The space was not infinite, but very large. It was so large, in fact, that I could perceive no horizon – only a vast flat surface extending in every direction. At first, the space was empty of all things, even silence. There was no night and no day, no stars, no world of nature. Only three phenomena existed: my self, the surface, and time. I walked through this expanse, deep in thought, pacing to and fro, contemplative, brooding, and mentally willing a new creation.

After an immense duration, one small object came into being in the centre of the space, an object white, square and featureless. As it was very distant, it could have been very large – a building perhaps, and the beginning of a new city. I continued to move through the space, striding god-like, thinking, drawing on great reserves of mental strength to bring into being a second thing. Aeons passed. Soon, another but larger building arose, to join its smaller brother; the beginning of a new world.

So I endured, moving, thinking, and creating, for a vast lapse of time, stone upon stone, block after block, city by city, until at last my creation was finished: a great white world, pristine, beautiful, perfect – but empty of other souls. How much time had passed? It was certainly in excess of 500,000 years, but not one million years. So let us say 600,000 years, as a conservative estimate. That is the figure I have in my mind. And this is the story of how I lived those 600,000 years, and survived to tell the tale.

The event occurred over thirty years ago, when in my mid-twenties I lived alone in Newcastle. The influenza was abroad, and as the night fell upon the city, a strong fever fell upon me like a weight. A high temperature and a slight perspiration soon became a cold sweat, accompanied by shivering. The only cure was bed, and to sleep through it. I soon fell into a deep dream state, or perhaps a delirium. Then there occurred this long hallucination, wherein I built a new universe, with dimensions of time and space comparable to our own, from my mind.

While it’s true that our perception of time ceases when we sleep, it does so only in relation to the physical world. In the mental world of our dreams, events are still ordered in time, have a recognisable temporal sequence, just as the objects of our dreams have a familiar arrangement in space. However extensive that sense of dream-time may seem, occupying hours or days or years, yet it may be a mental event of only an instant’s duration. How often we have awoken at 7:01, fallen back into sleep, dreamed of events lasting hours or days, and awoken again at only 7:05!

While the memories of most dreams fade almost immediately upon awakening, to be lost forever, sometimes a particularly vivid dream is remembered and never forgotten. We all have such dreams. And when I awoke the following morning, exhausted and covered in sweat, the fever may have been broken but the dream was intact. Do I remember every minute of my 600,000 year dream-hallucination? No more than I remember every minute of last year, or last month, or even yesterday. Nevertheless, the memory of that dream, and the sense of its duration – the perception of its vast interval of time – remains with me still.