The Dream Machine

The following blog is the first story in a paperback entitled 'Seven Dreams of Reality' (ISBN: 978-1-84436-911-9). Written by travel writer Adam Colton ('Mud Sweat and Beers' & 'England and Wales in a Flash'), the dream-like stories promise 'mind-blowing twists' to diligent readers.

THE DREAM MACHINE

Vincent Smithfield had always had the opinion that dreams were of considerably greater interest than reality.

“He would say that,” people always murmured to themselves as he extolled the virtues of another restless night’s sleep to his audience at the local bar, “All he does is paint picture frames for a living.”

There was more going on in Vincent’s basement than his struggling business, but as nobody ever ventured down there, nobody ever knew.

And so one day, he found himself standing beside a white-board, waving a marker pen around randomly at a room full of academics and newspaper reporters.

“Dreams are a product of a chemical called MDNA,” he announced proudly, “This substance occurs naturally in the warts on the backs of toads,” [carefully timed pause] “…although I have never had the urge to lick a toad before.”

He had no idea if this was true; it was just something somebody had said to him in conversation when he was hiking around Scotland many years ago. Given the lack of laughter from his audience he wished he had omitted this dubious fact.

Still, his words were of little importance, it was the machine that people had come to see.

The ‘science’ had something to do with being wired up to electrodes which monitored a person’s brain patterns during sleep. During a period of REM or ‘dream sleep,’ the probes would activate the recording device which would then create a digitally simulated approximation of what was happening in the subject’s mind.

In a soundproofed room behind, his Uncle Bert was obliviously snoozing away, having followed the simple instructions to stay awake for 24 hours prior to the experiment. For taking part in this ‘wanton lunacy’ he would be rewarded with a pint of Scragglewort ale whenever he walked into the local pub for the next six months. It seemed a reasonable repayment.

Proudly turning on the overhead projector, Vincent looked down at his computer screen and made a few arcane movements with the mouse. Then suddenly, up flashed an image of a church surrounded by daffodils.

The film was clearly the view of somebody walking along a stony footpath towards a church door. The sound of birds and church bells now wafted around the room. Particularly prominent in this bucolic soundtrack was the wonderfully unimaginative call of the wood-pigeon. Or was it a ring-necked dove? Vincent never was quite sure.

On the screen an elderly gent’s hand reached for the large, black metal handle. Giving a twist and a yank, the door opened with a creak, inside was the familiar view of the bar at Uncle Bert’s local; a rustic looking place with a blazing log fire and wooden beams. But something was very strange about this – there was an oak tree growing in the corner of the room with four children sitting around it on small chairs.

There was some music playing in the background which sounded positively mediaeval, all flutes and the like with a pounding yet indecipherable beat underneath.

Vincent gazed at the faces in the audience which were now devoid of all expression, totally engrossed in the ‘movie’ that his uncle had unwittingly prepared for them.

A female voice then addressed the dreamer, “Where’s Juliette?”

Juliette, who everybody correctly assumed to be the barmaid, had gone to a bingo hall in Whitstable. Given that the pub, and so presumably the church, and definitely the room where the presentation was taking place, were all in a small town in Lincolnshire, it seemed pretty unlikely that anybody would get a drink this evening.

There was a hypnotic quality about the combinations of sounds and images, especially the incessant bar-room hubbub. Having analysed his own dreams since childhood, Vincent knew that these sounds would still be buzzing around his uncle’s head when he came to.

Just then there was an almighty crash; the dark brown roots of the tree were rising up out of the ground. The floor was giving way and the flagstones were now juxtaposed at the kinds of angles you would encounter in one of those crooked houses in a kiddies’ fairground. It was clearly impossible to stay on two feet and a pair of aging, hairy hands reached forward to grab hold of one of the aging, hairy, upwardly mobile roots. This person was clearly being lifted off the ground and was hanging on for dear life. The noise emanating from the speakers around the room was a deafening rushing sound, like being trapped inside your own head with the blood rushing around interminably. The audience shuffled uncomfortably in their chairs as the claustrophobic feel of the ‘dream’ began to get just a little too vivid for comfort.

The view on the screen was now of a church with its rows of wooden pews as though being viewed from the rafters. And what’s more, Bert was losing his grip, whilst the dream’s grip on the viewers was becoming increasingly strong.

His hands were slipping and finally relinquished their grasp on the gnarled oak’s roots.

On the screen were shots of stained glass windows flashing past at delirious angles. A feeling of impending doom washed over all who watched. The fall seemed to go on forever, until…

The screen went blank and a collective sigh issued from Vincent’s congregation, the tension being alleviated with his intentionally humorous comment that Uncle Bert had just awoken with a ‘spasmodic jerk.’ Ironically, this was a rather derogatory term that the elderly chap had used to describe his nephew when he was first invited to take part in the experiment. Poetic justice you could say, now that the machine was a proven success.

Quite what the practical uses of a ‘dream capture synthesiser’ would be was another question entirely. There was always the possibility that a suspicious spouse could use it to catch a partner dreaming of somebody else, but attaching a series of wires and electrodes to a sleeping husband or wife without waking them could be tricky, and as Vincent knew, dreams should not be taken literally.

So the machine sat idle in Vincent’s basement for a while, and the local press ran a series of stories on what they had seen, with a general bent towards proving Mr Smithfield to be some kind of befuddled eccentric. Of course, the inventor had now taken to sleeping in the basement wired up to the infernal device, which so far hadn’t yielded anything more interesting than eight hours of electrostatic fuzz. Why did it record Uncle Bert’s night-time preambles so faithfully yet fail to pick up anything since? – Not even that dream about the budgie that was actually a snake with feathers on!

Vincent knew that obsessionalism wasn’t healthy, so one morning after checking the machine for recordings that clearly weren’t there, he packed a bag, wandered down to the local railway station and bought himself a five-day return to Aberdeen. A quote he had used at a recent presentation had reminded him of his days hiking the Caledonian landscape with nothing more than a rucksack and a friend with a head full of crazy ideas. It was time to revisit those paths, to revisit the thoughts the pair of them had dropped along the way, in hope of some inspiration.

It was sometime during the second day that things got rather strange.

The grassy trail was narrow and hemmed in on both sides by brambles. As the warm sunshine beat down, flies darted in and out of the undergrowth. The sound of birdsong was very prominent and clearest of all was the familiar coo of his old friend the wood-pigeon. He humorously mused that the call of this ubiquitous bird was just the same north of the border as back in good old Lincolnshire – it had not the slightest hint of a Scottish accent!

After a hundred yards or so, Vincent came to a decrepit wooden gate surrounded by overhanging bushes. Realising that it would be much simpler to climb over than to attempt to open it, he hauled himself over with ease and emerged from the bushes into what seemed to be a churchyard.

Then suddenly one of those deja vous moments hit him. The scene before him was strikingly familiar: a stony footpath, daffodils and there, bold as brass in front of him was a church that he thought belonged in Lincolnshire. This was insanity. Or was it?

It was his uncle’s dream that he was remembering, not his own. Uncle Bert must have visited the exact spot at some point in his life and conveniently regurgitated the memory in his dream. Yes, that was it.

They say that curiosity killed the cat, and Vincent’s inquisitive nature naturally compelled him to walk up to the large, arched wooden door and try the handle. As he approached, he felt like an actor trapped in a film, carrying out his role as though there were no other options available. His heart was beating so intensely that he thought it was going to pound right out of his chest. Before clasping the handle, he put his ear to the door. He could hear music. Peculiarly, the rhythm of his agitated heartbeat seemed to fit in perfectly with the rhythm of the melody. It sounded like folk music.

Then suddenly, there it was – the exact same mesmerising tune he had heard emanating from the speakers at his presentation; a flute tackling the melody, backed by stringed instruments of some kind, perhaps a harpsichord. How could this be happening? Vincent’s logical mind was being thrown into disarray. Was he losing it?

With a burst of adrenaline, he grabbed the metal hoop with both hands, and making an almost violent twisting motion, he released the catch inside and pushed firmly on the heavy oak door.

The quartet of young musicians were stunned by this intrusion. They were practicing for a recital of Elizabethan music which would take place in the church that evening, resplendent in full Tudor dress. Now all four of them were staring at Vincent with open mouths. A lady’s footsteps echoed across the flagstone floor of the ancient building with a fast yet determined pace.

As she turned the corner from the central aisle to face the door, she stopped in her tracks, clearly alarmed by the fact that a strange man was staring in an almost menacing way at her four youthful performers. Just what was this fellow’s intention?

Unsure that she could handle this situation, she needed some assistance, so opening her mouth she firmly addressed the children with a question:

“Where’s Juliette?”

Vincent’s head was spinning and he began to feel quite faint. His eyesight became blurred and he struggled to focus, fixing his eyes on the bright light coming through the stained glass windows. It was as though he had become trapped inside his own mind and a feeling of dread washed over him like a huge tidal wave. He turned to grab hold of the door to steady himself but missed the handle. His hands scraped down the wooden surface, and yes, it appeared to him exactly as that oak tree had done to his uncle in his dream. The sound of blood rushing around his head was immense and time seemed to have slowed to a pace where it felt like it was about to stop completely. Then, bang – his head hit the ground and he was out like a light.

*********

At first Vincent thought he must have fallen out of bed in the night but gradually he remembered the church, the music and a sudden encounter with a cold flagstone floor. Slowly, it dawned on him; he wasn’t in a place of worship but wrapped up in a duvet in his own basement. He had never been to Scotland, at least not since that walk with his mate twenty years ago.

Sitting upright in the half-light, he carefully extricated himself from the maze of wires that had been attached to his head.

Surely his invention couldn’t work in reverse? For several nights running he had meticulously connected himself up to the device until his head looked as though it had sprouted wires, yet the next day it had recorded nothing. Had it actually put his uncle’s dream into his mind instead? And if so, what a breakthrough that would be – people could experience each other’s dreams as and when they pleased – had Vincent inadvertently opened the door to a new era of virtual reality entertainment? Not forgetting his Uncle Bert’s contribution to the experiment of course.

His Uncle Bert?

Vincent scratched his head. “I haven’t got an Uncle Bert,” he mumbled to himself.

His heart sank like a stone. There had never been a presentation, and the only person that knew about the dream machine as yet was its creator.

“Hang about,” Vincent told himself, “That was all just a dream; if this thing works, reality is going to be better than that.”

Emboldened by this thought, he leapt from the pile of bedclothes and walked over to the computer. With a flick of the mouse the blank screen changed to the picture of Stonehenge that he used as a desktop.

He clicked on the yellow folder in the bottom right-hand corner marked ‘dream capture.’

It was empty.

For six weeks he had been trying to perfect this darned machine. Six weeks of sleeping in the basement; six weeks of waking up and clicking open an empty folder. Enough was enough. This project was lunacy.

He yanked the wires out of the back of the computer so hard that they recoiled like a whip and began angrily stabbing commands into his keyboard that translated as ‘erase hard drive.’ Walking away from the desk, he walked away from his dreams of becoming an inventor, boiled a kettle, and half scalding himself, he made a cup of tea. Milk and two sugars.

Carrying his cup in one hand and an A5-sized picture frame in the other, he walked across to a workbench covered with tins of paint. Picking up a brush he began the therapeutically serene task of transforming a bland piece of wood into something you could hang on your wall. He knew there was a reason he stuck at the job, and this was it.

Perhaps it was just as well that he got too engrossed in his work to notice what was going on behind him. As the computer flicked through all the files it was destroying, the opening frame of a movie appeared for a split second on the screen. And what was this subliminal shot?

A room filled with academics, a white board, a computer with a plethora of wires hanging out of the back and in the foreground, Vincent’s arm waving a marker pen in the air.

THE END

Enjoyed this and want more? Order your copy of 'Seven Dreams of Reality' (ISBN: 978-1-84436-911-9) through your local bookshop or direct from the publisher by emailing Hamcopublishing@AOL.com