David Lane

I was approaching a large ship with a few friends I had picked up while eating a very fulfilling lunch.  We were all completely content, and we skipped along a path made of dirt.  It was a narrow path and curtains were surrounding us.  We did not see any people, but we saw multiple animals.  We laughed together.  It was a beautiful day.  When we passed the area with curtains, we were exposed to a large clearing.  The ship was in sight but seemed like a few days’ travel to get to.  My friends and I hopped in a car and drove really fast in the direction of the ship.  All of us held lunchboxes, and we compared our food with one another for the majority of the trip.  The friend who was driving had the skinniest face I have ever seen.  It was as if his head had been smashed in between two trucks, but he was still able to live normally.  We all teased him because he looked really silly.  It was all fun and games, though.  He laughed with us, and we continued to pal around and listen to music in the car.  Suddenly, in the middle of the road arose a large shadow.  It scared us, so skinny-face swerved, and we hit a rock.  Our tires popped off, and all of us began to run around the broken car screaming as loud as we could.  Our screams hurt our own ears.  My head was throbbing because my friends continued to scream and shriek.  It was like we were being forced to use all of our muscles for the sole purpose of screaming.  The shadow came over to us and began talking to us.  He told us a story of his upbringing and how every day was a struggle for him to live because his family had no respect for him.  He then grabbed us all by the chests and began to tear open our ribs to retrieve our lungs.  He said he needed them for some reason.  We willingly let him do this because he seemed rather nice, and it was relatively painless.  Once he completed his extraction of our lungs, he set us down and disappeared into the air.  We were sad to see him leave, but we were glad we could continue to venture toward our destination.  Fortunately, it was not any harder to breathe without our lungs so we could continue with ease.  Unfortunately, our car remained broken from smashing into the rock, so we began walking the rest of the way.  The ship was still far away, so we decided to make rope swings that would make the trip a little easier.  My friends and I took hundreds upon hundreds of ropes and tied them together.  We then lassoed the ropes around the ship and began swinging toward it.  It was tiresome, so we decided we would just pull the ship to us.  So we did.

The ship was completely white and could probably hold about 50,000 people.  We stepped aboard and a man greeted us with some flyers written in some foreign language.  I learned to speak and write this language and then translated the flyers for my friends.  We liked what the flyers said, so we ran through the ship with spears in our hands.  Cottages were burning and people were screaming.  Every corner we turned there was some sort of destruction happening.  We, being the nice people we were, tried to help everyone.  We built a pool for the kids to swim in to get away from the fire.  We built a slide for some dogs who could not move their mangled legs.  Our help was much appreciated, but there was too much to be done to make a true impact on the situation.  The ship set sail, and we embarked to a place called “Little Creek.”  My friends and I decided to find shelter and build fortifications for security.  No one knew what exactly we were trying to defend ourselves from, but we were positive we needed to do it.  We took hundreds of stones and set them up in a circular fashion.  We then sat around in our circular stone structure, and I talked to myself about college.  A loud bang startled me, and I began to rally the men to stand by my side and defend ourselves.  But we were no match for the nothingness we faced.  My friends began to fall apart, literally.  It began with their fingers and eventually they were nothing but heads flopping around on the floor.  I was lucky enough to stay intact and safe from whatever was attacking us.  I picked up all of my friends’ heads and decided to put them in a bag I could haul around everywhere.  This was annoying, but I figured I owed them the best seeing as how they had been my friends for all of the trip to the ship.  They talked in the bag to themselves, and I had to repeatedly tell them to be quiet because it could blow my cover.  I did not want anyone knowing who I was.  People would probably try to hurt me if they found out I was the one dreaming this situation into existence.  It was my reality I was forming and creating, and most of the people hated it.  For instance, as I carried the bag of heads around, people were looking at me with disgust, and then they would simply fall on the ground and die.  This happened multiple times, and I did not understand why everyone looked so negatively at me.  I had disguised myself well, but they continued to single me out and stare at me.  If they stared at me, I would stare right back and watch them fall to the ground.  It was sad but necessary.  The ship set sail, and we left the hill we had sat upon and headed out onto the sea.

The ship approached a large mass of trees floating in the ocean.  We penetrated the trees and began traveling much faster.  We were moving on a small creek that should have in no way been able to support the weight of our ship.  It was a twisty creek, and our ship eventually tipped over.  Everyone aboard fell and climbed off on to dry ground.  I was lugging my bag of heads with me and began to get tired of it, so I gave the bag to one of the woodsmen.  In return, he gave me some fishing line and a hook.  I began to run away from everyone and separate myself from the crowds.  I fashioned a kite out of the fishing line and hook and flew into the air.  The air was cold, and it hurt my lungs, so I decided to go pick up a drink.  I picked up some chocolate milk and headed back to the broken ship.  I resolved I was going to kill whatever was hurting so many of my fellow friends.  I charged into the ship.  It was dark and gloomy.  Not one person followed me.  As I paced up and down the halls of the ship, I sung a song I made up.  It was about my favorite television show, The Office.  As I sung out different names of the different characters in the show, they appeared behind me with weapons, ready to fight.  Jim, Creed, Dwight, and Kevin became my army.  Jim held a mallet.  Creed held a large stool.  Dwight held a sword longer than twenty normal swords, and Kevin had a lion on a leash.  We ran through the hallways of the ship, screaming.  We could not find anything that appeared to be dangerous, so we decided to turn around and just go back to the village on dry ground.  But then, out of nowhere, a frog the size of a normal frog leaped out onto our pathway.  He began speaking in a foreign language Creed was lucky enough to have known.  Creed was too scared to translate it for us, though, and died on the spot.  We buried Creed and made sure everyone knew he had, in fact, been too scared to translate anything.  We then resumed our confrontation with the frog.  He had eyes that could melt away a skull and legs that could propel him to the moon.  I squashed him, and we left the ship laughing.

Jim, Dwight, and Kevin decided to go home, so I drove them to the airport and said my “goodbye”s.  Once they left, I decided to go back to the village and help start up the new colony.  I helped everyone build houses, libraries, and restaurants.  It was a nice town.  It was free from the worries of the modern world, and we liked the isolation.  We only ate pineapple, but it never got old.  I met a nice girl and decided to marry her.  We had several kids, and they grew up faster than you could imagine.  I became a lumberjack and made a good sum of money that comfortably provided for my family.  One day, I approached a tree I was supposed to cut down, and I looked inside it.  Something grabbed my face and engulfed me into what seemed like a whirlpool of colors.  I tried to push it off, but it was inevitable I was going to get swallowed alive.  The whirlpool of colors became my new home.  I hated it.  It was like living in a bubble only big enough for your body; lights were flashing color into my eyes, and it was absolutely silent.  I could not hear myself talking or even thinking.  I bounced around in my color bubble, oblivious to my surroundings.  All I could think about was my family, but I realized I was never going to be able to see them again.  This thought made me sad, so I decided to stop moving and just sit in my bubble and ponder a way to escape.  I fashioned a needle out of some strands of yellow and blue and popped the bubble.

I was startled to see I now stood in a desert, but instead of sand it was full of tiny plastic beads.  Although it was not the best place in the world, it certainly was better than that colorful bubble.  I ran through the plastic beads and rejoiced.  I eventually reached a hill and began to ascend the hill.  As I ascended, it began to turn in to more of a mountain; a really tall mountain.  I put on some conveniently placed climbing gear and began to scale the vertical walls of the mountain.  I knew at the top of the mountain I would find some sort of prize.  I was about forty feet from the top of the mountain, and then I lost all feeling in my hands and feet.  Not only did I lose feeling, but I lost the capability to grab anything or move.  As frustrating as this was, I began to use my forehead to slowly but surely scoot my way up to the top.  My feet and hands fell off completely now, and my throat was parched from not drinking enough water.  After three days of constant hiking, I reached the top of the mountain.  Sure enough, at the peak, there was a gift.  It was wrapped up in red packaging tape and in a box about the size of a desk.  I unwrapped it and opened the box.  Inside the box was a bag.  Inside the bag were the heads of all of my companions.  I slowly looked up in despair and saw the frog I had squashed laughing at me.  He snapped his fingers and the world around me changed into its original form.  So once again I sat trapped in a color bubble longing for my release.  Then I woke up.