V

You are dreaming. You know you are dreaming because you've never met these people before, and they appear to know you very well. Glancing around, quickly to regain your bearings, you seem to be in an office building of sorts. Cubicles are scattered in disorderly, random intervals throughout the room, the dingy, gray carpet reeks of the sterile scent of professionalism. There are no walls to seperate this room from any other. It appears that you could walk directly into the open air of this new world, but refrain from doing so. You are being watched by every soul in this strange room, a dozen of them at least. Are you supposed to say soemthing? As if to answer, the room turns away and conversates among itself. The people you don't know speak calmly to one another.

At this exact moment, a television screen above the desk you didn't realize you were even sitting at flickers and comes to life. The newscaster speaks in tongues you do not understand about a scuffle apparent in the background montage. You turn toward the non-existant windows, doubletake, back to the screen, then back outside, with amazement. The world you've become apart of mimics with incredible accuracy the images of war behind the newsman, but this doesn't seem to bother anyone but you.

You are thirsty. Ignoring the outside scenery for the moment, you make your way across the room in which the cubicles have disapeared, to a water cooler in the corner. On your journey, you are stopped by a woman of about thirty.

"Tell me something." She demands. You don't know what to tell the woman, and say nothing. "Is something the matter?"

At the utterance of her question, a spew of words find their way out of your mouth and onto the floor in front of you. The woman stares, as you reach down at your knees to sort out the mess, and find what you intended to say. Evidently something about the apparent certainty of your death in the war waging on outside. She stares apprehensibly through her glasses, and with an outstretched hand, invites you through the wall with her.

Stepping into the heat, you awaken on the couch, the tastelessness of water still on your lips. A look at the clock (it reads 9:18, but its broken. Why did you even look?) a resituation, a gathering of covers gone astray, a muttered "What the hell?" and you're back asleep, hopefully through the morning.