Izzy’s world was black and silent; right up until it wasn’t.

  One moment there was a peaceful weightlessness and nothingness to his existence, the next he was acutely aware of his weight as he plummeted out of the sky. It felt like one of those dreams where you can’t remember what you were doing, but you know that you fell and it woke you up; this just seemed to have happened in reverse. He was awake in the darkness, started falling, and then it began to feel like a dream.

  Despite being in imminent danger of becoming intimate with the ground at terminal velocity, the shock of what he saw below him and the inconceivability of his current predicament gave him pause. He had to be dreaming…

  “What the actual fuck?” he said, the wind stripping the words away from his ears as his voice reached a crescendo with the last words.

  He’d barely finished yelling as his fall turned into a tumble. He was no skydiver; he’d always thought those crazy adrenaline junkies were out of their minds. The numbers around parachute deaths did not do enough to make Izzy want to experience anything like that. Why choose to do something for fun that, even with probabilistic insignificance, could end with your death? Yet, here Izzy was, tumbling through the sky like a guy in a bad action film.

  Attempting to control his breathing, Izzy started to think. He could think really well because it’s what got him through everything! When things went bad, think good.

  “Bad action film”, Izzy thought, shutting his eyes tightly. “Why did I think of that? Because it was frustrating when people who were supposed to be good at this stuff, did it poorly in movies. But how were you actually supposed to do it?”

  His eyes flew open and he threw his arms and legs out as far as they would go. His tumble started to slow and eventually he was looking backwards.

  “Backwards?” he thought, then realized why he thought of it that way. He was looking away from the direction he was falling, but hadn’t thought of it as “up” because he wasn’t really looking at anything. There was just a dimly lit overcast that appeared ethereal and too thick for it not to be raining. “What the hell am I looking at? The weather was supposed to be clear! It is Bermuda after all!”

  He needed more information, so he ever so slightly started tipping his body to his right to try to reorient himself downwards. His stomach lurched again, somehow, like when he first started falling and he could feel his heart pounding in his head as the wind tore at his body and stole the air from his lungs. He realized how much of a mistake this was when he saw what was waiting in his path.

  Below him, a giant port city with towering walls and buildings sprawled before him. It was like something from a fantasy book; giant gray stone walls wrapped around a city nestled on a tiered landscape and butted right up against a vast ocean. Torches set periodically around the circumference of the city and lights on the inside made it look like a high-quality Lite-Brite sketch of something from The Lord of the Rings.

  He also noticed that, just like what inevitably happens in those books, most of it was on fire.

  Even from how high up he was, he could see immense shapes working their way over the causeways of the port and through the town. Lights flashed like high caliber tracer rounds from large groups of what Izzy could only assume were the people fending off an attack. The soft glow from the torches and the intense white light of flares, which looked like those military grade magnesium ones, were playing off of each other and he could just make out the shapes and silhouettes of an entire city in panic.

  This arrested his attention for a while; Izzy tried to make sense of everything in front of him when one of the giant shapes did something impossible.

  “Holy shit!” He yelled, as a bright beam of seemingly corrupted light tingled purple erupted from one of the creatures.

  It was only active for a moment, blowing out his vision a little like the flash of a polaroid camera, but it was followed by secondary explosions along its trajectory. Whole buildings erupted in a fire similar to the purple- and black-speckled beam, ending at an immense castle-looking building higher up in the city. A giant portion of the large wall had bent inwards where the beam struck, reversed, and blew outwards like a bomb had gone off on the inside.

  “What?” Izzy yelled again. “The actual fuu….” he trailed off.

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  He was repeating himself and needed to start thinking again. Why was he having such a hard time thinking?

  “Ohhhhh…” Izzy thought. “It’s a dream. I’m on the edge of lucid dreaming. That’s why I can only think a little. That’s why I thought of a bad action film. I either need to take control, because this would be an awesome dream for me to be lucid! Or I can just wait till I hit the ground and actually wake up.”

  Izzy calmed down a little and took stock of himself.

  “Yup… definitely a dream” he thought as he looked down and, for the first time, realized he was completely naked.

  He rolled his eyes, glad he wasn’t dreaming of one of his guest lectures at a high school instead. That would not be a fun dream during which to become lucid. This one though…

  Izzy focused, trying to use the nature of lucid dreams to make things clearer so he could better understand what he was looking at below him. Nothing happened.

  “Okay, let’s try something else,” he mused. He closed his eyes and focused on his body, pushing his awareness down through his head, neck, and all the way through his limbs. Everywhere along his body, he thought “I can fly, I can fly, I can fly”. The scene from Disney’s Peter Pan played out quickly in his head. He shook his head just as the dog, Nana, started barking and refocused.

  “Fly, damn you.” He slowly opened one of his eyes, but already knew it had not worked thanks to the feeling of the cold, night air rushing past his tender bits. The city continued inexorably up towards him, like the mouth of a car tunnel as it begins its path beneath a mountain.

  He tried everything he could think of: bringing up the ambient light, vanishing the giant monsters he thought he could see, making air woosh out of his hands like Ironman. He even tried wishing some clothes into existence to ease up the biting cold on his skin, among other things.

  Nothing worked.

  “Well,” he thought. “This sucks… It would have been a fun dream! Must be in that weird spot where I’m not awake enough to do much of anything.”

  The city grew closer.

  He knew when he hit it would wake him up, but he didn’t have to watch it happen. Again, he didn’t have an adrenaline junkie bone in his body; he rolled back over so he was facing up and resigned himself to his fate. Hopefully he could try something like this again, this dream really did look fun.

  He closed his eyes and, after a while, realized he was actually starting to enjoy the feeling of the fall. He was as cold as he thought he ever had been in his life, but the air was starting to warm up and the ache of the cold was slowly easing. As Izzy settled in, he had a few thoughts right in a row.

  Terminal velocity takes about 12 seconds for the average person. He had definitely been falling for that long, so he was plummeting at about 200 kilometers an hour. That’s the fastest he’s ever moved outside of a plane! He then thought of how his body was warming up and how bad the cold had been. This was a very realistic dream! Then, he had a final thought that made his eyes snap open as he gasped.

  The city grew closer.

  He DID have some control. He could move his body, he could close his eyes, and, when he wasn't distracted, he could think. Properly think. Not the halting, all over the place thinking that happens in a dream, but as though he was thinking with his waking mind. Putting aside some of the impossible things he had seen when looking down, the evidence was mounting in all the wrong ways.

  What if he wasn’t dreaming?

  “If I wasn’t dreaming, I wouldn’t be able to conjure clothes out of nowhere,” he thought, his head starting to pound again with the full force of his heart. “If I wasn’t dreaming, I couldn’t suddenly see or perceive better than anybody can a kilometer in the air. And I wouldn’t be able to increase the brightness on the world like a computer screen. Once you eliminate the impossible…”

  He could feel his train of thought trail off as the truth struck him like somebody hitting the ground without a parachute.

  “Oh…”

  Izzy turned over again and saw the city seemingly coming up faster than it had ever been. He panicked. Fear blanked everything in his head, it took over every part of his body. He was no longer Izaak Bertchwild Schiller; he was a tiny, screaming meatsack plummeting into an evil ring of light about to consume him.

  Tears flew from his eyes, the air of his shrill scream tore at his throat and lungs, and the city continued to rush up to him. He was so low now that the walls of the city no longer looked like a ring of light, but a lit fence stretching around him in the distance. He streaked out of the sky and nearly struck one of the taller spires, the roof of the building flashing by. All he could do was yell his dismay, fear, and confusion into the night.

  The city grew closer.