The sleeper stirred in the bed, groaning softly.
In his dream he was a soldier. There was a lot of noise going on, and he was running across an open field waving a flag. When he tripped and fell it had woken him up. He was now waiting at table. He glanced across at the Eifel Tower. He was a French waiter taking an order from English-speaking tourists, he was thinking that their accents could be German when a departing customer bumped into him. This caused him to wake and find that the pigs that surrounded him in the pen were making so much noise he could hardly hear what his young daughter was saying. She came closer and shouted that lunch was ready. He was obviously a pig farmer. He waved as he closed the gate. It came down on his thumb and it jolted him awake.
Now, he stood listening to a strange noise that he didn’t recognise. He looked around. A gush of wet concrete began to pour onto a metal grid. He was holding a shovel, and like several others was about to spread it out to create a floor. He was a construction worker on a building site. No sooner had he started spreading another man’s shovel clipped his leg. The pain snapped him wide awake for him to find that it was night time and the torch he’d been using was beginning to flicker. As a security officer, he was checking that the doors around the outside of the building were locked. When he tried the next one it opened, setting off an alarm. The piercing sound of the siren shook him back to consciousness, where he discovered that a train had pulled into the station and passengers were getting off. He was holding a small red flag.
He was aware that as a station guard he had to wait until everybody was clear before waving the all clear to the driver. When this was done and he was returning to the guard’s room he tripped on something and fell forward. He put out his hands to save himself and the impact with the ground brought him out of his sleep. He was still lying on the ground, but this time he was crawling under a car. When he reached the spot he needed to be at, he turned over and started to use the spanner he held to check that several nuts were tight. As a motor mechanic, he knew how important this was. As he was checking the last one the spanner slipped from his hand and fell, hitting him on the forehead. This caused him to wake with a start, to see his room! His room, yes, he was finally, properly awake and back in his room.
He laid still for several minutes. He was looking up at the bedroom ceiling trying to shake off all the images from his dream. Of course, he wasn’t any of those people, all of this had been a silly dream. All these different personalities had been conjured up by his imagination. However, he was suddenly shocked by the realisation that he couldn’t remember what he himself actually looked like! He stayed there even longer, trying to figure out how it could be that he had absolutely no memory of that!
Now, fully awake, he got up and stretched. This strange state of affairs could be solved in an instant. He went into the bathroom, switched on the light and looked in the mirror.
To his utter astonishment, he was a rather tubby, grey-haired woman in her fifties.