Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter, and all characters therein, do not belong to me, I've merely borrowed a few of them JK Rowling for a little while. Oh, but the other characters (Reg, Susan, Aaron, Bridget, Philip and friends) are mine. Including the crazy one crouching in the corner and foaming at the mouth, the big doggie, and the JarMeanies (you'll see).

A Beginner's Crash-Course to Dimensional Travel

By CalamityM

Chapter 6: Dreamt A Little Dream

"Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you,
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you,
But in your dreams whatever they be,
Dream A Little Dream Of Me."

- Doris Day, The Mamas and the Papas, Michael Buble and pretty-much everyone.

It was on going to sleep that night, that I had time to reflect on what had happened to me that day – and though I was tired, I was kept awake by the insistent buzzing of unresolved questions in my head; that, and the loud snoring from Bridget in the bed across the room. I realized – in a strange, distant way – that I was still in shock; my body felt lethargic and my emotions were numb, and though I was quite aware that I ought to be screaming and crying hysterically, I was very calm and unmoved. I couldn't feel for the man I had – indirectly, I strongly believed – killed that day; and that worried me. I couldn't focus on what was happening, it just didn't feel real. The facts were of little help to me, as they were as deceptive in their oddness as the possibilities; since there was no way in which I could possibly have time-traveled, of that I was almost certain! Well… maybe.

And then there was the matter of Blacksun. I think it was her presence that troubled me the most: I had always thought she was imaginary. I couldn't recall the earliest image I had had of her - lurking at the back of my mind like some malevolent nightmare - but when she had appeared the visions of her were brutal, savage and more than slightly chilling. I had thought her little more than just a character to a book I'd might one day write; or a comic I might one day have the talent to illustrate. Apparently she had had other ideas...

Was I going insane? She couldn't be real. And yet she had felt so much so; and so much more than just a figment of my imagination. Was Blacksun a fevered delusion; a split personality for me to hide behind? I tried to push those thoughts aside, for the time being, and focus on falling asleep. Tomorrow was going to be a big day.

I dreamt that I was in a large storeroom; so large it was like as endless maze of metal shelves. Shadows and smoky-mist gently and slowly drifted around the ground between the shelves and along the floor; and a baleful half-light illuminated the platforms and their contents. Each of the shelves were filled to their edges with various glass jars of many different shapes, sizes and colours; each containing, in their murky depths, their own unique pickled matter.

I wandered through the aisles, peering through the clear glass of each jar in turn and puzzling over the floating contents inside, my bare feet kicking up the mist as I went. One jar contained corn cobs of various types; the usual yellow, a few whites, one or two odd, Mexican red ones, as well as a few black; all of which bobbed around in the jar in their vinegar. In another jar floated small pickled onions in a blue-dyed liquid; they floated about unaided, and as they slowly turned I noticed that each one had a blue spot on one side. I frowned and moved on quickly to the next jar; inside were pickled apricots that looked suspiciously like shriveled ears and I quickly hurried on.

My eyes drifted across the shelves, idly examining each of the jars; and, for whatever reason it was that took me, I stopped in front of a jar of chillies. The jar was tall and narrow with a latch-top lid keeping the contents air-sealed; inside, packed in tightly, were hundreds of chillies of various shapes and even more varying colours, all compressed and pickled in vinegar. I looked at them with mild interest before something extraordinary happened,

"Hey, how's it goin'?"

I stared. Two of the chillies, pinched together at the ends, had just formed into a mockery of a mouth and talked to me.

"There a problem?" said two other chillies above the first pair.

I kept staring, not quite sure what to say.

"You look a little unwell, maybe it was something you ate?" another pair suggested.

"Stop that!" I finally snapped. "Stop talking! You're chillies! You can't talk!"

"Oh?" said the first pair. "We are, are we? Are you sure? I mean, really sure? For that matter, are you sure about anything at all? You don't even know when or where you are; you don't even know what you're doing here! So how can you be really sure abut anything?!"

"Well I'm sure you're just a jar of chillies! And chillies don't talk!"

"Why not? They were part of something that was alive once, weren't they?"

"That was a plant!" I said, and there was a slightly unpleasant feeling rising up in me. One I didn't really want to focus on at that moment.

"Was it?" asked the chillies contemptuously. "Was it really? Okay, so this is a jar of chillies and that over there is a jar of pickled apricots, and over there is a jar of eyes- no, sorry, I meant onions. Right?"

"Shut up," I said.

"Just trying to understand where you're coming from!" said the chillies petulantly. "Aren't I allowed to be understanding? You certainly weren't, were you; Muggle?"

"Shut up! Just shut up!"

But they were laughing at me now, each pair of chillies in the jar all forming their own little mouth and laughing mockingly at me.

"Shut up! Shut up, you bastard! It wasn't me!"

"You let her out," replied one of the pairs over the laughter of its brethren. "You let her out! And look what terrible things she's done!"

"I didn't let her out! She snuck out when my back was turned!" I cried.

"Murderer!" said a pair.

"Monster!" said another.

"I'm not!" I wailed. "Shut up! It wasn't me! I didn't do it! It was her!"

But they had all joined in, each shouting out it's own accusation. I was crying uncontrollably and trying hard to reason with them but they wouldn't listen.

"Dreamer, pay them no attention! They are only figments in your imagination,"said a voice behind me.

I turned around in surprise to look for the newcomer and saw a large, white-furred wolf standing calming in the aisle and looking up at me.

"Do not be alarmed. This is an attempt by your brain to make sense of what is happening to you,"it stated.

"It- it is?"

"Yes, Dreamer, it is. You must focus on the facts now, you must work out how to leave this world in order to return to your own."

"What? What do you mean: this world? I'm on another planet?!"

"No, you are in another realm,"explained the wolf, patiently. "This is the same planet, but in a different Possibility. A different realm of reality to the one you originated from. This is another possibility for the same Material Plane; one in which you do not belong. You must return home, Dreamer; your existence here disrupts the balance between the realms."

"What? Why? How does my being here disrupt the balance?"

"Because-"started the wolf, but it was too late.

I had been woken up. I discovered, in my hazy state, that someone had thrown a shoe at me. It was still on the bed, sitting on top of the blankets, and my arm still hurt where it had hit me. It fell off as I rolled over and I heard Bridget reprimanding me,

"You're snoring!" she complained. "How 'm I to sleep when you're snoring like a pig?!"

I mumbled 'sorry', even though I would have preferred to point out her own obvious nasal-symphonies; but I decided that sleep was more important right now than a mid-night debate. I rolled back over and tried to fall asleep again. When I finally managed to, the dream was gone, and so was the wolf.

The next day Reg took me in his car to a local café, in the hopes that I would find some work. The owner was an old friends of his; though I was beginning to get the feeling that most of the people around the neighbourhood were old friends of Reg's, since everyone we walked passed – whether they were customers or store-owners – seemed to know and recognize the old guy quite fondly. The café owner's name was Paul and he spoke in an accent I couldn't place (but Reg later told me was one-part Brazilian, one-part Yorkshire and the rest was Londoner). The work was mostly as a kitchen-hand, until I mentioned to Paul that I had some prior waitressing experience, and then I found myself waiting tables for the rest of the day. It was hard work, but satisfying and it took my mind off my current problems, and by the end of my six-hour shift I had eighteen-pounds in my pocket and an invite from Paul to come back and work for him the next day.

Reg came to pick me up and was pleased by what Paul had to say about me.

"You'll do well, girl," he told me later, while he was driving me back to Susan's. "Paul's not usually impressed all tha' readily! You must've worked ya arse off! Best no' over do it though, or he'll expect tha same each time ya go there!"

We went to the supermarkets, before Susan's, to pick up some supplies; and I grabbed a British Sci-fi mag to breeze through at the checkouts and Reg encouraged me to throw it in with the shopping,

"'Aven't seen a good sci-fi movie since Back-to-the-Future!" he said cheerfully as we loaded the shopping bags into the boot of the car (there was no point trying to fit them into the backseat with all the biscuit-tins in the way). I agreed that I had liked the series and we chattered about them on the way back to Susan's place.

Unloading the car and packing away the groceries I couldn't help but feel a little peculiar; I knew it was the year 1997, I knew that I was somehow in London, but what I couldn't work out was whether all of the events that I had been through were real – and that I had gone back in time, and the Harry Potter story had in fact been true all along – or if it was some sort of bizarre dream I was having. It was the ordinariness of the day I had just had that was throwing me; everything had been completely acceptable as normal.

Unlike my usual dreams it wasn't an illusion of normality, but real, hard, boring normality itself; there was nothing that had happen that day to suggest that my experiences were in any way dream-like; no hazy vision or discolouration, no distorted communication with those around me (or the dreams in which everyone would be speaking another language but you could still understand them completely; the green-grocer I had met that day had an Scottish accent so thick I could scarcely understand him, so I knew it couldn't be one of those dreams!), or people turning into animals or objects but still engaging you in polite conversation. No, it was real: dull, everyday, pointless, uneventful, mundane and real.

I didn't know where that left me and it certainly didn't explain the references to the 'Potter' series that I had witnessed, but so long as it continued to be dull and ordinary there wasn't much reason in me worrying too much about it. At least that's what I told myself.