That night, I had a very scrange dream. In the dream, I was at the playground at school. I took the two chips out of my pockets and held them out in my cold, warm, left hand. A voice in my head told me that "this is how these chips must be used." I used the chips and a blue circle like a mirror appeared in front of me In that mirror, looking back at me, was another copy of myself, another Maddie. My reflection smiled and beckoned for me to step through the circle. I hesitantly complied, and as I was stepping through the circle, my reflection seemed to get stuck temporarily whilst trying to swap places with me. Eventually, we were successful, and once I entered the opposite side of the circle, I immediately felt something change within me. It was as if I had had depression, and by stepping through the circle, the depression had magically been cured. I glanced back through the orange circle at my reflection on the other side, before a wave of exuberant exhilaration swept over me. I closed my eyes and did a backflip as the low-gravity playground and smiled as my body slowly floated upward, tumbling over itself over and over again. A flock of pink balloons floated past me as I stayed suspended in the air, and I could hear the ravens, the Baltimore Ravens, cawing in the distance, as the warmth of the sunshine and the cool breeze moderated my body temperature. I felt like a cold-blooded lizard on a warm-blooded rock. For an indefinite amount of time I stayed in the air on that rock, my body hovering above even the slide and the cuckoo's tower. Once my blood had reached an acceptable temperature, I opened my eyes and looked down. I smiled and descended to the road right outside the confines of the playground, right next to a brand new, shiny red bicycle with training wheels and shimmering purple and silver streamers on the handlebars. I smiled, knowing that this was my bicycle, and got on, starting to pedal. My mama says that I'm always 'post to wear a helmet when I ride a bicycle, but this was all just a dream, and there were no rules in dreams, right? I pedaled faster and faster, feeling the muscles in my thighs firing as I sped around the carpool loop into the parking lot where everyone else parked. There were many cars in the parking lot, and all of them were purple PT Cruisers. On top of the PT Cruisers, there were five buttons: play, pause, stop, fast forward, and rewind. Inside of the PT Cruisers, there were people that watched my every move as I pedaled through the parking lot. I could feel their suspicious eyes on me, as if they all had that thing that Jacques has. I passed the kissing rock, where the older students supposedly met after school to kiss, and sped out of the parking lot, exiting through the entrance lane. Surrounding the parking lot was a circular 4-lane highway with a lot of purple PT Cruisers on it as well. Channeling my inner Frogger, I maneuvered my bike between the cars, attracting more suspicious stares as I went along. Were these people… following me? Suddenly I began pedaling faster, as my bicycle transformed into a little tikes tricycle, severely limiting both its, and my own, speed. I veered left onto a -
The whole world paused and went grey, as if someone had pushed one of the pause buttons on the top of the PT Cruisers, as my brain searched for a synonym for "drawbridge", which was the thing I had just veered left onto, but my mama says that it's bad taste to repeat words again when you've already said them before. An indefinite amount of time passed while I tried to conjure up a synonym for "drawbridge" which was made even longer by the thought that if the world was paused in my dream, then time didn't actually exist and these nested tasks could not be taking up any time at all, before I finally became at peace with the fact that there was no synonym for drawbridge. I exhaled, opened my eyes, and
– drawbridge to escape the PT Cruisers, their buttons flashing like police lights as they chased me onto the 'bridge. Suddenly, the 'bridge began to draw, its gaping maw exposing the river below. Pedaling up the 'bridge became more and more harder as the angle approached ninety degrees. As the angle approached ninety degrees, it had an inverse relationship with my tricycle's speed, just like the amount of sand in the top of an hourglass and the amount of space in the top of an hourglass without sand. Just as I was about to stop moving, lose my momentum, and tumble backwards into the gnashing jaws of the hungry hungry horde of PT Cruisers, I head a loud car horn resounding through my head. Descending from the heavens like Bob Marley in the ultimate showdown, a mix between and eighteen wheeler and a cement mixer plummeted towards me with vicious, ravenous, rebellious force. I screamed, and threw my body to the left, using the low gravity of the world to my advantage to do a barrel roll on the tricycle as the eighteen wheeled cement mixer roared past me, crashing into the PT Cruisers below and causing them to silently explode in slow motion. The force of the explosion sent me slowly spiraling off the side of the drawbridge. I unwillingly relinquished my hold of the tricycle and fell rather quickly into the water below, losing a deeper level of consciousness. The next thing I knew, I was lying on top of a red cube made of a metal grate hovering above turbulent waters filled with durbulent walruses inside a large warehouse. Upon surveying the area, I could see that there were other red metal platforms like the one I was sitting on hovering around the warehouse. There were also lots of rocks in the turbulent waters below, and I had no way of knowing how deep those waters were either. Unsure of what to do, I sat on the platform for an indefinite amount of time, until puttering through the air came a small, tan rectangle. My inner voice, the voice that came from within me, told me to stand on that platform, so I did, conveniently on the white painted footprints on its center. Then, without being bidden, the rectangle began moving on its own. As I peered over the edge, I could see that there were several penguins and old men with long, flowing beards in the water. The rectangle kept moving and moving, slowly spanning the massive expanse of the warehouse. The smell of fish assailed my nostrils. After a star trek across the seemingly infinite warehouse, the rectangle bumped into another red metal grate platform and I was able to step off of it there with ease. From my newfound vantage point, I could see an artificial rock face carved into the corner of the warehouse. There was a ledge to walk on that led to a door with a glowing red exit sign above it. Using my amazing powers of deduction, I was able to guess that the door was probably the exit to the warehouse. Leading up to a ledge was a metal ladder that descended into the water below. From the platform where I was standing, it was about 100 meters to the ladder, but I did notice something floating in the water below. It was white, big, and shaped a bit like a round buzzsaw. It had some green markings on the inside and some gold trim. I thought that it looked a bit like a unicorn, and I figured that I could probably float on that to the ladder. Taking a deep breath, I lept from the platform and landed in the water. I could feel time slowing down as I fell and my world turned upside down as I also turned upside down in the water. After doggy paddling to the surface, I doggy paddled to the side of the white thing and climbed aboard. The turbulent waters continued to slosh, as if this whole warehouse was just the bathtub of one disgusting giant. Ever so eventually, the white thing bobbed closer and closer to the ladder, as if it was floating face down in a swimming pool somewhere. Using the muscles in my arms and legs, I was able to ascend to the top of the ladder until I was standing on the ledge made of false rock. I scrode along the ledge until I reached the exit door. After turning around to give the rest of the warehouse one last glance, I gulped, stepped forward, pushed open the exit door, and exited the warehouse into the world beyond.