The Field Of My Tedious Dreams (Part 1)
An account of strange and unfortunate affairs…
My phone woke me up, I looked at my clock, it read 3:45 am in its taunting digital red numbers. I answered the call. It was the most beautiful girl in the world; she was in tears and told me that something bad had happened.
A week earlier my friend Michael got into a fight with Greg Franco, the biggest dickhead in school. He was the sort that didn’t like anyone who wasn’t like him, and to show his disapproval he would throw stones and shout abuse at every given moment there was no adult near someone who wasn’t like him. When Michael and I were walking home through a car park with the masses of other teenagers like us, drifting around the many-parked cars a gigantic rock suddenly smashed me in the back of the head, knocking me to the floor, and then a second one hit Michael in the back making a very worrying cracking noise. Michael was new in school and didn’t take having a huge rock thrown at him as good manners, so naturally he picked up the thrown rock and smashed it over Greg’s fat, simple-minded head. As per usual a crowd gathered; they screamed and shouted in a haunting rhythm ‘fight! fight! fight!’ Greg stood up with what dignity he had left and swung for Michael’s chest, he missed and hit a car door, denting it with the incredible force of the punch.
By this point the crowd had gone wild and was jumping and screaming, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were holding up banners and setting off air horns. While all this was happening I was on the floor staring at my blood-covered hand, the blood was from my head. Another friend of mine, Charlie Stratton, was there, a middle-aged god in my eyes; he’s helped me through enough crap in my life to write a series of depressing novels. He looked at me with his scarily blue eyes and asked me if I was ok. That was the last thing I heard before passing out.
All my short life I was a constant daydreamer, me being 16 and balancing my energy with school and the great late night shows on TV had made me more tired than an insomniac. During boring lessons like French, I would practically fall asleep and dream about incredibly random, scary and strange things. It wasn’t until September, when my sleep now averaged about 5 hours a night, that I started to have dreams which could only be described using one word: tedious.
I woke up in my bed as normal, but my bed was in the middle of a field, and all around the field were those large cylinder stacks of hay calmly swaying with the wind. I got out of bed and tried to assess the situation. The clouds in the purple sky were moving far too fast to be real, and just as I noticed that and looked back down to ground level, I was in the middle of a car park. All the cars were bright white convertible Volkswagen beetles, and inside all of them were about a dozen chalkboard black ravens. Sitting there sinisterly, still, it felt like a single sudden movement would make the ravens scatter and probably attack me.
After that moment of slight panic I remembered that this was the car park on the way to and from school. So I started to walk home, and just as I set a step down, I was sitting down in what looked like a café in the center of an airport. It was huge and full of people in Hawaiian shirts, sandals and shorts, there was a large skylight directly above me. It looked as if there was a storm outside through the skylight. Everything seemed normal here, except that there were ravens flying slowly around the inside of this room, chasing tiny red airplanes that made a very low hum, a bit like a Lancaster bomber would make. I was sitting in front of somebody reading a newspaper; it was so large I couldn’t see his or her face. A chill ran up my spine and everything froze, except for the man with the newspaper and me.
I was awake, incredibly confused and curious by the last night’s events. I decided to stop thinking about this and start remembering where I put my pencil case for school. It was week 2 of the new school year, in my new school. It takes me about 40 lonely minutes to get to school, sometimes by luck I’d see someone I know so I can walk up to school with them, but so far that’s only happened once. I arrived at school just as the bell went and I tried to remember what lesson I had first, and as soon as I remembered I was already next to the classroom it was in, which was lucky. My first lesson was ICT, and involved us typing away mindless babble about input and output devices for about half an hour. We were sat in alphabetical order, and I was placed next to my friend Jordan, whom I knew since primary school, so I never completely died of boredom.
My mind went off into a trance like state as I stared at the screen, everything was still, my teacher called out to us ‘Ok, can everybody turn your monitors off and look at me.’ We all did as we were asked, as I turned my head I caught the eyes of a girl sitting behind me. She had medium length bleached blonde hair, and sexy deep blue eyes. For just a moment as our eyes met we both fell in love, cheesy fantasies of me holding her hand and kissing in a park played in my head, then everything returned back to normal as we both looked at the teacher and awaited our further orders.
The bell rang, everyone stood up and put his or her coats on in unison. I walked out the door, still half asleep, and started to walk to my next lesson. Images from the girl in ICT still were playing in my mind like a movie, I knew straight away I had a crush on her. She was gorgeous, with her soft blonde hair, a fit body and had eyes that grab your attention instantly. My day eventually drew to an end and with the girl still on my mind; I walked up to the car park where I meet with my friends Dan and Richard. They weren’t there, and the school was dead silent, so I began my walk on my own. My mouth was dry so on my way home I decided to stop at a corner shop and buy a drink. As I went to turn into the store Greg walked out with a large fluorescent bag of newspapers, and shouldered me to the floor. As he was laughing in the distance I stood back up and brushed myself off, I wasn’t thirsty anymore. Then all of a sudden I heard a really loud screech followed by an ear shattering smash.
Steven couldn’t believe it, not only did he wake up 3 hours late for work, but also a large lorry had smashed into his house. ‘Typical,’ he thought to himself. He then realized this was a very valid excuse for his lateness, a slight smirk made its way to his face. His mind then began to thank god Lisa, his wife, worked nights and wasn’t home until 11 am. He looked at his watch; it was 10 o’clock. Steven walked to the door, he then noticed that about 2 thirds of his bedroom was replaced with rubble and a giant truck. It was in those 2 thirds where his door was. Panic filled him as he realized that his dog was asleep directly below where the door once was. Steven climbed down with great difficulty, tearing his only remaining pair of clothes, his posh, powder blue suit. As his bare feet reached the floor he began to call out for the dog.
A dog was barking inside a nearby house as I looked to see the source of the smash, a bright red Porsche convertible had crashed into a lamppost. Its bonnet was wrapped all the way around it, like it was trying to hug the lamppost. A man was standing next to me; he was dressed in a black suit and looking in horror at the accident. I said to him ‘I hope no one was hurt.’ He looked to me, smiled calmly and said that the car was empty when it passed him. This was how I met Charlie, as creepy and weird it seemed making friends with a middle aged man that I met at a crash site, he had a certain quality about him that made me feel safe…and that he didn’t want to kidnap me.
To Be Continued…