The electronic dream catcher was a great idea and should have worked perfectly. Well, it did at first, but like all new inventions, it soon fell victim to abuse, and we all know what happened when it fell into the hands of the Triads.

It was a simple concept, little more than a novelty item. You wore the skull cap with the wires attached, and it reached into your sleeping brain and recorded your dreams. In effect, if you dreamed of a night of passion with George Clooney or Pamela Anderson, you could re-run it every time you felt randy. Similarly, with nightmares, you could re-run them in the cold light of day, and take the frightening edge off them.

The dream catchers caught on pretty quickly and were quite popular for a few months, but then one day I got a phone call that chilled my blood.

"This is Dr George Moody from the Kalamunda Medical Centre. I have a patient here who claims she is being terrorised by a monster she recorded last week on one of your dream catcher machines. She says that almost every time she thinks about it, it appears in front of her."

"Does it attack her?" I yelled, conscious that as the inventor I could be held liable for the medical costs of re-attaching arms and legs.

"Thankfully, no," he replied. "It doesn't take corporeal form, but it looks pretty solid to her, and she says she can't see anything through it."

"Can't you simply advise her not to think about it?" I asked innocently enough, and had to hold the receiver right out from my ear, away from the blast of invective that came my way. Well, I didn't know doctors used that kind of language! "Sorry, sorry, silly thing to say, I know. But it can't hurt her, and it will go away eventually, won't it?"

He replied to the effect that he hoped we were well insured, as he foresaw months of psychiatric counselling to restore her to normality.

It's my belief that anybody who goes to a psychiatrist needs their head seeing to, but I assured him that my public liability insurance was up to date, and eventually hung up the phone. I leaned back in my chair, thankful that the awkward conversation was over, but my relief was short-lived.

In the next couple of days, I got complaints from all corners of the globe, much of it in languages I couldn't understand. These I passed on to my assistant to deal with. There were people walking naked down every street in every city, and what made these particularly bad was that everybody else could see them too. Very embarrassing! I supposed it was just as well that they didn't have actual physical form, or there'd have been chaos. People were falling off high places all the time, and being visible to all, there was a lot of ducking going on. Running in slow motion was another obstacle to pedestrians, who tended to forget that these were all just dream illusions.

Of course, it didn't take long for the long arm of the law to reach into my office and severely question me.

"But it's impossible for the dream catcher to allow that to happen," was my stock response.

After being threatened with half a dozen life sentences by a Police Inspector, whom I guessed to have suffered some of these unwelcome dream recurrences, I demanded the return of some of the dream catchers so that I could examine them for faults.

It was a hell of a relief I can tell you, when they turned out to be inferior cheap copies of my invention. They were being churned out by the thousand in some Asian sweatshop and sold on the black market for half the price of the genuine article.

These bootleg version were the ones causing the repetitive side effects, so I was off the hook when it was proved that the people who had paid full price for my genuine article weren't being haunted by their nightmares.

"If you hadn't charged so much for them, this would never have happened," smirked the same Police Inspector.

"What's up?" I wanted to know. "Did you buy an illegal copy and end up being bashed by the same crim day after day?" After carefully checking to make sure there were no onlookers, he dropped me with a nasty punch and exited the building, his dignity in tatters.

All pending lawsuits against me were dropped, and I thought things were getting back to normal, but unfortunately, the authorities weren't so easily satisfied. Within a month, all dream catchers had been completely banned, and my factory made to close and cease producing them.

My assistant keeps on at me to invent something else and get back into business, but my reply to him is always the same. "Dream on!"

© Sandy Parkinson, March 2007. Word count 822