I went to bed, after watching some
crappy movie, at about 11pm. I had work the next morning, but things were fairly quiet there with
Christmas coming up so nobody would notice if I wasn’t
firing on all cylinders the next day. My bed was a bit rumpled as I had only pulled it up after sleeping in it the night before. Doesn’t matter, I wouldn’t notice it as soon as I was asleep. I climbed in after undressing, and snuggled down, waiting for the bed to warm up and sleep to
overcome me. I don’t recall which happened first.
I woke suddenly. My bed was hard and gritty, and there was a freezing wind coming over me. It was still dark, but my eyes adjusted to make out that I was no longer in my upstairs bedroom, but lying in the dirt outside somewhere. I stood up, and the icy wind went through me like a thousand knives. I wrapped my arms around my chest to try and keep some of my warmth in, and peered around me in the gloomy light. There weren’t any stars as it was obviously cloudy, but I could make out that I was in a hollowed depression on a vast bleak landscape. There were dwarfed scruffy shrubs, and rocks, but mainly dirt, grey from the dim light of the pre-morning twilight.
What was I doing there? How did I get there? Where was I? How do I get back? It wasn’t a dream, I could tell when I took a step and my soft city-dwelling feet stood on a sharp stone and sent pain up my right heal. My first problem was to find shelter out of the wind and wait until a bit more light so I could assess the situation. “Assess the situation” weren’t the words going on in my head, but the expletives carried the same meaning.
I trotted out of the hollow and across the ground in a hunched over position, arms hugging myself in an effort to lessen the wind. I didn’t get far before I realised I had chosen a random direction, and the chances of finding anything in this darkness were next to zero, so I backtracked my few steps back to the hollow where at least I could lie down and keep out of the main wind.
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