All Gone

It was a morning much like any other. He got up unwillingly, not quite believing the night had gone so fast, and stumbled off towards the bathroom, only noticing halfway there that the bathroom had gone… disappeared.

He looked down, realisation coming slow to his sleep-addled brain. He was standing in long grass, the breeze blowing ticklish waving green blades against his bare legs. Still seeing, but not registering, the scene that lay around him, eventually he began to realise he was standing on a small hill, covered with long green grass, under bright, warm sunlight. The hill carried on down a gentle slope to a valley bottom, where a stream meandered, and then back up on the opposing side to the peak of a higher hill where bare rocks grew up towards the cloudless sky. On that opposite hillside, a herd of some animals he could not recognise grazed in apparent tranquillity.

He turned to see his bedroom door, slightly ajar, standing on the hillside behind him. He noticed it seemed to shimmer around the edges, and that it was fading. The longer he looked the more he could see of the rising hillside behind it, through what should have been a solid white-painted wooden door.

He took a step towards it, craning round to see if he could see his bedroom through the door. He could… but that was fading too, he could see small white flowers – a bit like daisies – appearing through the very solidity of his bed.

‘This is some dream,’ he said, surprised at the loudness of his own voice in the relative quietness of the landscape.

Steeling himself, he closed his eyes and stepped back through the fading doorway.

He stood, eyes closed, trying to decide if what he felt under his bare feet was more grass or his bedroom carpet. He realised he couldn’t tell, his legs still itched and tickled from the grass, but he couldn’t tell, without opening his eyes, if that was a memory or something that was still happening.

He realised he didn’t want to find out.

Right, he said to himself. I’ll give it a count of five and then I’ll open my eyes.

‘One…. Two… three… four… five….’

He opened his eyes.