about the title of the book
... I had the title for quite a few years and I was looking for a book to pin it on. I had a number of different writing projects in mind. A book of short stories, a book of dreams, an autobiography, but I never got round doing any of those things so the title was still floating and then when Marcela came up with the idea of the book of poetry and art work, I said "OK, I'll stick this title on this book".

about dreams
... Many of the poems and pictures are inspired by dreams that I've had. But obviously it is not just nocturnal dreams, but dreams in the sense of phantasies and aspirations. Another way of looking at the title is that I never knew my father. I maybe saw him once or twice a year before he died which was in 1965, so I guess the fact is he never gave me any dreams. He certainly never told me any, so I decided "OK I will say he sold me instead of telling me". It's probably a bit unfair on him to do that but the cynical title reflects cynical attitude towards maybe my family. And at the same time we live in a very nasty capitalist world and I don't really think anyone would give dreams for free in this society of ours. Any dreams you get are constantly sold to you. And, in a way, father is like society. Tony Blair, George Bush, they just sell you nightmares, actually, they don't sell you dreams.

about the message
... There is no way a non-disabled person can get to really see how we, disabled people, see the world or how we experience the world ... some non-disabled friends of mine who have looked at this book said "God, I never realised that it was like that. It's really interesting getting your perspective on life, how you are experiencing the world". And it's great that they are able to get this perspective through the pictures and through the poetry and without me having to tie them down on the chair ...

about disability, inequalities and power
... There's a problem of how to deal with power inequalities and how you can distribute access to power in a more democratic, fair, equal way. And we see in our society that there are gross inequalities in the access to power. And it is not about power to dominate and control others, it's just the power to determine your own life and to live the life that you want. There are some groups, whether it's women, whether it's black people, Asian people, disabled people, people with certain sexual orientation, that may feel that they have less access to power than their opposite counterparts. And that's in a sense what I am talking about. It's not just about THEY are Labour or, THEY are Conservative, or THEY are "able-bodied" and WE are not so called able-bodied, we are disabled. Actually, the reason I hate the word disabled is because it means without power. And I think we shouldn't be labelled with a word that constantly describes us as someone without power. Our aim is to get power. The power to live the life that we want to lead, to have the opportunities that we believe we should have on equal basis to anyone else.

about discrimination and how the shit starts
... There is certainly legislation that is threatening to disabled people. The Mental Incapacity Bill for example is giving licence to kill disabled people unfortunate enough to end up in a hospital. And the Embryology and Fertilisation Bill with the amendment that says that if a disabled foetus has achieved full term, nine months, it can actually be killed whereas non-disabled foetus is actually even harder to abort ... We have got this attitude in this country where disabled people are considered to be useless, so we have a prioritization system now in our health care. So if you are disabled and you go to a hospital, you are less likely to receive proper treatment because they would like to see you dead. And to try and get on to the waiting list, if you are disabled, it's ten times harder than if you are non-disabled. Because again they actually want to see you dead. And there is the kind of explicit euthanasia policy that people like Thatcher and Blair are slowly introducing into our society.

... It's coming from corporate capitalism I suppose. It's coming from the scientists' idea of creating the perfect human beings, because of all the efficiency needed for generating profit. So it's coming from the motivation to maximize profits ... Insurance companies, for example. It's getting harder and harder for people who are ill, for people who are old, people who are disabled, to get insurance. Because insurance companies don't want to pay out. And it's coming again from the whole genetic engineering or genetic science. Processes are going on where DNA research is looking for defects and things that are likely to cause this disability or that disability or any kind of impairment. It could be a social impairment, it could be a psychological impairment, it could be a personality impairment or how you want to call it. Any kind of impairment that could be in their view genetically determined. They want to eliminate it because they see it as a factor that will be detrimental to the processes of profit making ultimately.

how it develops
... And the transport situation, this business of locking people out of cities. It certainly started with disabled people and it's getting to point where I'm not allowed to get into London because every time I do, there is a good chance I'll end up with a parking ticket. In fact the London boroughs have decided since the 1980s to ignore the disabled badge and they claim they've got their own badge. But then you may end up having to have about five or ten different disabled badges. You have to use them in every borough you are going. They have become sort of passports. You cannot go to Kensington and Chelsea unless you show the Kensington and Chelsea disabled badge. You cannot to go to Westminster unless you have the disabled badge for Westminster. So now we have this system of restricting disabled people's mobility and movement in the metropolitan areas and it's obvious in London.

... And all this nonsense about immigrants, asylum seekers... I noticed that actually most of the time when they go on about immigrants and asylum seekers they don't mind the American immigrants because they are white, they don't mind the Australian immigrants. But anyone who's got a slight colour to them or comes from some apparent dodgy regime, they are going to be a bit scared. There has been so much research shown over the last ten years that ... Britain ... has always actually received more income from immigrants that it's actually paid out to immigrants coming. But this is just part of the general psychology of fear that is being created in this country to make Britain more xenophobic than ever and at the same time to restrict our movement. Because the governments don't want us meeting in public places, so we've got these anti protest bills that prevent us from going to Parliament Square, etc. because the politicians want to have an easy life and they don't want to be told what they are doing wrong. And they don't want people to stop them from doing things which is only in the interest of politicians and the people that pay for them to be in power, the big multinational companies... So there is this general trend to restrict all, not just disabled people's freedom and movement...

and how it ends
... As it happened in Nazi Germany. The first people that were gassed in Nazi Germany were disabled people. Not Jews, not gypsies, not communists, but disabled people. The first people that were being castrated, sterilised were disabled people. And the first babies that had been murdered in hospitals by Nazi doctors were disabled people. So the general public should look at what happens to disabled people and realise that that is a warning of about what's going to happen to them next. So it's actually in the interest of non-disabled people to fight with us, to be our allies.