[Aleksis]

Well, then I must have been thinking of some other movie and not Dumbledore. I recall the person looked into a cauldron of water to see a "live" vision.

According to Robert Bruce, a vision screen is all a 3D recording, and not real.

I wasn't sure I believed that, my experience of going into the future seemed very real. But this last experience it did behave very much like a 3D recording. Like a hologram.

I don't see how my opinion on what I think a memory screen should do would shape what it does. Either it does it or it doesn't.

After all, I was fully expecting it to be an instant live feed. I was stunned when it slid back into the wall.

And it wasn't a memory either. The view was taken from above him. He couldn't very well be watching himself talk on a cell phone from five feet above himself.

And it wasn't of the past. It went and snatched three seconds of video from the present. So at the most it was a three second delay.

Hmm. Maybe that's why it had to vanish. Because what I was asking to see hadn't happened yet. It wasn't "on file." It had to go take the recording and bring it back.