Little Shop of Dreams

A reality check

There is a museum in Cambridge, on the corner of Spagnolo Street and Kleitman Avenue. The place is neatly preserved on the outside, just as it was a hundred years ago. It even goes by its original name: Little Shop of Dreams.

I stumbled across it last month while visiting Maggie Sooth, a distinguished professor of real-life studies at the university. We catch up every few years, if we can, and take a spell in reality.

Despite the winter drizzle, we had ventured outdoors, along the grey and empty streets, engrossed in conversation and neglectful of our surroundings. But as we strolled down Kleitman Avenue, its wet cobblestones slippery and difficult to walk on, the rain quickened, and we sheltered under an awning.

“What’s that?” I asked, waving at a stone building across the road, indistinct through the hazy veil of the rain.

Maggie flicked me a grin. “Oh, that’s Ground Zero,” she said. “Where the Theta Corporation tested the first dream incubation protocol. It’s the place that gave us dreaming-on-demand. Shall we go in? It’s a museum now.”

Normally, I’m not one for real life; reality is only three-dimensional after all. Like most people, I prefer to see things properly curated in my dreams. But the rain was falling heavily, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable with nature’s raw elements.

“OK,” I said. So, we went inside, and marvellously back in time — for the place is crammed with antique curiosities of the human imagination.

There’s a little panelled-off section where you can try on those cloddish and nauseating headsets our great-great-grandparents so sweetly referred to as ‘Virtual Reality’. I did not like them, but Maggie said they reminded her of her childhood because she was a slow dreamer.

There’s also a large, dimmed room where you can sit and watch what they used to call a ‘movie’. We spent a few minutes in there, watching a flickering, two-dimensional projection about the sinking of a primitive passenger ship. I found it dreary and flat; but Maggie felt that the music had stood the test of time.

Elsewhere, to my surprise, we got to hold a book — a real book! — and each of us had a turn at folding over the genuine paper pages with our own hands. “Wow!” Maggie gasped. “Yes,” I said, “you can see why they stopped using these.”

I am cynical about the past, I confess it. Undergoing first-hand the tedium of life as experienced by our forebears is, at best, a marvellous tutorial in the virtue of progress. There was one exhibit, however, that left me uneasy.

On the second floor of the Little Shop of Dreams they have recreated the original room in which Sophie Kanenas (“patient zero” as Maggie put it) lay when Spagnolo and Kleitman proved they could manufacture dreams.

In there, one can see the same kind of bed, the same old-style gelatinous electrodes, and an exact replica of the original brain modulation unit used to program the very first instantiation of a purposeful, pre-engineered, wakeful dream.

Furthermore, because people so rarely visit, for a small fee you can lie down in that room, have the electrodes fastened to your own scalp, listen to the rhythmic hum of the brain modulator, and experience Sophie’s first dream exactly as she did.

Naturally, I tried it out. It took only a few minutes. Stretched out upon the billet, my mind lulled into a theta state, I saw what Sophie saw:

I was the emperor of China, sitting on a cushion behind a screen; a platter of delicacies on a lacquered table beside me …

There were silk screens on all sides, each intricately decorated with paintings of cranes and peacocks …

Behind them, I could hear people moving and speaking …