Help, I Can't Wake Up!

Someone gets caught in a music video they don't even like...

I sank blissfully into my comfy armchair. Lightning flickered in the windows as I browsed YouTube on my iPad to the steady sound of rain. I watched a video about the multiverse, how different worlds can overlap and catch people in the wrong one. Scrolling through the comments, I read, “hey, can people get caught in imaginary worlds too? Like if a YouTube video exists, does that mean if there's a glitch in the cyber spacetime intermesh, we can step inside it?”

Ah, the foolish things one finds on the internet. I chuckled. A roar of thunder shook the building as my fingers hovered over the screen. I must've accidentally jabbed at a video on the sidebar; gilded flower petals swirled before my face with high-pitched vocals and weird, wavy, synthetic noise. Grumbling, I tried to close it out, but a blinding flash of lightning erupted. My armchair flipped upside down. I grabbed the sides with a yell as the iPad slid off my lap and disappeared.

When my vision cleared, the bouncy, bass electric music was still playing. I was in a hotel room with a guy wearing white pajamas. Several attendants in dark uniforms stood around us, but their faces were blank. Not expressionless: blank. Like someone had pulled socks over all of their heads. Then the words began, something about spinning off on two wheels. Was the guy in pajamas singing? While standing on the bed?

I ran for the door as I recognized the words to be lyrics to an Imagine Dragons song, one of those awful things you can't turn off fast enough. Heaven help me! Was I caught in a music video? How'd this happen? I don't even like Imagine Dragons!

I yanked the door open, only to find myself on the rooftop, overlooking a city with tacky glowing casino signs. Spinning around, I saw another bed, with the guy in white and two other guys wearing matching pajamas sitting on the edge. They stared stonily at me, all swinging one leg across the other and lip-syncing the ridiculous song in unison, backs to the cityscape.

“Everybody's coming, wake up!” they shouted.

“Aye-aye, aye-aye!” came the awful high-pitched backing voices.

I spun backwards, tripped, and fell over, the world flipping upside down around me. Next thing I knew, I was hanging over an ocean brimming with circling sharks! Before I could even scream for help, the scene changed again, this time to a lobby where the guy in white was standing, signing autographs on a pad of sticky notes held in a tray by one of the faceless attendants.

One after another, notes went flying as he scrawled, the stack of papers never shrinking on the tray. I slipped past them, tripped again and lay on my back in a field, papery autumn leaves fluttering in my face. As I sat up, a cheetah zoomed past and took down a gazelle on the savannah. A split second later, dice clattered on a roulette table as a row of dominos knocked itself flat.

How could I get out of this rapid-fire nightmare? I pulled a door open and found myself in the bedroom again, this time with all three guys jumping on the bed. The original guy pantomimed eating spaghetti as the world flipped upside down – suddenly I was the one in bed, surrounded by faceless attendants!

I leaped to my feet and ended up on the rooftop again, with a lip-syncing guy on either side of me. The casino signs blinked mockingly, glowing in moody twilight. Slipping past a pile of luggage, I ran downstairs, around and around and around a dizzying spiraling staircase. At the bottom, the original guy in white pajamas was still signing autographs, still flinging aside sticky notes as the faceless guard stood impassively. Finally, he scrawled one autograph too many, tore the whole tray out of her hands and chucked it into a glass wall that shattered as he turned and fled.

The faceless guard approached me with another tray of sticky notes and a pen.

“Oh no ya don't!”

I ran down the hall after the other guy, dodging two more attendants and a car spinning out of control. Was that a radioactive warning sign? An owl? A shoreline with the tide coming in? A charred birthday cake? I swore the clock's hands twirled backwards as calendar pages flickered forwards. A hot air balloon soared overhead. I shuffled through handfuls of black-and-white photographs, desperately looking for something familiar. Throwing them aside, I kept moving. There had to be a way out of this!

The room filled with greenish red lights; the three guys in white pajamas stood around me, bobbing their heads to the beat. The original guy, his sleep shirt hanging unbuttoned, jabbed a finger at me, drawing it across his throat while shouting something about jealousy. Then he gestured toward another door. I yanked it open, only to see that dratted rooftop again with five blank-faced attendants lurking by the bed!

I shoved past them, jumped into the bed and buried my face in the pillow. If I couldn't fight my way out of this madhouse, I'd sleep through it. Someone whispered faintly amid pounding synth waves,

“Winners hate to lose…”

When I opened my eyes, I was staring up at the ceiling of a perfectly ordinary hotel room. The music had stopped. Sunlight filtered through the curtains. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, then got up and opened the door. My own living room beckoned. I stumbled through and collapsed once more into my armchair, where my iPad still rested, undamaged.

“Man, that was insane,” I grumbled, glaring at the music video still buffering on the page.

I tapped the three dots and selected “Do Not Show Videos From This Channel.” A moment later, contrarily, another music video popped up: Sharks, by Imagine Dragons. Good grief…

Words: 987.
Written for the daily "The Writer's Cramp"