I open the door and there is a man wearing a mask of my face.
“Can I come in?”
“I wondered when you’d arrive. Welcome.” I say. He is wearing a dirty police officer uniform and he smells of electricity. We walk through the hallway and into the living room. I had rented a house for a few days, a lonely chateau surrounded by trees.
“Would you like something to drink?” I say, going over to a minibar against a wall.
“Sit down.” He says. I look over and see his has his hand on a pistol at his hip. I can also see it is made from a single piece of plastic, he had tried to paint it to look realistic but the way the light caught it betrayed the underlying form. It was a replica. I pour myself a gin and tonic, going over to sit on the couch. Floor to ceiling windows across showed the forest night.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“Footage online. In the background of uploaded photos. Security cameras. I created a program that would scan social media and news feeds, I’ve been tracking you and your car for several weeks.”
“I see.”
“You also review fast food places from the same e-mail account, leaving a trail of one star reviews from here all the way back to New York.”
“Ah, yes.” I say, smiling at the memories. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“I’m glad. I need to setup some equipment, would you mind putting these handcuffs on?”
“Please.” I say, holding out my hands. He cuffs me then goes over to a sports bag he had brought with him.
“I was wondering, why are you wearing a mask of my face?” I say. He pauses.
“Do you have the sense of Déjà vu?”
“No, not right now anyway.”
“Neither do I. But all of this is so familiar to me. I have been here before.”
“In this house?”
“In this very moment. You and I, in this room, having this conversation. That is how I knew to wear this mask, the mask of your face.” He says. I drink deeply from my glass.
“Are you a time traveller?” I ask. He laughs.
“No, not quite. I am a scientist. My field of research was Hypnology, the study of sleep. I was particularly interested in dreams. In all the advancements in science, our understanding of dreams is still quite primitive. It was my wish to be able to record dreams, so that they could be studied afterwards.” He says, pulling a metal thing from the bag. It looked like an old-style VR headset, made of metal and beige plastic.
“This machine can record dreams.” He says. I lean closer.
“Amazing. It works?” I say. Video Cop nods, taking a cylinder out of the bag and setting it up. It was a portable projection screen.
“Would you like to see one of my dreams?”
“Is this what you’ve been showing people?” I ask. He shuffles. I had known about him from the news reports. A man dressed as a cop would enter homes, get families to watch something and afterwards they’d barely be able to speak, nevermind tell others what they had seen. The shock of it had turned their hair grey.
“No, no, this is just for you.” He says, clicking a projector on. It takes him a moment to align the blue background within the edges of the screen, then the recording starts.
I see us both in the room we are in. I am handcuffed on the couch, drinking a gin and tonic, he is wearing a mask of my face, both of us watching something being projected on the screen. The dimensions, shapes and colours are a little different, but it was recognisable.
“It seems you had a dream of premonition.”
“I think there are moments in time that are so strong, that they echo in the past as well as the future. Have you ever had a dream and days later, found it predicted something?”
“Not like this. Maybe more metaphorical though, sure.” I say.
“Don’t you see? This is proof that dreams can tell the future!” says Video Cop.
“Or you had a dream that influenced you to then do the thing you dreamt about.” I say. Video Cop sits in a chair next to me, sighing.
“It is too detailed. Too specific. This room. Your face. This has already happened and it has rippled across time. Don’t you see?” he says. I shake my head.
“No.”
“I didn’t come here just to show you my dream. You were asking early what I have been showing others, so let me show you.” He says, taking the dream recorder over to the projector and plugging it in.
“After I had tested the dream recorder on myself, I was curious to see the dreams of other people. At the time I was living with my father, and so I recorded his dreams.” He says. The projection shows a normal video seemingly captured by Video Cop’s phone. It was of a very elderly man, lying in bed. The flash from the phone was on, throwing harsh shadows behind everything, reflecting off the angles of the machine.
“There was a malfunction. The radio waves inside the dream recorder intensified to lethal amounts, acting like a microwave. I had killed my father.” He continues, watching the phone footage of the old man convulsing, vapour starts drifting from beneath the machine. The phone is dropped on the floor, giving us a view of the ceiling, taupe paint over a roofbeam cutting diagonally across the frame, the light shining down beneath the lampshade and into the lens. The video stops.
“I’m sorry.” I say.
“What are you sorry for? Why does everyone say they are sorry? They didn’t do it, I did.”
“It was an accident.”
“I know. But if my father hadn’t have died, the dream recorder would never have captured what it did. I have recorded the mind of somebody dying.”
“I thought it just recorded dreams.”
“It appears as though when we die, we dream. The deceased continue dreaming once life has left the body.”
“What do they dream?”
“The dead dream of heaven.” He says. We sit in the dark room, it has started to rain outside. I finish my drink and look at the man sitting nearby. He seemed to believe everything he has told me. There was a space between the holes in his mask and his eyes, casting dark shadows where his skin was supposed to be.
“What the dream recorder has captured will change the world. We have irrefutable proof that there’s an afterlife. We will need to re-evaluate everything we know about science, religion, death. We might even be able to communicate directly with God.”
“Is this footage what the others saw?”
“Yes. It is unfortunate, it seems for a living person to witness heaven that it drives them insane.”
“But you’ve seen it.”
“Many times. That is why I am conducting my experiments, small control groups, trying to configure the optimal way to experience the recording of my father’s death dream so that it doesn’t cause the current side effects. It would be highly unethical for me to publish this footage online, it could potentially break the minds of billions of people.” He says.
“Are you going to show me?” I say. Under the mask, he smiles.
“I have been looking forward to it.” Says Video Cop, going over to the dream recorder and pressing some buttons. I sit back in my seat and begin to watch.
The footage begins. It is of a landscape, a yellow and white sky. The old man from the video was walking towards a hill. I realise this must have been his dream whilst he was alive. It flashed white, black. There was a sound, so quiet and low, it felt familiar yet totally unrecognisable. What came to mind was a shape, interconnected. It was the feeling of the shape, like hands clasped together over a lock. There was a square of brown, the colour seemed to shift, pulse, move. It was a colour I hadn’t seen before. I noticed the colour wasn’t just limited to the square, but ran in a web across the blackness, seeming to move beneath the surface like tendrils.
A dot. A white dot.
I realised I had been holding my breath, letting it out, breathing in again, transfixed by what I was seeing. The dot expanded, transformed, it was like seeing something in the distance through a telescope you made from your fingers. As the image shifted, I noticed it had gone quiet. There had been another sound before, a hidden roar that had faded. The blood had stopped moving around his body and was now trickling through arteries and veins, miniature red waterfalls emptying into bruised reservoirs. The fuzzy dot continued to grow, turning a dark pale purple. It was a tall room, the old man didn’t look up and so our point of view was locked onto the figure standing there. It was made of stone and cloth, gathering a robe around its face and shoulders so that its head resembled a dolphin. An arm lifted, pointing towards the back wall of the room. A door began to open. And beyond the door was heaven.
Fractal death fields and mountains the shape of fire. An impossible palace lay ahead. All around there was a colourless fog hiding the shapes of things that had no symmetry. The sky overhead held the universe, but as soon as the dreamer noticed it, it seemed to blossom, opening up to the great abyss that lies between. And from it came the sound of a grave.
The film ended. We were sat in the dark once again, the rain falling against the window. Video Cop leaned forward, looking at me, his eyes shifting backwards and forwards as he tried to read me. I turn to him.
“Thank you for showing me.” I say.
“You feel okay? You can remember what you have seen?”
“Yes. I also know why I was able to watch it, whilst others can’t.” I say.
“Tell me.”
“I have seen it before.” I say. He is quiet.
“You mean, you have seen it in a dream?”
“No. When I was born, I died. They resuscitated me soon after, but my first memory was of death. The afterimage of heaven had burned itself into my brain, just as the sun does if you stare at it long enough. I had never been sure, but now I have seen it again, I remember.”
“Don’t you see what this means! You and I are destined to meet here! You are the only one who has been able to watch the dream of a dying man, you have to help me.”
“Before I do that, I would like to try the dream recorder for myself.”
“But its dangerous!” he says. I smile, holding the handcuffs up.
“Maybe this is part of how I help you. Besides, I’ve seen your dreams, it seems only fair that you see mine.” I say. After a moment he agrees, and I go to lie down on the couch. Video Cop puts the dream recorder over my head.
“I’ll keep an eye on you. I can also watch your dreams live through the projector.”
“Thank you. See you soon.” I say, winking, before pulling the dream recorder over my eyes and start trying to sleep.
I’m woken up by a man screaming. I pull the dream recorder off my head, momentarily confused between the two states.
“What?” I say. Video Cop is sat by my feet, holding his hands over his eyes. I go over to touch him and he shrinks away, the intensity of his screams rising like an injured child.
“What’s the matter? What did you see?” I ask. His noises soften until he is quiet.
“Video Cop?” I say, waving my hand in front of his face. Unresponsive. I check his pulse, his heart is still beating, arrhythmically. I needed to take off his mask. When I do, two things happen. I see the man beneath the mask staring corpselike into the distance, his hair had turned white and his eyes appeared flat. I also started to get an intense sensation of recognition, feeling as though I now remembered what happens next. After looking at it for a moment in my hands, I pull the mask of myself over my head, leaning close to Video Cop, seeing the reflection of myself in dilated pupils.
“You’re right. I have dreamt about this before. The two of us, here, like this.” I say, straddling him, leaning so close our faces almost touch. I think he makes a sound, but it is too quiet to properly hear. What could he have seen to have such an effect on him?
The bags are packed quickly, I find a hammer in a drawer, nail the mask to the front entrance. The cleaner would arrive tomorrow and find Video Cop, he’d get arrested and I didn’t need to hide or wear disguises any more. As I drive the Hyundai Sonata away, I look at the dream recorder on the passenger seat. The evidence of heaven could change the world, but it seems the knowledge of this was beyond humanity’s comprehension. I stop the car, get out, throw the dream recorder into the night and it disappears between the trees. For a moment, I regret it, but could also see the funny side in this whole situation. I sit in the car, listening to the rain fall on the roof, thinking about time and dreams and death. And all is well.
