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For a moment Harriet Templeton might have thought she was walking into a wet cellar rather than out of a theater into the night; she might have, that is, if she had been thinking at all. To call her mental activity at that moment thinking, however, would be like kissing one's own sister on the cheek and calling it sex. She was far too absorbed in the emotional residue of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal to rationally consider any thought. Her mind was inundated with images of arcane chessmen and the pursuit of hooded, faceless stalkers, icons from a brief detour into death by plague, sword and time itself. She was captive of these images for as long as they wished her to be. That time did not end even when she slipped into a deep sleep several hours later.

The next morning Harriet wrote in her dream journal:

Finishing her first cup of French Roast, Harriet looked up from the journal and stared out the kitchen window. The sun shone, the wind blew and summer fought for its life in another losing battle. She looked at the kitchen clock. It was 9:15, time to get to work. In the bedroom she decided to wear her running suit instead of getting fully dressed. She wasn't expecting any company today and it was so much more comfortable than regular clothes. That extra measure of comfort was important to her today and she insisted on indulging herself.

After completing her morning toilette, she entered her study (actually a spare bedroom) and sat down at the computer. With any luck she would finish her article by mid-afternoon and would have the rest of the day free. Clickity-click-click. The computer keys tapped out messages to nameless, faceless readers. Harriet new her subject and her tools so well that she could entertain completely unrelated thoughts as she wrote. She thought about the movie, about the dream, about the feelings they evoked and about her own reactions.

When noon rolled around, she was nearly finished with the first draft of the article: Alternative Counseling in the Eighties. Hunger insinuated itself into her thoughts and she responded. Back in the kitchen she heated a bowl of soup and toasted two slices of Russian Rye. She ate slowly, automatically, hardly tasting the food. Questions began flooding her mind, questions about time and aging and death. Images followed one another in a procession; watching her grandmother grow older, more feeble, less vital, ending with a snapshot of her lifeless face in a coffin; clocks and watches working with impunity, ravaging all life from within; her own childhood, adolescence, youth and now - she couldn't even think the words - middle-age. Was it all just some cosmic practical joke? Was there someone watching it all from a box seat, laughing at us like Caesar in the Coliseum? Harriet was not upset, not really, but she was most definitely concerned and that concern was light-speeding toward obsession.

At 2:30 she declared the editing completed, shut off the computer and picked up the cordless phone. A few moments later, "Is Zan Fielding in?" Yes, he was, could she hold a moment while he finished the call he was on. Of course.

"Zan Fielding," came the voice.

Harriet put on her most cheerful and nonchalant telephone face, "How's my favorite editor today?"

"Great! Just great. How's the article coming along?"

"Well, I think it's all done but you'll probably have something to say about that. Want it by fax or e-mail?"

"I'm going to need it in electronic form sooner or later anyway, so why don't you modem it to me. Do you like it?"

"Yeah, it's not the best piece I've ever written, but I think it does the job quite nicely. Zan ....?" In the moment she hesitated he knew that there was something else on her mind and that she could use a little coaxing.

"Yes, love, my editor's hat is back on the hat rack and I have my friend-and-confidant's chapeau in place. What is it?"

"I've been thinking a lot today about aging and death and, well, about time in general. It all started when I went to see a movie by that terrible Swede last night."

"Ingmar strikes again, I see." he quipped.

"You bet your life. I guess that wasn't enough to suit me 'cause I came right home and spent the rest of the night dreaming about angels of death dressed up like clocks doing battle with crusaders in a losing cause. You'd be proud of me though, I have been keeping up my dream journal religiously."

"Sounds like something whose time has come. I don't suppose I have to ask you how you're feeling about it."

"Not hardly. Actually I'm doing pretty well, all things considered, but it is becoming a little obsessive. It's all your fault, you know. Ever since you gave me that damn book on dreaming it seems like that's all I do at night."

"Try to remember, dear heart," he interrupted, "you're probably not dreaming any more than you used to, you're just remembering more. And don't blame me. It was your idea to begin exploring the dream state, and you're the one who's been giving yourself suggestions every night that you will dream and remember. Now you're complaining because it's working too well?"

"Yes, yes, I know. I didn't mean it, of course. The thing is that I'm beginning to feel like I'm getting in over my head. I'm not so much scared as I am scared that I will get scared. You know what I mean?"

"Sure," Zan paused for a moment, "There's another book perhaps you should read. This one's on lucid dreaming.

"Lucid dreaming -- what's that?"

"It's simply becoming conscious while you're dreaming and realizing that you're dreaming. Once you're conscious, you can take charge of the dream and create whatever you want to. If it's scary, you can change it. Once you develop some skill with lucid dreaming, you won't have to worry about being under constant threat every time you go to sleep. Plus, you can turn it to creative purposes just as easily. I've been dabbling in it for a couple of years with some success. I confess I haven't devoted as much time and energy to it as I could have but you have better reasons than I've had."

Harriet felt herself beginning to relax more than she had since she sat down in the theater the previous evening. Zan always had a calming effect on her but his counsel now was even more tranquilizing. "You wouldn't happen to have a spare copy of that book, would you?"

"Funny you should mention that, I sent it to you late last week. You should be getting it any day. Hell, it may be there already. Have you checked your mail yet today?"

"No, I haven't. Hold on while I take a look." She rushed out to the mailbox, phone in hand, and sure enough, there was a book-sized package waiting. Walking back she said, "Here it is, Zan. What a treasure you are. Just this one more time I'm going to forgive you for poking around inside my mind when I'm not looking but don't think that gives you any sort of license. Okay?"

"Duly noted. Well, take a look at it and let me know what you think."

"I have the rest of the day set aside with nothing in particular to do. Guess I'll do just that. Thanks, Zan. Call you later."

"If you didn't know better, you'd think there was only one mind. Later, kiddo. Bye."

"Bye, Zan."

Harriet opened the package and removed the book. After building a fire in the fireplace, she settled into her favorite chair and began reading.

It was just after midnight when she finished the book. She was so excited she could barely contain herself. In the pages of Zan's latest gift she had encountered possibilities she had never, pardon the expression, dreamed of. Not just the maniacal ramblings of some self-styled guru, but the results of years of experience and clinical experiments by professional dream researchers at prestigious universities. While the interpretations were not unanimous, the conclusions proffered by the author seemed unassailable to her. She was completely convinced that we can become fully conscious while dreaming and that we have magical, if not divine, powers at our disposal the moment we become lucid.

According to the book most people can dream lucidly. The only requirements seemed to be a high degree of motivation and sufficient practice. Harriet could hardly wait to get started. She decided to augment her nightly ritual of auto-suggestion by including strong encouragement to become conscious while dreaming. So high was her level of expectancy that when she finally flopped into bed, it took her nearly an hour to slow her mind enough to sleep at all. At last fatigue prevailed and she drifted off into a sound and, sadly, dreamless sleep.

In the weeks that followed, Harriet's dream activity returned to normal, if dream activity can ever be called normal. She continued with suggestions every night that she would become lucid while she dreamt but to no avail. Her mental correspondence to herself seemed to end up in the psychic dead-letter office. Nothing was getting through. She discussed it several times with Zan and he offered some recommendations but nothing changed. Her disappointment building, she re-read the book from cover to cover, this time taking several days to give it a chance to sink in. She was heartened by the author's comment that it can take months or even years of attempts to produce the first lucid dream but that if you really want it and just hang in there, it will work. There was no doubt in Harriet's mind that she wanted it. She would just have to persist.

Then one morning:

That night she was in bed before eleven for the first time in months. She slept restlessly for several hours, rising to semi-consciousness occasionally before drifting into a more profound dream state just before dawn. Not only did she become lucid in her dream but she was able to make decisions to do things, magical things, while she was sound asleep. She transformed an old woman into a young man right before her dreaming eyes. The dream ended a short time later when she stopped to think of something else to try. During that moment's hesitation she drifted to the surface wide awake. Again she was delighted. A whole new dimension was unfolding before her and she was in awe.

Next morning she couldn't wait to call Zan and do a little bragging. She hadn't called him after her first experience because she wanted to have more than a few seconds logged before going public. He was, of course, both delighted and impressed. He suggested that in order to avoid dreamus interruptus in the future she should have some agenda for lucid dreaming clearly in mind before going to sleep. That way if she reached a point where she ran out of spontaneous inspiration, she could just start in on her pre-defined list of activities.

On his advice, she spent the rest of the day thinking about and finally committing to writing a list of the things she would most like to do during periods of lucidity. At first it was hard to invent activities that seemed worthwhile. It was as if this were a long awaited audience with God and she didn't want to waste a single moment. Later she couldn't stop writing. The longer her list become, the easier it was to extend. When she'd filled several pages with notes, she decided that it was time to stop expanding and start refining. First she sorted the items into prioritized order, starting with those that she felt would be easy to do yet were also worthwhile. Below these she placed the most exciting possibilities she had considered. Last were the ones that she just thought might be fun or interesting. When she had finished sorting the list, she read it over from beginning to end. She could hardly wait to get at it.

By the first of December she had had more than a dozen lucid dreams, sometimes several in a single night. She had reached the point where remembering her agenda was all but automatic in the lucid dream state. On her list of accomplishments were; visiting with people she had loved who had died or left her life in other ways; piloting a Boeing 747; assorted romantic and sexually explicit adventures; exploring Mayan ruins with x-ray vision; strolling along the floors of the deepest abysses in the oceans of the world; traveling to other star systems and visiting with the locals. The possibilities were endless. The trouble was that once the newness wore off, it began to leave her a little hungry in the morning. It was as though she was filling up on desert but was leaving out the main course. Her to-do list was used up and she didn't quite know what to try next.

That night she found herself in a full fledged rematch with The Clocks From Hell. She remained in a normal dream state until nearly the point where she had awakened in the previous edition after the Bergman film. Suddenly, she became lucid and decided to save the day for all Christendom. She pointed a dream finger directly at the clock nearest her (a two story monolith originally built for the Jolly Green Giant's grandfather) and focused her intent on extreme cold. At first, frost began to appear on the horizontal surfaces of the huge timepiece. Then its movement began to slow. Soon it came to a complete stop, frozen solid, encased in invisible ice, completely petrified. Harriet was utterly thrilled. She turned her attention to all the other time-soldiers she could see, and there were hundreds of them, then, using both hands, she subjected them each and all to the same temporal winter. In short order her dreamscape looked like a snapshot pried loose from a glacier. The war was over and she was victorious.

On waking Harriet realized the immense scope of this revelation. This was the missing item on her list. She had done battle with the minions of time and had prevailed. Her elation lasted for hours; while she recorded it in labored detail in her now burgeoning dream journal; while she exposed herself to Zan; while she sat quietly before a fire throughout the winter afternoon. As dusk descended imperceptibly she was overtaken again with the feeling that something was still missing.

For several hours she pondered the question of what she had left out. It wasn't until she was in bed reciting her pre-sleep litany that it dawned on her; she might be the master of time at night, but time was still the undisputed master of her days. At first the thought depressed her. It all but destroyed the elation she had been feeling all day. Then the grand idea jumped right into her mind's lap and gave her a huge, wet and warm kiss squarely on the lips. If she could give her dreaming self suggestions to perform miracles while sleeping, why couldn't her dreaming self return the favor? If she could enable her dream-self to master time at night, why couldn't it provide her with dominion over time while she was awake.

Harriet's mind and body suddenly became as stiff as the clock-soldiers. What if she actually could? It seemed just within her reach. Even if it didn't work, it would be so simple to try it out. What did she have to lose? And if it did work ....

Her mind rocketed along with (if this is possible) a mind of its own. She remembered reading once that Albert Einstein said there was no such thing as objective time, only personal psychological time. Others said that all time is simultaneous, that only our experience of it is linear. She saw thousands of images of all the articles, books, TV shows and movies she had ever seen that dealt with the underlying nature of time and the mosaic created by all of these was revealed in one simple statement she had once heard: "time is a fiction created by humans to keep everything from happening at once."

Harriet's attention turned to the challenge of devising a method for testing this hypothesis. She concluded at length that the easiest and most direct test would be to change the behavior of a clock. She decided to see if she could program her dreaming self to program her waking self to slow down a clock. She could easily determine whether it worked or not by comparing that one clock with others. This was where she would begin.

That night, as she was drifting toward sleep, she repeated a mental message to her other self to give that suggestion while she dreamed. In the morning she was disappointed that she remembered nothing about her dreams. The results were the same for the next three nights. It was as if she was in full scale resistance to the entire notion. It was the first time since she began her dream journal that she had not made an entry on four consecutive mornings. This occurrence only served to redouble her passion to succeed.

On the fifth night, she had a lucid dream but the thought of the time experiment didn't surface until she had again awakened. Well, she thought, progress is, after all, progress. The nightly suggestions continued. Another night without dreaming. And another with dreams but no lucidity.

On the eighth morning she recorded the following:

All that morning, Harriet had "stop 45" on the brain but no blazing insights occurred. She talked briefly to Zan on the phone but decided not to tell him about the experiment, not until she had more to report. Besides, shortly after they had said their hellos, he got another call and asked if he could call her back in five minutes. She said fine and hung up. The smell of coffee from the kitchen lured her back for one more cup but before she could reach the door the phone rang and it was Zan.

"That was quick," she said, surprised to hear from him so soon.

"Don't be sarcastic, Harriet. I said five minutes and according to my watch it's only been 4 minutes 38 seconds."

"Are you kidding? It couldn't have been more than 10 seconds. I barely had time to get up and head for the kitchen for another cup of coffee," she responded in amazement.

"Harriet, I know I'm a pretty fast talker, but even I can't read half a page of figures over the phone in 10 seconds. You must have dozed off or something?"

The shock hit her like The Ice-Pick Express. Either Zan was having a little joke with her or she'd lost that five minutes. "Zan, no kidding now, isn't there any way you could be mistaken?"

"I could be a few seconds off but no more. Why does it concern you?"

Harriet told him everything now, about the experiment and last night's dream and the message which now clearly meant "stop for five (minutes)." He was, of course, amazed and intrigued. He asked if she had plans to continue her efforts which of course she most certainly did, now more than ever. He insisted that she call him every morning after she had any kind of related dream and she agreed. She told him that her next venture would be a more objective one: clock stopping. When he hung up, she dropped into her chair by the fire like five empty sacks of Minute Rice. Her mind returned to Churchill Downs and the race was again on.

Night after night Harriet pressed onward with the experiments, first with stopping clocks, then with speeding them up. Sooner or later the desired effect was always created. She considered the possibilities of what could be done with her developing abilities. After much thought and confabulation with Zan, she decided that the ultimate challenge would be to reverse time. That seemed to be essentially useless in and of itself. Looking in her mirror one morning and noticing the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes she seized upon the boldest idea of all: she would try to reverse the aging process itself. Yes, this was the most practical application she'd thought of yet and she felt that she was as ready as she would ever be to make the attempt.

Week by week, month by month she worked by day and by night to accomplish her goal: to be 25 again, not just in appearance but in vigor and joi de vivre. Slowly at first, then with increasing visibility, the wrinkles faded, a ruddiness of cheek emerged along with a quickness of step and firmness of flesh. It was actually working. By New Year's Day she looked not a minute over 30 and people were beginning to notice. There were rumors that she'd had a nip-and-tuck job but as the process continued unabated, even that offered no suitable explanation.

By late January she was nearing her goal. The looks she got from friends and acquaintances were almost as strained as the leers from young men were lecherous. It was getting, to say the least, a bit uncomfortable. Zan had flown out to see for himself that it was working as well as she'd said. He was astounded and immediately began his own campaign against time. His efforts were a little different but just as sincere and successful.

Increasingly people were asking questions for which there were no easy answers and Harriet found herself staying home in relative seclusion, a situation that didn't agree with her at all. By spring she realized that something had to be done. She just couldn't live this way much longer. She had tried everything, even telling people the whole unvarnished truth, but they didn't believe her and were actually more than a little hostile that she should insult their intelligence that way. Ultimately, in abject resignation, she decided to sell her home and start anew in another city.

The summer of 1985 found Harriet living in a different city in a different state, starting over without friends and with few acquaintances. She pondered whether it was worth it or not sometimes, but, though it was too soon to be sure, she suspected that she had achieved physical immortality and that it had to be worth it. Hadn't man been seeking the Fountain of Youth for centuries? Hadn't she found it sans fountain? She would be 25, or whatever age pleased her, forever. She still wrote and Zan still edited her work. For himself, Zan was playing competitive tennis again for the first time in almost 10 years. He too was beginning to get those dirty looks and was considering drastic measures to preserve the quality of his life.

In the end, there was no other choice for them. They really had no one but each other with whom to share their lives, not unless they could find others who would listen and follow the trail they had blazed. You'd think that would be easy but it was not. Even the author of the lucid dreaming book dismissed them as crackpots and hung up on them abruptly, thereafter refusing to take their calls.

Inconveniences notwithstanding, they never had the slightest temptation to return to their former aging selves. They simply went on about their business as best they could and relied on each other for close companionship. They concluded, however, that like so many other things, even immortality does not live up to its advertisements.

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