...And Dreams Are Dreams

— 6-

“You, my friend, are living in a dream world.”

How these words came to mean something unfeasible, something unattainable, was the first thing we tried to explain to our readers. We wanted to transform that phrase, to change its negative sense to a positive one.

So we changed it to the imperative: “You, my friend: live in a dream world!”

We did the same with the expression that implies that someone has given false information or has altered the truth: “You must be dreaming.” To our readers it came to mean, “You must be telling the truth.” As for

“The fool had a dream and saw his destiny,” we changed that to, “The wise man had a dream and saw his destiny,” although that came only after we had convinced our readers that the only practical people in life are dreamers. The so-called technocrats who live in the abstract world of numbers and statistics, opinion polls and quotas, we told our readers, are actually the lotus-eaters, the fantasists, the mythmakers.

These transformations of a language that

concentrated the habits of centuries, naturally, could not be achieved overnight. As with every true change, they had to first be acquired by the public through experience. And experience proved that real poverty was the absence of dreams. Every poor person was potentially rich by virtue of his dreams, whereas a rich man without dreams was forever indigent.

It wasn’t easy; I’ll say it again. First, the ground had to be removed from under the feet of the privileged in order to weaken their dominance, in order for a fortune not to be able to guarantee some power or other.

In the beginning, the socialist government (with its programs for social tourism, senior citizen shelters, group sports activities for men and women, European youth meetings, and the new employment

organization) was eager to accept our propositions. For a while it supported such initiatives, but soon, without a dream, without a vision, it backed down. That was when our big chance came along.

Yes, the circumstances were in our favor. When the first general strikes began, our newspaper showed an unexpected increase in sales. It was as if the newly unemployed had more time to devote to their dreams.

Because dreams need time and space in which to develop. They need air. A general strike makes them multiply at an extravagant rate. It allows them to take their rightful place in this life, which is otherwise so prosaic and wretched, so full of minor worries.