The Train to Hollow Earth

"WHOOOOOO!" I awoke to the sound of a train whistle. A train whistle? No, that is ridiculous. I must still be asleep on my stiff hotel bed. After all, walking around in the hot Florida sun had always fully exhausted me in the past, sometimes making for weird dreams, and this year's Comicon was apparently no different.

"Tickets. Tickets please." A Ticketmaster was walking down the rows retrieving tickets. The smells, the sounds, the hunger in my belly. For a dream, this was the most realistic I had ever encountered.

The Ticketmaster was now standing at my row looking down at me very inquisitively. He was a very slender man with pale skin wearing an odd green uniform. His accent was peculiar and he had a very unworldly air about him. I wanted to wake up before this turned into a nightmare as some of my deep sleep dreams tend to do.

"I, I am not sure if I have a ticket sir, or perhaps I have misplaced it." I squeaked out. The man's face seemed to not be impressed and in a droll tone answered back, "See to it that you find this misplaced ticket of yours soon then, little one."

It was as he walked away from me that I noticed how tall he was. He was, well, a giant! I would say around 12 feet tall, maybe taller! The train too I now realized was enormous, with a ceiling reaching extremely high!

Then I heard something that truly alarmed me. Screams from down the way from what seemed to be a storage car. That's it. This dream needed to end now!

"I need to wake up!" I shouted. "I need to wake up and be back in my room! I don't want to do a nightmare, get me off, get me off this train and back to my hotel room right now!"" I was now shouting to myself, but my dreaming subconscious did not take notice. The other passengers however did, looking at at me with almost a curious gaze as if I was a caged animal in a zoo. And the passengers, they too, like the Ticketmaster, were very, very big!

I began pinching myself, hitting myself, anything to become awake, but no matter how much I did, I didn't wake.

Was this real? No, this had to be a dream. But the longer it went on, the more I feared I was either fully insane, or that this was actually happening. Insanity sounded like a much better option.

Amidst all of my commotion, the Ticketmaster had now returned with two other large fellows, all looking very displeased. "Stop this commotion at once, or I will be forced to take you to the holding cell along with the others." The others? I stopped inflicting pain on myself. "Do you have your ticket?" I was overtaken with a state of shock as I was now beginning to consider that this just might not be a dream. "No? Very well then. Take this small lady to where the other two trouble bumbles are. From there we will process them." Suddenly, the two enormous security guards picked me up like a doll, and whisked me away to a storage room nearby where two other individuals also were being held. My hands and feet were bound, and then the two guards promptly left us. The other two who were bound were not giants, but rather my size. I had never felt so much joy seeing another human even after just recently being sick of so many crowds at Comicon.

One of the prisoners was a young man about my age. The other I could not make out but was lying limpless on the ground. The young man sitting up had dry blood down his temple, and what looked like a freshly made black eye. My joy subsided quickly.

"This is no dream. I heard you yelling, about being in a dream. This is most definitely reality, though what reality I am not sure. But there is no use in trying to fight them. We might as well be kittens to them clawing at their heels."

I stared at him and the other limp body laying next to him in disbelief. The pain I was feeling was real. The air I was breathing was real. I think he was right. This was happening. And I was very far from home.