The Dream Factory 

There is that time of day in the bustling city of San-Francisco, just after the fiery orange summer sun has dropped below the horizon, at an indeterminate point between dusk and evening, when the city drops to into a hushed half slumber and lounges in the warm salt scented breeze and the distant sounds of chugging of the engines of the boats working down in the bay.  

The office workers having made their way home across the intricate lattice of narrow streets, up the dusty roads, into the quieter realms of the hillside, sit quietly sipping ice cold beers from tall glass pitchers behind the thick brick walls of their aging Neoclassical villas. Basking cats lying dosing on wide, paint faded wooden balconies, feeling the slow retreat of the sun's rays and the dusky shadows reaching out over pristine bottle green lawns, stretch their legs, shake themselves off and slink inside to lap from patterned saucers brimming with lukewarm milk.  

It is in the hazy time that stagnates between the vigour's of the day and the fast approaching commitments of the evening that old memories begin to gently ferment in the still of the minds of the residents of the city. 

Riding the tram down Nob Hill, with the rhythmic rocking of the carriage car and the hypnotic clickety clack sound of the steel wheels over the uneven rails my eyelids drop and my thoughts drift from the glittering waters of the bay and turn inward. Into the vapours of my mind come the nomadic image of my first true love Saffi Fairbairn and a memory from long ago floats back to me from the recesses of my mind.  

We are in a half full theatre. Saffi's glowing face basks in reflective tribute to her intense blue eyes, her thin cotton dress clings lovingly to the gentle curves of her body. As I hear the distant refrain of her long forgotten voice I feel the glow of this fond recollection flush through my body. We are waiting together, sitting in the back row in the semi darkness, whispering forbidden secrets to each other when a young man with a guitar strolls out onto the stage. He is tall and gangly with dark, swept back hair. He starts to sing a song, 'Shake Rattle & Roll' whilst a group of young girls at the front scream up at him. Surprised by this unexpected intrusion Saffi turns from me and starts laughing and singing. 

A voice steals up on me, hushed, whispered, close by, drawing me back to the present. 

'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, 

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit 

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.' 

I jolt back into conscious. The girl next to me has arrived so quietly I had not felt her push up next to me on the seat. She is concentrating on her toes. She hangs her feet and kicks them up like a child on a swing seeing how far she can skim them across the deep waters of the pearlescent sky. Her face has a startling similarity to Saffi's, and in the instant, roused from my memories, I blurt out Saffi's name. Then realising that was forty years ago I cover up my foolishness by quickly adding. 'I'm sorry did you say something?' 

She speaks to her toes, not to me. 'Beautiful isn't it? It's Persian. A lament on the vagaries of the immutable passing of time.' Suddenly consumed by the earnestness of youth she turns to me, 'What if, what if you could capture all those great moments in time from the perspective of the people that were actually there and play them back at will. It would be almost like.... being able to travel in time.' 

'I'm sure it would be... fascinating...' I respond, searching for the right words to please her.  

'Fascinating?' Her face forms the next question in a mask of profound seriousness. 'It would be more than that surely? A pantheon of experiences to be lived and lived again, experiences to be drawn up from the view of their beholders with all their emotions at the time. Like capturing someone's recollection and dreams of the events exactly as they had lived through them.' 

'I don't think mine would be much of a catch.' 

'Oh I'm not so sure. I must go, this is my stop.' She slips away, as I watch her go a feeling of melancholy sweeps over me as she gently sways down the carriage and jumps lithely onto the cobbled street. 

I sigh and close my eyes, trying to recapture my lost moment with Saffi at the theatre. 

'It's possible!' she is standing below me under the open tram window. 'I'll show you. Come on, quickly!' 

The image of Saffi returned burns into my mind, caught by the impulse I grab my bag, push past the protesting grip man and jump down just as the carriage pulls off. She skips up and takes my hand in hers, cool and soft, and gently pulls me into the jumble of side streets. 

She chatters incessantly as we walk past the white wood clad houses, their fascia's bleached white by the long summers rays, hiding behind their tall iron railings and dark polished door hung with brass door ornaments of lions heads and odd bug eyed gargoyles. We stop at an old building plot to pick wild flowers which she weaves together in a chain as we walk. She talks of the weather, of Cicero and politics, Franco and the Spanish civil war, Che Guevara and T-shirts and the fact the horns of the boats in the bay remind her of Alexandria in the spring.  

When we stop I find we were standing in a thin paved lane south of the bay area. I look around, I know San Francisco well but cannot not place myself exactly. The old warehouses here lean dangerously as if the winter storms have exacted revenge for some past misdemeanor, now long forgotten. Walls of verdant green corrugated iron set with heavy doors warped by the sea air and brisk winter frosts line the street as regular as rusted post-boxes on a long country road. 

'Do you want to see?' she claps her hands together as if I'd just bought her a puppy on a lead. 

I say nothing, just nod. The nod of the wary. 

We pass from the cool of the evening into a small foyer and then she pulls a chain from her neck and using the intricately designed key opens the padlock hanging on the inner iron studded door. Stepping inside she extends her arm and beckons me in. 

In truth I'd been expecting to see an art gallery, the area this side of the bay being expensive for storage but cheap for retail has become popular with students and hippy dippy art dealers. In return for her company I had been quite content to make murmuring appreciative noises at whatever she may have shown me, crochet cushions, abstract paintings, china cats. For the moment my eyes burn in the brightness of the lights above us, I raise my hand to shield my face and follow her in. 

Around my knees a thick mist swirls and runs around me like cold soup as I move. Like the chilling grey mists that roll in over the Bay in the late autumn, cold to the touch, a clinging mass of gossamer threads that climb up and swamp everything, the cloud envelopes me and draws me into it.  

As my eyes became accustomed to the lights above I can see all around me, revealed by the occasion parting of the fog, row upon row of salt white statues, heads uplifted, pale faces turned upwards towards the lights.  

'So?' She turns to me. 

'It's impressive, it's conceptual?' I muster, then seeing the look on her face,' forgive me I'm not an artist. What is it?' 

'It's my dream factory!' she spins a little turn, arms outstretched like a ballerina and dances off down the central isle and calls up into the hollow air, 'what do you think?'  

'It's amazing, how big is it? I can't see the walls. Have you extended into the other warehouses?' I walk after her. 

'I think you'll find it's bigger in the inside than on the outside.' Her voice echos back to me. 'I thought you'd like it.' 

I've lost her in the mist, 'Hello, are you there.' I realise I don't even know her name.  

'I'm here.' She draws close, looks up at me and catches the fingers of my hand in hers.  

The place is still. So still. I stop and watch the mist wrap itself around my legs, then turn my face upward feeling the light warm my face. The strange stillness empties into me, the eerie figures in the simmering mist, the oddities of the glowing discs of light above me that claw at my eyes and throbbed in my head.  

My mind begins to spin. The room fills from afar with distant sound of applause, my head becomes fuzzy. I close my eyes.  

An old memory races back to me. Suddenly I'm with Saffi again. Saffi of old. Her face is electric with excitement, we have walked with the crowd from the Washington monument to the Lincoln memorial in the heat of the day. Far off stands a man on the steps of the colonnaded building on a podium surrounded microphones and photographers. A sea of heads dips up and down as we try to catch sight of him. We listen intently to the voice reverberating around us. 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. I have a dream...'' 

Saffi is beside me, holding tight onto my hand. The speaker booms with a voice, rich and resonant that reaches out over our heads. 

'Free at last, free at last' I hear the impassioned cry ringing in my ears. 

The voice drifts and wavers and evaporates into the mist. The mist swirls around. The lines of ethereal statues swim back to me. 

Saffi has gone. The man standing in front of me is wearing a neat black suit, thin black tie, white shirt with sparklingly silver cufflink peeping out from his cuffs. He has the benevolent look borne of the lessons learnt though a lifetime of fighting battles for freedom. He is as I remember him on the day of the speech. 

'Where's Saffi?' I ask. 

When he speaks his voice carries the low timbre of authority and an undeniable charisma, 'I'm a Chrononeirologist David. I explore history through the experiences of others. What is captured in their minds, can be regurgitated at will be the merest tickling of the mind with a cerebral feather. I came here long ago to begin my collection. Here, all around you is my living history.'  

'I don't understand.'  

'Then let me show you. Then you'll understand.' He smiles and rests him heavy hand on my shoulder. 

The mist races away and breaks into a thousand tiny shards. I'm standing in the cold, my raincoat flaps wet around the backs of my ankles. The sound of squally rain, like rice being thrown on rock, spins up at me. A small group of us are huddled together under a canopy, shying away from the grey rain as it whips past us. In front of us behind a water smeared window, the eyes of twenty grainy black and white screens blink back at us.  

From a tiny speaker above the shop window echo the words. 'Colombia, Colombia this is Euston AOS. Over.' 

Cold rain is trickling down my back. My skin crawls with the overwhelming excitement and pride of the moment. 

A figure steps uncertainly from the module and steadies himself with one hand, and calls across two hundred and fifty thousand miles of space to us. 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'  

'Jesus would you look at that', the man huddles next to me his coat collar turned high up against the wind. 'Who would have believed it? A man on the moon!' 

The vision recedes. Martin has gone.  

Further down the aisle, standing in the eddying vapour I catch sight of a space suited figure, standing still, facing me, my reflection in his visor. He turns slowly and lumbers into the gloom.  

'Wait!' I call after him. 

I run after him. I see him disappear off the right and I duck down through the statues in pursuit. Stopping breathless, I realise I'm not sure where I am. I'm lost in this sea of fog and glassy eyed figures. Standing close to a statue of a woman, my eye is drawn to the perfection of the carving, every crease of the skin, every crinkle in the side of the lips, each follicle of hair, has been perfectly captured. Then to my horror I see an infinitesimally small pulse on her throat.  

I stagger back bumping into another statue of a young man. With all my will I resist the urge to run. Summoning up my courage I touch his hand and tug it gently. He remains unmoved. Kneeling down waving the soft mist to one side I find he is anchored into the ground by a series of tubes that spring out of the earth and wind around his ankles then drill into his legs under his knees. A creeping dread fills me. I jump back in the shock of realisation and look around for a way out. The infernal fog makes it had to see very far, to each side stand the ghostly white figures, young women ,old men, their white eyes dimmed like boiled egg skins. I feel trapped, helpless in this maze.  

'David!' 

'God Saffi, you scared me. Where were you? ' 

'Saffi?' She coos softly, slipping her arm through mine. 

'I'm meant ....... I don't know what I meant... Saffi, what is this place, we need to get out of here, do you know the way?' 

Even as she talks her words sooth me, my panic ebbs away. She is calm. As I listen her words ooze over me like warm honey. 'You still don't understand do you? Here around you are your people going back through your history to the beginning of antiquity, ordinary people, people through whose eyes history should be told. Babylonian priests. Viennese craftsmen, Greek prophetesses, Tudor archers, Galilean carpenters, Persian astronomers, Roman foot soldiers, Chinese adventurers, Japanese sword makers, Mayan temple builders. They are all here, indigenous races, all from differing cultures, all from differing times stretching from now right back to the beginning of civilization.' 

I look at the nearest statue. An old man bent forward, one hand hidden in the folds of his robe the other hanging limply by his side. His eyes, open, faded into a ghostly white, stare blankly up into the light.  

She is watching me closely. 'Here in the light they stand and craft their dreams, an eternity of work to turn out something so perfect, so close to the original experience they had , that when you step into them it is like actually being there.' 

'Why?' My voice sounds strange, disembodied. 

'David, I have fought Hannibal at Zama, ridden with the Mongol hoards as they have swept across the boundless steppes, dodged musket fire on the main deck of the Victory, carved reliefs at the temples of Angkor Wat, watched the sun rise over the newly built tombs of the pharaohs, seen the first Spaniard explorers sail into a bay in South America, watched Pompey overcome by deadening black ash, stood helpless as the Gallic masses sacked Rome. I was with the Crusaders as they took Jerusalem and Saladin when he took it back again.' 

'But what about them?' 

'Don't worry David. They will live forever caught in the web of their dreams. They've felt pain, elation, fear, loss, love. And I can do all this again and again forever through them. There is no machine that can match this. No life, however well spent that can come even close to this, to what I can experience.' 

She is entrancing. Everything I've ever wanted. It seems so long ago when we were together and she's here now, my sweetest Saffi, holding my hand, pushing my hair from my face and smiling. Happy like I always remember her. 

I can feel her hands slipping my sandals from my feet. I feel powerless to resist, the lights are entrancing, they pull me in like the moth to the moon on a warm summer night. My feet settle into the deep soil. I can feel her as she runs the tubes round the base of my legs, the sharp pricks of pain make me flinch. 'It's OK, It's OK,' she whispers gently like she is tending a sick dog. 

The warmth on my face takes me in, my eyes flutter and turn up toward the light. 'Is this all a dream?' I hear my voice far off. 

'Perhaps it is. Just a dream.' her soft voice comes to me. 'Sleep now.'