The Dream Projection Machine

Once upon a time, (eight years ago), there was a young man (Amos Rosethunkle, Ph.D.), in a faraway land, (very-west-Canada, which is, well, far enough from my home), who woke up and remembered that he was lonely.

He went to his yellow and red dotted kitchen and opened his soft green cabinet, the one where he kept his jasmine tea. He took the last teabag from the robin's egg blue tin and made tea. When his kettle (the littlest of his eleven kettles) was whistling Dixie (for each kettle had her own song), Amos remembered something else.

Amos remembered that he forgot his last-night's dream. And he was sad, for he did remember it was a very beguiling dream which had made him feel less lonely.

Now, if it had been you or me, we would have just sighed and got our galoshes on (it was raining that cold morning) and gone to work. But Amos was an inventor.

He went to his inventing office on the other side of town and read from some scientific journals, calculated some amazing numbers, and drew some blueprints.  It was to be his greatest invention, the dream projection machine.  Then he could record his dreams and watch them on his television with buttered popcorn.

Amos locked his office at the end of his day's work and went home. He had dinner by himself: a half-loaf of caraway bread; a half-carafe of Merlot wine; a half-hen, roasted; with a half-lettuce salad. He finished his repast with half of a small, lemon tart and hot water (for he had forgotten to buy more tea bags that day, being so preoccupied with noodling and conniving about his new invention).

He read from his Scrabble Dictionary and fell asleep in his favorite armchair, mouthing the two letter word for his favorite irrational number.

On waking the next morning, Amos unremembered his dream. It was that same entrancing dream he had had the night before.  He was now doubly determined to complete his visible light spectrum dream mechanical invention.

For many weeks he labored on paper and tinkered with lead solder and inverse wires and carbon sticks and thorium derived alloys and tubes from discarded, old television sets and South African mined jewels. And each night his wonderful dream repeated; and each morning the dream was devilishly forgotten, just out of memories' reach.

But as the weeks turned into seasons, Amos had to admit defeat. A machine which could record-your-dreams-so-you-could-view-them-the-next-day was beyond his ability to invent, if anyone could.

But his nightly dream teased and would not quit. He tried hypnosis to remember it and many other remedies from odd books. None worked.

Then one foggy, summer morning, Amos read on the back of his breakfast cereal box of another scientist who was had successfully constructed a visible light spectrum dream mechanical device, Doctor Rapunzel Quispelthorm.

He packed up his carpetbag and drove entirely across the continent to Norfolk, a quiet town in north Connecticut, where Dr. Quispelthorm lived and worked.

When she answered her doorbell, (which chimed Dixie), a sad Ms. Quispelthorm informed Amos that the young, eager writer had made a mistake and would be printing a retraction and apology in the next quarterly issue of The Journal of Scientific Practicums. It turned out that she did not actually complete her invention of a dreamatic recording device but had only been working on it and now had come to a dead end.

As she was slowly closing the door, Amos suggested that they compare their failed inventions to see if the flaws in each could be fixed by the other.

This they did. Amos and Rapunzel worked excitedly and very happily at it for months. All the while, Amos's dream continued each night. Rapunzel admitted that she too was haunted by a similar unremembered dream that she longed to remember each morning.

Their thinkings seemed to fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces and they were fixing each other's errors week after week.

But alas, they had to give up when one cloudy day, their contraption smoked and sputtered and fizzled.  It had done this before but somehow they both knew this was it.

Amos was getting his carpetbags ready to go home when he decided to ask Rapunzel to come with him to the restaurant down the road where they could say goodbye and lick their wounds.

At the restaurant, Amos looked across the candle lit table and noticed Rapunzel's eyes. He had those eyes somewhere before. "Where was it," he thought? He had been too involved with the inventing of the visible light spectrum dream mechanism to have looked into them before now.

"Where was it," Amos wondered?

He remembered. It was in his dream.

And of course, across the table Rapunzel was having the same thoughts.