the long sleep between ashes series (from one day to the next) goes on soundly. there a slight stirrings, and there are dreams: of encounters with dream teams that crumble in a heap; vivid dreams set in pakistan full of hi jinx and subterfuge and with glorious endings; of golden dream boys dropped from the team; of brett lee shopping or singing; of a one day series in new zealand that defies even the logic of dreams with its frenetic nightmarish movement; of a batsman who can never be dismissed; and the greatest dream of all, an immense figure from the past returning to haunt the cricket world with a new prominence.

urn malley, like his fellow dreamers, searches for the fragments of time that have entered the dreams from the future. he looks for the patterns & associations that his sleeping mind discerns out of his compacted past, and sees the next ashes series playing itself out already