This account of the first new conceptual watch creation to emerge from watchmaker Vianney Halter in six years is by Michael Clerizo of the Wall Street Journal

Vianney Halter, wearing his customary faded jeans and tight T-shirt, sprawls on a chair in the disheveled office of his factory in the Swiss village of Sainte-Croix. The 50-year-old Frenchman, with lively blue eyes and an accent as thick as a slab of foie gras, is reliving the creation story of his first new watch in six years: Deep Space Tourbillon.

Over a career of more than 30 years, Mr. Halter rarely took a vacation and frequently slept only three hours a night. By 2010 his life was paperwork and visiting customers, with little time at the workbench. He was becoming nervous and jumpy, often forgetting what he’d done and who he’d spoken to.

In November 2010, some long-repressed survival mechanism kicked in. He started sleeping 15 hours a night. In January 2011, he laid off 17 of his 20 employees. Bereft of ideas and energy, he thought his watchmaking days were over. (The last original watch he had created had been the Classic Janvier in 2007.) He often stayed home, listened to music, and reread sci-fi classics he had devoured as a teenager.

A DVD store owner in Lausanne told him about the “Star Trek” spinoff series “Deep Space Nine,” which Mr. Halter bought and, “like a junkie,” watched all 180 episodes. He viewed the original “Star Trek” series again. “I [would] dream about ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Deep Space Nine’ because I went to sleep directly after watching an episode.”

He often had the same dream: He would encounter beings from another universe and explain to them how he was from planet earth, a place with four dimensions: length, width, depth and time. His new friends, however, wouldn’t understand, so in the dream he’d present them with a device to illustrate earth’s dimensions. The extraterrestrials would be satisfied, but Mr. Halter, himself, was unable to see the device. “The more I dream, the more I see of this thing,” he says. “Finally I understand, it is a watch.”

By November 2011, Mr. Halter was hard at work on Deep Space Tourbillon. As the watch progressed, he slept 12 hours a night but continued reading science fiction and watching “Deep Space Nine.” “I [had] lost contact with my inspirations in science fiction and that hurt my imagination,” he says. “I also understand that I must sleep because dreaming is important for my spirit.”

Like a film director hiring a cameraman, Mr. Halter engaged the services of a designer, 37-year-old Swiss Jeremie Senggen, who says: “For Halter anything mechanical contains a universe that he experiences. My job was to translate Halter’s experience of the watch he imagined into drawings.”

Vianney Halter expects to produce 100 Deep Space Tourbillons, retailing for about 180,000 Swiss francs (€145,000) depending on the case metal.

Deep Space Tourbillon

At first glance, Deep Space Tourbillon resembles the circular space station of the TV show, “Deep Space Nine,” with the outer “docking” ring displaying hours and minutes, and the curved towers having morphed into blue hour and minute hands. The fictional space station’s core is round; Mr. Halter’s is a roughly rectangular element he calls a cradle, with three moving axis. One axis moves the cradle around the dial like a hand, but it completes the journey in 30 minutes. On the second axis, the cradle rotates (like a rotisserie chicken) every six minutes. The third axis holds a tourbillon, which rotates every 40 seconds—not the standard 60. Mr. Halter says the elements have no time-keeping function: “This watch is the explanation of life on earth. I made the three axes move at speeds that have no place on watches in history. The axes are the three dimensions.”

The fourth element, time, is indicated on the outer ring, and surrounds the other three. The notion of all-embracing time is accentuated by a domed crystal, which soars 10 mm above the cradle. (The watch is 19 mm thick and 46 mm in diameter.) “I wanted to make a very basic device that explains the dimensions on earth to everyone in the universe. The three concrete dimensions in the center with time all around. This was in my dream.”