This plasma was extracted from a flower called dreamanthus, commonly known as the dream flower, which flourishes on the moon and in the lunar regions of our planet: the deserts. In our country, one can find dreamanthus in abundance in the Mani and certain areas of Kilkis, on plantations that the large supermarket trusts tried to have declared forbidden, as if they were plantations of hashish, but the Supreme Court beat them to it and declared the plantations protected, since the flowers did not contain any toxic substance and did not cause addiction. On the contrary, read the Court’s decision, they contain the essence of life, which consists of such stuff as dreams are made of: the life-giving force of the sun.
Our coffee and tea were made of dream plasma, our oil made with dream lipids, our legumes and other vegetables grown with fertilizers of dream plasma, and our fish came from the dream Sea of Messolongi, where the plankton in the water was fortified with dream-flower plasma. Our trout, our snails, our marsh frogs, were all snapped up. People preferred our products, partly because in them they found what was lacking in terrestrial foods grown with chemical fertilizers, but especially because they could pay for them in dream drachmas, that is to say coupons that they would cut out of our newspaper and that covered the cost of production. So when the third devaluation of the drachma took place, and all goods went up in price yet again, our prices remained firm, because the ratio of the dream drachma to the dream dollar remained the same.
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.
And the more the politicians went downhill with their antiquated programs, the more our movement grew among the people. Because existing political structures are like a radio station whose signal you cannot receive because, while you move along in your car, it remains immobile.
Then one day, the prime minister asked to see us.
He sent one of his personal secretaries in person to invite us. We accepted most eagerly what was for us a great honor, especially since we supported his efforts. The meeting was set for Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock. We had decided that only Dimitris and I would go. The others didn’t want to go: if there were a lot of us, we would look like a union. At the entrance of the old parliament building, our names, written in the appointment book, awaited us. They kept our identity cards, and a guard led us to the office of the secretary who had invited us. He offered us coffee:
“Not your kind,” he said, smiling, “ours.”
“There is no yours or ours,” Dimitris replied; “we are all one people.”
We watched various people come through, asking for favors. It gave us an idea of how tiring the job of a personal secretary can be: answering phones, dealing with persistent requests of citizens wanting to see the prime minister in person, with powerful people trying to intervene in the prime minister’s work, and others shirking their duties.
The prime minister apologized when he opened his door to let us in. The delay was not his fault, but the fault of the United States ambassador who had stayed longer than the time provided. The date was approaching for the military bases to be disassembled, so the prime minister must have had all kinds of worries on his mind, worries of a quantum nature: the foreign military bases had to go and stay at the same time.
He explained various problems to us,
confidentially. Times were very hard, as always in this country, which we knew as well as he did. Then, taking a paternal interest, he asked us about our movement: where did we feel its success came from?
To what did we attribute this success, and did it contain elements that he, as a governor, could promote?
“Unfortunately,” I replied, “dreaming could never become an affair of the state.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said, “but I would like to know whether you have any concrete demands with which we, as a socialist movement, if not as a state, could help.”
“Unfortunately,” I repeated, “we grow in power as you lose yours. It’s simple: not having any place else to go after abandoning you, people come to us, where they are given nothing more than the right to dream, which is the right to hope for better days.”
I used his campaign slogan on purpose, as if to tell him that people felt their expectations had been lamentably betrayed, and that the responsibility for this failure lay, if not with him, then with his colleagues.
“They’ve declared war on us on all fronts,” he said.
I responded that for me politics was like human relationships: unless you offer the other person a vision, a horizon, a prospect, it won’t work. Otherwise, however large a gift you may give a worker, he will not respond. He will accept your gift only as a tiny bright spot in the general darkness. But if you offer him a prospect, then even a slap will seem like a caress. In this case, heavy taxation weighs on him less than a tax exemption with no horizon. That’s what had happened to the movement during its second four years in power. It wasn’t working, because it had no dream, no vision, no prospect. The sacks of Aeolus had deflated. Of course, I was quick to admit, as I saw his face grow dark, a lot had been achieved. Undeniably.