You wake up slowly from a rare, beautiful, dreamless sleep. A slumber this smooth deserves to be savoured and you keep your eyes determinedly closed. The real world begins to invade, your bed sheets catch on your pyjamas and you roll to your other side, eyes stubbornly shut. Why are your pyjamas so scratchy? You snort in frustration and lazily rise, placing one hand behind you and raising the other to rub your sleep encrusted eyes.

“Wha-!”

You seem to have impaled your supporting hand on something sharp and jolt wide awake, scratching your whole face on some other spikey thing.

You scream and writhe around, completely disorientated, every movement seems to cause more scratches and punctures until you finally eject yourself out of this thicket of pain.

You’re panicking now, breathing deeply, face covered in blood and you wipe it away with a hand that is also scratched badly.

You look at the way you came and discover that the inexplicable thicket of pain is really a thicket of equally improbable brambles. At least, that is what your subconscious seems to tell you, something dim and distant, a child - presumably yourself - crying after falling into a spiky plant, the consolation of an adult and the word “bramble”. The memory is frustratingly clouded but you don’t have time to ponder this as you consider your situation.

Your bed, or at least the foot of it, is jutting out of a thick mass of brambles, covered in wickedly sharp thorns. Someone, or a group of someones, must have carried your sleeping self and bed into this mess. That must be it, a prank by your good friends - but the names slide right of reach. You wipe the trickling blood from your eyes in frustration.

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More to the point, where are you? You look around for the first time.

You are near the bottom of a depression in the ground.

In front of you is a gentle slope dotted with various trees, shrubs and brambles. There’s a worn dirt path leading straight up which seems to follow the path of least resistance, straight up the slope.

You sit very carefully at the foot of your bed and look behind you. There’s what looks like a swamp at the lowest point of the depression, and behind that, a jumble of exposed rocks leading sharply up a cliff face. Some stubborn plant life seems to be clinging onto the cliff face. You look to your left and right and find that the cliff face and gentle slope meet at both ends of the depression, rather like an eye.

You get up, and search your pockets leaving a bloody stain on your torn bed linen and walk up the gently sloping path. Surely you can find help over the ridge.

You hurry up the path and slip on the edges. Clumps of sticky mud adhere to your bare feet. By the time you near the top, your pyjama trousers are covered in brown streaks and your toes are stuck together with globs of what you’ve now concluded is pretty thick, damp, clay.

You picture an impending warm shower and hurry over the ridge, only to find yourself looking down another gently sloping path with a rocky cliff face on the far side. Frustration mounting, you grit your teeth and head down, wondering if there is a way out at the bottom of the valley.

Someone has recently made a mess of this path, leaving clumps of clay everywhere. You tut and continue down carefully until you spot half a bed, jutting out of a bramble patch, with blood stains on sheets.

“What!”

You all but run up the path again and at the top, you see the same damned valley. How is this possible? You scream in rage, grab a rock, whirl around and throw it straight over the ridge and hit yourself in the head.