Strange Dreams.

That night, Paul slept fitfully.

He dreamt of a factory, only it couldn’t be a factory for it was coloured as one would colour a circus; garish stripes of red and white and blue covered the walls and floors and stalls and machines. White flashing lights were everywhere, yawning into candescence before blinking off, then slowly on, then off again and again. Eerie accordion music played, as though this was some kind of carnival.

A giant copper coloured contraption that filled the room came into view, ornate and antique in appearance, with steam and smoke spouting from brass tubing on top of it and a loud whistling like that of a steam train and huge glowing doors that slid apart, jagged in nature like the jaws of an abominable creature. It was easily twenty feet across and perhaps fifty or sixty feet tall.

Each moment or so the jaws of this giant, mechanical beast ground open like a goldfish, though it bore no resemblance to anything as harmless in any other way, and a faceless mannequin would inch along a wide belt that extended from the machine, driven by oiled gears that dripped with the same clown-like red and white paint that adorned everything else in this factory of madness. The belt moved onwards and onwards, towards a dark horizon where Paul could see nothing. He could only hear a repetitive banging; tremendous and fierce, like a thousand boots worn by a thousand feet beating the ground in unison.

The sound drowned out the hideous accordion music as it echoed throughout the entire building, obscene and abhorrent, where it shook the endless concrete walls without any windows, rising from a concrete floor that was scuffed and circus-red. Despite the pounding of his ear drums by the insistent and incredible noise, he wanted to discover its source; he carefully walked along the path that the snake-like belt made, glancing occasionally at the frozen human copies that rode upon it. Bang. Bang. Bang!

His body trembled with each and every strike, reminiscent of a giant gavel cracked by a judge in court, though he had never been in court and had only assumed that was what a gavel would sound like. “Order! Order!” Yelled an imaginary judge, crying for the spitting steam, the grinding of the gears and cog-wheels and even the humongous banging machine to cease their mechanical din.

Soon he reached a tall-looking wall and there was no other way to follow the motionless bodies and no other way to find the whereabouts of the thing responsible for the banging without climbing aboard the conveyor belt itself. Bang. Bang. Bang!

He rode this contraption, rubber underfoot and smelling of oil, standing between two of the lifeless mannequins. And then, looking up at one of them, he could ignore the sound for a moment; these were not dolls, but people! Their features were frozen and not a sound escaped from their bodies – no breath, no heartbeat, not even a whisper – and they were drawing closer and closer to the gavelling.

Paul recoiled in horror and looked upwards at a giant fibreglass figure in the shape of Simon Cowell, one right arm clockworking upwards with an audible clicking sound, its hand holding a giant stamp. The moment it was raised, the arm crashed down upon the conveyor belt and the space around it shook; the mannequin was crushed into dust, but the hand with its pinkish flesh-coloured paint, cracked in places and dirtied with soot and powder moved immediately upwards.

The grinning and inhuman face of Simon Cowell was bearing down upon Paul, who now stood where the previous person stood. The accordion music reached a crescendo. Paul was now standing directly where the crushed person had stood and, looking upwards at the hand as it clicked and rose as high as it could, he understood it all: reading the indentation of the symbols on the underside of the giant stamp, he saw the word ‘Dreams’ with a cross through it.

The gears finally stopped clicking.

The hand fell.

Paul gasped and gripped his pillow, eyes snapped wide open and darting about the room. He released a short sigh, then climbed from his bed, away from its sweat-soaked sheets and sweat-soaked blankets. He peeled away the sweat-soaked underwear and black T-shirt he wore for bed.

“Ugh,” he grunted, "bloody Simon Cowell." Then he wandered into the bathroom to wash off the sweat.