...And Dreams Are Dreams

Our business was a resounding success. Even though I am a writer, I can’t think of a better phrase to describe it. We hardly understood how we had opened such a chain of agencies, in Athens and Salonika to start with, and then all over Greece. We were competing with video stores. But as we kept growing, the business got more difficult to handle. The four of us had begun to tire. Young people had now taken over the gigantic enterprise, which made Dimitris rub his hands with glee and regard the big supermarket trusts as if they were insects.

The other newspapers kept printing embittered comments, because of the money they got from advertising the trusts, even though the journalists, as individuals, were on our side. The truth is that not one of us became rich. We didn’t buy luxury cars or build villas in Ekáli. So as far as “making it big” went, there was no question of that. On the contrary, we were always quick to denounce through our paper and our weekly TV program any attempt at commercialization, starting with the key rings and T-shirts printed with the slogan, “I dream, therefore I am,” and ending with the phoney stores that tried to imitate us by selling products made of dream sperm — they changed the word plasma to sperm so we couldn’t sue them.

The public was on our side, because we were protecting its dreams. Whenever skits in theatrical revues tried to parody us, they were booed by the public. Whatever dream plays were dug up from the archives never made it on stage. People knew that our movement expressed serious ideas, and that these dream plays were diseased dream fantasies of the past.

We raised the right to dream onto the pedestal of real life. We were terrestrial, and that is why we dreamed.

We were not extraterrestrials, propagandists of a new technology or some multinational conglomerate of supermen. Our trust, if one could call it that, had to do with individualization, the way Alvin Toffler had predicted in his early books, and not at all with the turning of people into sheep, as the multinationals of the third wave would have liked. We accepted technology to the extent that it increased the potential of the dream. We did not fight technology, but neither did we contribute, in any way, to its development.