Hey guys, just playing with a story idea here. Yes, it is a "girl goes to Middle Earth" story but I am hoping it's a little different. Although I do make references to "Maximum Ride", "Blue's Clues" and "Harry Potter" this is a Lord of the Rings story. The characters and story lines belong to their respective authors. Please review, this will be a long one and I need your feedback to know if you like it. I apologise for the format, it won't stay in the format I typed it in!

-Lorikeet

Just to look at, I was an average 9 year old girl. Nothing about me really made me stand out. It was when I fell asleep that I was no longer ordinary. I am not sure when it started exactly, but I believe it began shortly after my parents began fighting.

They used to just fight at night, when they thought my sisters and I were asleep, but it soon escalated to fighting all of the time. It affected my sisters and I differently. Emma, who was 12, started getting into trouble at school. Usually getting into fights or cutting class.

My eldest sister, Tala, who had just turned 16 started sneaking out a lot, coming home drunk with the reek of cigarette smoke on her clothes. Emma has taken to calling Tala a slut, I don't know exactly what it means, but I called Tala that once when I was mad at her and she actually slapped me across the face. She never dared to hit Emma, she fought dirty and Tala always came off second best despite the age and size difference.

As for me, strange things started happening.

It must have been my way of escaping my rather stressful and upsetting home life, I don't actually know. But when I went to sleep, my dreams were real. When I was really small, the dreams were of simple things, television shows or stories for little kids that I had watched or heard. Mom wrote off my excited renditions of the previous night's dream as an overactive imagination. I believed her, until I came out of a dream where I had been with Blue from Blue's Clues with paint paw prints on my pyjamas. I knew my dreams were real then, but I kept them to myself.

As I got older, Mom started drinking and Dad rarely came home which in turn made me eager to go to bed to escape to whatever adventure my dreams would take me on. The only downside was that as I did get older, my tastes in books and television shows sometimes made my dreams a little more frightening.

When I was seven, I learned that if I got injured or died in a dream, then I felt the pain as though it was really happening. This was a rather terrifying revelation after I had managed to fall through the ice during an Antarctic expedition and drowned in the frigid water. The last thing I remembered was the water rushing into my lungs before waking up in my bed, drenched, coughing up water and freezing cold.

That little incident left me too afraid to sleep again, but I couldn't hold off forever. Luckily, my next adventure was much more pleasant. Getting injured or killed in a dream made things awkward sometimes. I once woke up with a nasty black eye after getting hit by a bludger while playing Quidditch during my Harry Potter adventures.

There was also the morning Emma came into wake me up and screamed bloody murder when she saw my blankets and pyjamas soaked in blood, without a scratch on me. That was actually a rather painful experience, it was when I was visiting the world of Maximum Ride and got disembowelled by an Eraser.

The night I started my next adventure was an ordinary Tuesday. Ordinary as I got home from school to find no one home, as usual. There was no food in the house and I had used the last of the money in my piggy bank to by food last week. By the time I went to bed that night, everyone was still out so I went to bed hungry.

Miserable and cross, I pulled the blankets over my head and cried myself to sleep.