The young man caught himself staring at the clear blue skies in the middle of a meadow. There was not a single cloud in sight. From where he was lying, even the sun was not visible. He presumed it was obscured by the mountains in the distance. If he was not so confused and maybe with some friends right now, he might have even gone on a hike and confirmed this presumption. The young man never did those types of recreational activities alone anyway. Apart from the lack of clouds, he is reminded of the days when he would come to his father’s office as a young boy and see the many computers there. Most if not all of the computers had identical desktop wallpapers. It was the default background for Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system called Bliss. Bliss which was originally titled Bucolic Green Hills is a photograph of a green hill and blue sky with clouds where the young man felt like he was in right now though he was in a meadow instead and there were no clouds where he was. 

The young man had a realization that he had never been to a place like this before. He had only seen pictures similar to the scenery he was surrounded by currently but never actually been to such sights himself. How had he arrived at such a place? The young man had another realization that the clothes he was wearing did not look familiar to him as if someone or something had changed them while he was asleep. He was currently wearing a long-sleeved faded round neck t-shirt that he had never seen before and a pair of grey slacks that he was not too sure was his. He checked the inside of his pockets for any clue to where he was. It felt strange for him to not have any recollection as to how he got there. It turns out that searching his pockets proved to have been a futile effort to help him recall his memory. They were as empty as the balance in his multiple bank accounts that he no longer used. The young man still kept the expired debit cards as reminders that he had opened accounts with those banks, convincing nobody even himself that he will reactivate them in the near future.

The young man then spotted an antique film camera not far from where he was sitting. He has not seen one of those since he was a young child during the first few years of the second millennium. His instincts told him that somebody had left it there for him. It was definitely not his but maybe it was given to him. All of this is probably mere words for the young man to justify taking a look at it. In any case, he thought the person who left the device should have at least wiped off the grime from the device. It was so dusty as if it had been left abandoned there for several lifetimes but somehow the young man felt that the antique film camera was still fully operational. He scrambled quickly to pick it up. It was a hopeful notion for him that the device could be a clue of sorts on his whereabouts. As he was carefully inspecting the antique film camera, he heard a twig breaking. His instant reaction was to turn to the source of the sound which was a little girl playing a kite. The young man had not noticed her before but now that he did he thought of asking her a few questions.

Before he could do so however, out of the blue, a bolt of lightning struck a tree not far from the two of them. The young man was shocked at how loud it was compared to the recently broken twig. He usually heard it muffled by the sound insulation in whatever building he was in as he rarely went outside. Everything had been so quiet and suddenly a huge noise invaded the scene. At the very least, he was relieved that it was the tree and not him that got struck while for the little girl, conversely, was so frightened that she had lost grip of her kite and it flew off. Before it got out of sight, the young man took a picture of it with the antique film camera that he had just found. While he did so, a flight of swallows invaded the frame. The young man tried getting another shot without the birds rather unsuccessfully. The little girl simply laughed at this peculiar character who was adjusting the position of his body so much for a photograph but not even bothering to get up on his feet to get a better angle which was the obvious thing to do for even the most amateurish of photographers.

After multiple failed attempts, the young man gave up trying to get a shot of the kite without the flight of swallows and put down the antique film camera. He just could not be bothered to stand up at the moment. Suddenly, shortly after the young man had stopped taking photographs there were vibrations that could be felt. It was coming from the young man’s left trouser pocket. It was as if something had spawned inside of it. The little girl looked with bewilderment as the young man’s pocket continued vibrating ceaselessly. The young man who was getting uncomfortable with the little girl looking at his slacks decided to bite the bullet and inserted his hand in the bizarre pocket. He was expecting the worst, maybe his hand could be chopped off but fortunately nothing of the sort occurred. Instead, he found a picture of the kite swarmed with swallows that he had taken. The picture was rather crisp given the age of the camera and it was in black and white instead of colour. Somehow from a certain view, the birds looked like deformed peasants while the kite appeared as a tyrannical king or at least that was how the young man saw it. The little girl most probably just saw her lost kite surrounded by some birds appreciating its company.

The young man handed the photograph to the little girl so she could keep it as a memento for her lost kite. She was not at all weirded out with the picture as if it was normal for a photographer to have pictures they had just taken to magically spawn inside their trouser pockets. She scrutinised the picture as if it was a leaked answer script for a standardized test which the young man assumed the little girl might have already sat through a few wherever she went to school. She was thinking of something, but the young man could not tell what it was. The little girl smiled before giving back the photograph to him. The young man who was mesmerised by her grace completely forgot about the questions he had been meaning to ask her and instead thanked her even though he had intended for her to keep the picture. He tried to stand up from where he was sitting to give it back to the little girl but then realised that his legs were too sore to get up and so sat back down again.

The little girl was beginning to walk away, maybe back to her home to tell the entire household that she had lost her kite while she was playing alone at the meadows earlier. The young man was not making it any easier for himself to get up by panicking so much that he could not get his legs to work before he lost sight of her. He scanned the premises to find several other people lying on the grass, all of them with their eyes closed, none of them having the appearance of any breathing movements whatsoever. Apparently, the young man was the first and most probably the only person to have woken up among them unless there were others who had gained consciousness even earlier than he had. He wanted to ask the little girl a few questions about the place but when he turned his head to look back at her, she had already disappeared from his vision.

The young man was really startled by how quickly the little girl vanished from his line of sight. The little girl was walking at a relatively sluggish pace due to probably feeling dejected after losing her kite. There was no way she could have left the area in such a short period of time while he had been distracted discerning the lying bodies in the meadow. He took another look around and realised his picture of the kite with the flight of swallows was missing, too. The young man was sure the little girl had given it back to him, but he no longer had it. Usually, he would jokingly say to people who had lost their belongings that their stuff had evaporated or sublimed and would later fall back to Earth as rain, but he was not currently in the mood for jokes right now. Even the antique film camera the young man had used has now miraculously metamorphosed into a brand new DSLR camera.

After a few consecutive oddities occurring, it suddenly came to the young man’s head the idea that he could be dreaming all this. As someone who often had lucid dreams during his teenage years, the young man had a technique to distinguish a dream from reality. He had learned about these reality checks from the prestigious movie director Christopher Nolan specifically from his sci-fi flick Inception. The filmmaker had written and directed a diverse range of movies regarding various topics, but it was the one involving dreams that the young man was the most interested in and learnt from the most. After watching Inception, he had done some background research on the subject regarding dreams and becoming lucid in them. From his findings, the film’s depiction of the process for someone to be aware of their dreaming state during their sleep was about as accurate as Hollywood blockbusters could get which was not saying much though later things would proceed to develop much differently than how it was portrayed.

The young man did not know that it was possible to know that you were in a dream until the film Inception came out. Additionally, he was also surprised that those types of dreams where the person dreaming in their sleep was aware that they were not actually awake had a specific name for what they were doing. It really baffled him that lucid dreaming even had its own Wikipedia article about it, but it really should not have since they literally just made a movie based around it. He should have at the very least anticipated that there would be more traction for these types of dreams especially after the success of Inception. Even prior to that film a few years before that there was another notable film that had explored the concepts and ideas of lucid dreams which heavily inspired Inception, albeit an animated one from Japan called Paprika.

The young man had read an article elaborating on reality checks which was first introduced to him by Inception. These reality checks were techniques that could be implemented for anyone to lucid dream. It was a really eye-opening read for the young man. The article also explained topics he was somewhat familiar with from Paprika in which dreams tend to be weird and bizarre especially during the early period of sleep when they are similar to artsy and aimless French films rather than American blockbusters with an actual plot. To the untrained eye, most dreamers will just ignore these weird events and carry on with the dream like everything is all fine until they eventually wake up. Most of the dream will be forgotten moments after but some fragments of it which are still intact in the memory chamber will be reflected upon and only until then will they realise how strange the dream they just had and now in hindsight how obvious that it was not real.

Ever since the young man discovered lucid dreaming, he had always questioned anything peculiar happening in the real world so that whenever he was in an actual dream, he was more prone to notice these peculiarities and do reality checks to see whether he was dreaming or not. One reality check that the young man had consistently used from the article he read was to look at his wristwatch twice. The first glance was to simply know the time while the second time was to be sure the hands in his timepiece had remained the same. Most of the time he did this he was not dreaming so the watch did not change the time that it had just shown. On the rare occasion that he was lulled to a stupor, the hands in his timepiece would stop making any sense thus making him sure that he was free to do whatever he pleased until he got bored and decided to wake up.

The young man was not able to go through his tried and tested procedure as when he rolled his sleeves to look at the time, he realised that he was not wearing the watch his father who got the watch from his father gave to him. Since he was the eldest offspring of his parents, it made sense that he would inherit the family heirloom but being responsible to keep it does trouble him sometimes as he is prone to misplacing things. The young man considered the possibility that he had been mugged. That could have been it. He did not like the notion, but he was a realistic person. He could understand his phone and wallet not being in his pockets because he always kept them in a brown leather shoulder bag that he had but his watch never left his wrists unless he was taking a shower. The young man was also considering another possibility that he had been hypnotised or something. No, that was most probably not it. Why was this young man not thinking right? 

The young man was maybe anxious to get back to his hometown to the comfort of his family. He was now at a meadow, and it seemed like it was endless with so many unconscious people lying on the ground. How far did he have to walk to leave this place? He did not want to disturb anyone. Maybe he was dead? The young man was quite sure he had never been dead before so he could not confirm or deny this. But maybe this could also be some sort of purgatory? The young man imagined the scene where Dominick Cobb was waking up in the beginning of Inception and relating it with his present situation. Leonardo DiCaprio was washed up on the beach in the start of his story while the young man was stranded in some field in the beginning of his.