He struggled to open his eyes which was not too surprising given that horrible trip he had just had. He probably woke up in the middle of the morning with eye crust keeping them shut. The thought to wash his face came to mind which would require stumbling his way to the bathroom. As soon as Drew tried to throw his legs off the couch, he slammed his feet into the wall.
“Shit that hurts!” He reached up and rubbed his eyes hard trying to get the crust out of them to see and was welcomed by more darkness as they opened. The lack of a pillow and apparent nakedness he started to feel did nothing to help his burgeoning anxiety.
“Well I wish I could see anything.” He mumbled under his breath. His eyes slowly adjusted when he noticed gaps in what appeared to be a box he was now stuck inside. Drew felt the lid thing that held him in place a foot above his face and gave a hard shove upwards.
He was immediately rewarded with nothing as it didn’t budge even a little. That was doing his newly learned fear of claustrophobia no favors.
He could see the gaps even brighter than before and notice the upper left corner seemed to have the most light. He tried to slam harder and harder with his fists in the upper corner and the gap started to widen more and more as the light streamed in through the gaps.
Nails that look to have kept the lid in place were forced out more and more getting him closer to imminent freedom.
With one final slam, the lid gave in and almost the entire top half bent open. Light quickly hit his as he tasted sweet freedom. Strange sights welcomed him into reality as his eyes started adjusting.
The walls looked like polished concrete and the entire ceiling was a light not nearly blinding as it once was. Drew glimpsed down at the container that held him in place and started to work his legs to get all the way up. The lid looked more stone like than he was expecting for how light it was and his earlier fears were proven true. He was completely naked down to his missing socks.
“Um, hello?”, he asked hopefully. The room felt almost clinical as he succeeded in actually lifting himself out of the stone box and taking in more of his surroundings. The box he was in sat on some kind of pedestal in the center of the room and so he jumped out and onto the surprisingly sponge-like floor for how stone like it looked and felt.
“Hello?” Drew tried once again to call out for someone's attention to no avail. “Well this is awkward.”
He looked back at the box to inspect it more and saw a bright 7-point star inlaid into the lid with gold and the weirdly flexible material bent like metal instead of stone. It actually looked like a fancy coffin in a twisted sort of way.
This didn’t do much to ease any of the confusion he was in and, while that was a little unsettling, he was finally free to walk around. Finally out of imminent terror he was starting to get a creeping feeling like this might not be a dream anymore and he didn’t feel like he was in an altered state like he was previously.
Drew wandered to what he could only understand to be a door of some kind based on the outline in the polished stone, but it was entirely devoid of any kind of handle like he was used to. He touched the side of the door to try and push it open only to meet zero resistance and stumble right through and into the hall that awaited him on the other side.
It was drastically different from the clinical room he had just left. It was overrun with vines and leaves of vivid greens covered the floor and walls in a blanket of life. The ceilings were still covered in the white glow that was present in the room and the shape of doors were the only thing keeping the hall from being a walkway of green and white.
Intermittent door size blanks devoid of plant life looked identical to the door he had just exited from. He reached out to the empty space only to hit a completely solid wall instead of the nebulous transparency he had felt when leaving.
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“Hello?! Anyone there?” Yelling down the hall met him with silence that only an abandoned building could answer with. He gently stepped over the thick vines that covered the floor and started down the hallway on his way to an exit. Very quickly, he learned that this was much harder to do than he was expecting and he quickly tripped more times than he could count which led to his next discovery.
There were bugs that he hadn't ever seen before crawling around on the ground. Things with 6 segments to the body and legs equally as segmented with bright red dots flanked on the sides by round bugs with massive pinchers like that of a scorpion. Seeing so many insects normally would not be too bad but, again, he was stark naked and completely confused with what to do.
The odd web he would walk through was not any more helpful to his sanity as the resident of said web quickly made a rapid clicking noise in anger. The deceptively loud noise came from some gray looking spot that would seemingly glide behind the leaves when he would look for the noise.
This slog through the hallway came to a grinding halt when he hit a 4 way intersection with 2 ways going to more paths and another leading to what might have been an opening due to the light seeping in from small cracks if it wasn’t filled with feet of thick vines and branches.
It was assumedly where the plant life had made its way in from. The final way was a little more confusing. It was a double door style imprint devoid of vines like the other doors were.
Choices, choices, choices. Really, there were only 2 but the illusion of choices more than made up for that. To the window or to the doors. It couldn't hurt to try the doors first which was just another mistake in a long list he was probably going to make in the future.
As he went to test the double doors, he stumbled on some vines and fell right into the door fully expecting to slam face first into a solid wall. This expectation was quickly subverted as he was allowed through and, instead of falling onto a floor of some kind, he started falling into a nice and bright pit that ended in another stone colored floor.
As adrenaline pumping as the new discovery was, he was equally scared of heights and was now falling to his presumed death in this hole. ”HOLY SHIT! Oh what the hell?!”
What should have been a terrifying free fall quickly turned into what could only be described as a controlled levitation that deceptively quickly lowered him 20 feet down this corridor onto some spongy stone. A brightly lit room with what could best be described as a welcome desk was the only thing that came into view as he looked up from the heart pumping experience. He just survived.
“Hello? Anyone there?” More deafening silence answered him much to his chagrin. Well, that was definitely getting old. He stood up in all of his naked glory and got to investigating. There were no vines or plant life anywhere nearby which was a nice change of pace but he could still hear and feel his heart beating in his chest from the controlled fall.
That was not really a dream-like feeling in his opinion. Drew felt like he had woken up from one dream into the next lately but it was starting to get a little ridiculous. All he could think of was how to tell if you were in a dream in the first place.
Pain wouldn’t really work all the time from what he could remember, but reality tests were another thing he could think of. He collected saliva in his dry mouth and spit on the floor and watched it change the stone’s color as it was slowly soaked into the surface, but otherwise formed a small bubbly spot on the floor.
He reached down and his heart dropped when he felt the cold sensation and slight viscosity of the spit on his fingers. The sheer impossibility of the situation was the only thing in his mind.
That would mean this is reality, but the ramifications of that were mind shattering to him. Drew traced his recent history and the improbable things that had been happening to him.
Walking through solid walls, the weird bugs he had never seen, and him being trapped in a coffin. All of this is not to mention the cosmic voyage he went through and the impossible white space.
“Okay. Calm down Drew, think this through. You came back drunk, went to sleep, were transported to another dimension or something where a creepy woman told you that you were going to a different planet, then you broke out of a coffin and walked down a plant filled hallway only to be levitated down a hole to end up here.”
“I am insane, cool, oh and completely naked.” Now not nearly as distracted as he once was, he noticed his leg had started itching and he quickly started to relieve himself of the annoyance when his hand brushed against something hard stuck to his leg. “What is this.... holy shit.”