In Munich, clockmaker Herr Friedrick Thiessen receives an unexpected visitor: an Englishman named Mr. Ethan Barris, who says he has searched for Thiessen after admiring his cuckoo clocks. Barris asks whether Thiessen will accept a special commission, insisting it should be a singular “showcase piece” and that money is no object.

Mr. Barris provides only minimal specifications: the clock should be rather large, painted entirely in black, white, and shades of grey, and feel “dreamlike.” With the rest left to Thiessen’s artistic license, Thiessen agrees. Days later, an envelope arrives with an excessive advance payment, a completion date months away, and a London address for shipment.

Thiessen spends those months almost exclusively on the project, hiring an assistant only for basic woodwork while personally handling the intricate details. He designs the entire mechanism around the single guiding word “dreamlike,” treating the commission as both challenge and obsession.

The finished clock appears ordinary at first—handsome, black, and well crafted—but when wound it slowly transforms over hours. Its face shifts through greys with drifting clouds, then darkens to a starry night as the body unfolds and turns itself inside out to reveal carved scenes and moving miniatures: flowers and planets, tiny books with turning pages, a silver dragon, a distressed princess in a tower, pouring teapots, opening presents, chasing animals, and even a complete chess game.

Where a cuckoo would be, a masked harlequin juggler appears, adding a silver ball with each chime until he juggles twelve at midnight. After midnight the clock reverses its unfolding; the juggled balls diminish and the juggler vanishes, and by noon the piece has folded back into an ordinary clock again. Weeks after shipment, Thiessen receives a grateful letter from Mr. Barris calling the work “perfection,” along with another extravagant payment; Thiessen, who privately called the piece the Wunschtraum clock, never hears from Barris again.