Following an unusually deep sleep, you awake to find your quiet bedroom’s furniture completely rearranged. It takes a few full moments of silent observation to realize this anomaly, having just slept a sleep which bordered on the transcendent states of near-death. Your dreams had been astral wanderings in strange pseudo-dimensions, different systems of consciousness. One of which (most likely the last dream before struggling awake) was a dimension where objects seemed to absorb all light, like mini-blackholes, and only occasionally reflected back a random color of the spectrum, slowly strobing through each color. It was a world where everything kept disappearing and then reappearing in a different hue. This was, ofcourse, very disorientating.
You sit up in your warm bed and try to formulate a theory on how your desk had managed to slide across the cement floor, from the wall near the door, to the opposite side of the room, neatly flush against that wall. No theory seems to fit: you did this in that unusually deep state of sleep, an earthquake (though it would have to be an oddly orderly quake that, instead of damaging property, just reorganizes it), or one of your housemates snuck into your room in the night and did this to freak you out; something had to have happened. But as you look around at your meager possessions, you notice that everything is rearranged, not just the furniture, but books, notes, the computer set up neatly on a table which you’ve never seen before, at the far end of the room.
You get out of bed and begin to look for your cigarettes. You look everywhere, but cannot find them, or even an ashtray. Then you notice that you don’t seem to have that internal craving for nicotine, that familiar sensation coursing through your nerves. The room doesn’t even smell like tobacco. Strange.
You start to search the drawers in the desk. The contents, instead of being a random collection of notes and junk, are surprisingly organized. One drawer has small open boxes, one containing paper-clips, one erasers, one nickels, another has a row of index-cards- each with someone’s name/address/phone neatly written in black ink. ‘Fucking bizarre’, you whisper aloud, a creeping sense of dread, of inexplicable terror begins to arise in your brain. You know, ofcourse, that you would never be so organized, that you’ve never even attempted to be so neat. There is no possible explanation for this.
Then you see a small box of paycheck stubs (again- neatly arranged, by date). You hold the small stub of paper in your hands and read it. Your mind reels for a second, and you have to pause and rub your sleep-weary eyes. It reads: ‘Tyler Finnegan’.
You try to think.
Dropping the stub onto the clean floor, you look around at all of these familiar, yet somehow terrifyingly alien objects, and wonder:
“Have I awoken within another dimension?"