Seeing Time

The Museum

As I walked with this man, my mind started to wander some more. Even more questions were going through my brain, mostly about where we were going. Was it going to be another theater like the one I had just seen? Before I could ask anything, though, the man reached another door and pushed it open. He smiled down at me as he led me in. I gasped as I looked around.
The room was much larger than the theater. It looked almost like a huge museum. Ancient statues stood proudly all over the place. Alien relics were laid out on pedestals. I saw paintings of what looked like bloody battles on the walls. I even recognized some scenes from the film I had just watched in some of the paintings. It seemed like this was the resting place of old memories and dreams yet to come. The whole thing was so overwhelming that I put my head in my hand to keep myself from crying. The man kept walking, however. I lifted my head from my hand and looked ahead.
I saw what looked like a bare marble pedestal right in front of me. When I got a little closer, though, I saw a tiny diamond sparkling there. I looked at it with awe, then with curiosity. I knew, just like the man and the box, that I had seen this before. But what was it?
I saw the man's hand reach for the diamond and pick it up. I looked at him, then to the diamond he was holding out to me. I hesitantly took it, staring at it. The man then crouched down to about my height and stared into my eyes for a few seconds. I felt held in place by his worn eyes. Then, he whispered something to me I would never forget:
"Do you know who I am?"
At some unseen cue, I looked around and saw eleven other men standing around me. One had stuck up brown hair and wore a long brown trench coat and Converses. Another man with curly blond hair wore a very colorful coat and held an umbrella. Yet another man with grizzled gray hair and a gray beard wore a black leather jacket and a brown frayed scarf tied around his neck. All of these men looked completely different, but they all had two things in common; tired eyes that looked like they had seen through time and the same mysterious, fatherly smile.
Suddenly, everything made sense. Everything seemed familiar because I had seen it before. The blue box was the TARDIS. The little diamond was a white point star. And these men? They were all the same person. I turned back to the man who had led me here in the first place. He was smiling at me, and  I could see a little bit of happiness in his eyes, even though they were covered by his hair. I opened my mouth to say something, and-
I was jolted back to my bedroom. I ran to my window, but the TARDIS was gone, almost as if it had never been there. With a feeling of extreme disappointment, I realized it was never there in the first place. The TARDIS, the white point star - the whole thing was a dream.
I sighed and flopped back on the bed. I thought about the dream, trying to memorize every moment. Then, my mind floated back to the question: "Do you know who I am?"
I smiled. I knew exactly who he was. Even though I didn't get to say it in the dream, I remembered the look in his eyes, almost as if he understood that I knew. I grinned and kept staring at the ceiling. He knew, that's all I needed to know.