardino to get her slice of the promised land. But four hours of commuting got to be too much for her husband, and sinking real estate prices have made the term affordable housing a cruel taunt.

So her family of five has moved back to Los Angeles, renters once more. They can’t afford to sell their dream house at a huge loss.

Mendez, a secretary in the office of a Los Angeles city councilman, did toy with the idea of moving to Utah last year. That was after a gang member shot her younger brother in the ear while he was stopped at an intersection en route to the family home in Boyle Heights.

The bullet remains lodged in his head. Mendez, 30, says it is a miracle he is alive.

“I think everybody talks about leaving,” she says. “That’s just talk. This is our home now. We just have to make it the best we can. I have hope that it is going to get better here. . . .

“And not everything is about money. Yeah, it would be great to have money. But I also know we can make it here. You have to believe in yourself and have faith.”

As diverse as they are, the dreamers speak a common language of sorts, and their bodies communicate as much as their mouths. They have plans, and energy. They sense possibility. They believe in the magic that can happen when like minds meet. This is why they are here. Better to be in California than in Cleveland when the cosmos align.

“The movies. The sun. The beach,” waxes Andrew Miles, a 29-year-old screenwriter-cum-waiter who hasn’t sold a script just yet. He stares into the surf at Santa Monica on a perfect weekday afternoon, shoeless and shirtless, wearing wire-rimmed shades.

“I came out here for the artistic atmosphere,” he says. “Back home in Philadelphia, the most artistic thing you can do is paint somebody’s bedroom. You gotta be here. You gotta breathe it.” He inhales.

In California, the common wisdom has preached, there is room for it all. Visionary or madman, entrepreneur or con, everybody could find a home in the nation’s most populous state. Being Californian implied a certain point of view. Even the oddballs were thought to enrich the brew.

So everybody came.

Ever since the outbreak of World War II, California’s population has grown at the rate of about 1,000 people a day. Then arrivals picked up, peaking at 2,000 daily in the mid-1980s. Last year, the state Department of Finance says, 1,203 newcomers arrived on average each day. But after subtracting the number of people who were leaving California at the same time, the net migration was the lowest since record-keeping began in 1940-41. This demographic blip has been much in the national news.

The economy, mostly, has been shouldering the blame. This being California, however, the downturn has transcended the tangibility of dollars and cents, taking on a metaphysical cast.

Symbols are said to have died, dreams to have shriveled in retreat. Natural disasters are comeuppance ordered by the gods. The drumbeat echoes at every turn.

Those who believed most fervently in this mythology of place have taken the psycho-barrage particularly hard. When they lose their job, or their car has been broken into twice, or when they notice their commute has never taken as long, these dreamers can feel betrayed, in a personal way.

This is the dream as opiate, and withdrawal can be cruel. In the rest of the country, such a lexicon doesn’t exist. Out here on the edge, we are given to excess.

“I hate it here!” says Risa Donegan, who stays home with her two young daughters in Santa Monica. “I came out here when I was single. It was fun. What was not to like? But now I don’t believe the California dream exists.”

Donegan would like a back yard, and more money in the bank, and fewer government restrictions on her husband’s paint contracting business, and local leaders who don’t bicker so much.

“My husband and I were just talking about it this morning,” Donegan says. “We are always talking about it. He’s from Indianapolis, and I guess he likes it here. After living in Indianapolis, I guess anything would look good.”

Ah. This is the catch. Americans like to comparison shop. They have experienced the tyranny of winters in the northern tier. They know about the East Coast snobbery that constricts.

The Midwest? Neither here nor there. The South? Small town on a regional scale. People come to California to find, reinvent or just be themselves.

But the disillusioned see this as a problem too. They multiply this yearning by about 31 million souls. They can tell you about the California dream: That would be the way things were. The equation they plot is elementary. Fewer people = simpler times.

They say Oregon or Idaho or even Las Vegas is the California of today. And Los Angelization is code for scourge.

“I lived the dream until about the last seven years,” says Harvey Jeane, president of Optika Imaging Systems, a computer software company that moved from Woodland Hills to Simi Valley and finally to Colorado Springs in December, 1992.

“But then I really starting noticing that a lot of the service functions were not able to keep up. I think there are too many people for the tax base in Southern California.”

So why hasn’t everyone packed up the RV and moved out of this crowded, overpriced mess? The answers form a labyrinth of emotions, aspirations and logic peculiar to people with the spirit of pioneers.

The real California dreamers talk of cycles and rebounds and buying low to sell high. They say the naysayers and quitters will never get the last laugh.

News flash: Bloomingdale’s, that icon of glitzy New York, has announced plans to open four new stores in Southern California.

There it is: the bottom line, where the California dream congeals. It thrives on cash. Or is it cash that flows from the dream? Regardless, the distinction may be moot. So much is perception, a feeling about what California is, that success can happen here and that it will.

San Francisco-born Michael Kowalewski actually teaches a course about such things at Carleton College, a small liberal-arts college in Northfield, Minn. “Visions of California,” which Kowalewski developed at Princeton University, is always oversubscribed.

And next year, Kowalewski will lead 24 students in search of the essence of California by traveling with them to the Golden State itself. Their base camps will be Sonoma, the Carmel Valley and Newport Beach. The off-campus program is a first for Carleton College. Beijing and London have been done .

“There’s been more interest in this than for any of the other off-campus programs,” Kowalewski says. “It confirms my suspicions about how people think of California.”

What they think, of course, has been largely influenced by TV and lately Michael Berk, co-creator and executive producer of “Baywatch,” has had much to do with that.

The show, which claims to have more than 1 billion viewers a week in 100 countries, is life as seen through the heroics of Los Angeles County lifeguards, most of whom also happen to be babes--in bathing suits, natch. Berk describes the show as sexy, in a wholesome sense.

Yet even “Baywatch” is planning on getting a little darker soon. Berk, whose Sherman Oaks home collapsed in the Northridge earthquake with him, his wife and 20 pets inside, says earthquakes, fires and gangbanging will make appearances on the show, albeit as seen from the sand.

“I grew up in L.A.,” Berk says. “I actually love the lifestyle I have. But I also just bought a house in Las Vegas. My wife really freaked out about the earthquake. Las Vegas is close to L.A., but it’s not L.A. I’ll be commuting to L.A. It’s a 45-minute flight.

“So the California dream has changed a little, just as dreams take sudden shifts and changes. They can turn into a nightmare, then they come back and turn into something else. That is what the California dream is becoming for me. The reality is darker than the image, you know.”

We know, we know. The new California dreamers talk like this, like philosophers, risk-takers, ad men or nuts. That’s why the rest of the country is forever cracking jokes at the expense of Californians. They’re just jealous, your mother would say. They’re still coming, are they not?

Lise Hamilton, for example. She graduated from Yale Law School last year and now she’s practicing corporate law in Newport Beach. Her office has an ocean view.

Hamilton was raised in Brooklyn, then New Jersey, and before law school, she lived in New York trying to make it as a folk singer. It didn’t happen for her. So like countless other migrants, Hamilton escaped the old to start fresh.

In her new life, Hamilton lives three blocks from the beach. She makes it a point to watch sunsets and to stroll. She could have gone almost anywhere after graduating from Yale, but a brochure from a Newport firm had caught her eye the year before. Sailboats, she thinks it was. And scuba-diving. The dream.

“It’s true,” she says. “I guess I always had this ‘Go West, young woman’ kind of dream in the back of my head. . . . But sometimes it’s hard. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I left everything and I’m doing something that I’d never thought I’d be doing.”

But . . . Hamilton is thinking of joining a softball team, and signed up for sailing lessons, and she hasn’t gotten over the pseudo-winters yet. She dreams of earthquakes, though.

She is not leaving yet.

It seems that in every stubborn California dreamer there nests a sense of expectation, and forgiveness, about this place. It is a feeling hard to replicate anywhere else. Words often fail to define it. It is more of a sensory thing.

Restaurateur, nightclub owner and dry-cleaning mogul Elie Samaha, who fled war-ravaged Beirut as a teen-ager to come to the United States, endeavors to capture it in business. He calls it mystique. Whatever it is, it sells. Samaha’s made millions so far. And he married a movie star--actress and singer Tia Carrera--too.

“It’s major hype, gimmicks,” Samaha says of the secret to his success. “But it’s quality too.”

Samaha also lost a house to the Northridge earthquake. But that was nothing, he says. “I believe in myself. If I was living in a tent, I know that in a three-year period, I would be back where I am today.”

That’s what the dream is too--confidence, swagger, hard work. And its dimensions are broader still.

Bank vice president Sharon Butler, the mother of a 5-year-old child, talks about growing up in St. Louis, where, as a black person, there were certain parts of town that you just didn’t go.

“St. Louis was a city that was highly segregated even after all the legal restraints were gone,” she says. “Here, you don’t feel constraints of the same kind. There are more opportunities for people to find kindred spirits among people of different cultures here.

“People are more adventurous. They will try new things. Ideas get a bit of a fairer shake. You can go a long way on an idea in California.”

And as for the problems, Butler and others say California doesn’t hold the copyright. “The job of adults is to make dreams come true, in our own families, in our communities,” Butler says. “Dreams aren’t going to come as the end of a good night’s rest. They’re going to come from hard work.”