Ramblings of an Insomniac

When sleep won't happen, I leave myself lying there in bed and go for a walk. I go downstairs, grab a packet of fruit snacks, strap on a backpack and head outside. I break into a jog. As I turn the corner on my street, I speed up. As I do, I start keeping pace with the cars on the road. So I join them, weaving in and out of lanes as I continue to accelerate. Pretty soon I'm at a dead sprint and I'm whizzing past cars, hurdling over-passes and swinging from streetlights as the night slides on. I hop up and catch hold of an airplane with both hands. It's not much bigger than a large chicken and so I just hold on as we dodge stars and fireflies in the night. I look up and realize that my airplane has changed color. And grown feathers. It really is a chicken now. It looks down at me, gives a brief squawk of alarm and then we tumble down through the wispy, cotton-candy clouds as we plummet to our deaths. As we fall, my chicken/airplane ejects an egg that gets in my hair and makes a mess. We land in a jungle. Somehow there is now a nest in my hair with a baby chick inside. I remove the nest, leave it and the chick with the chicken and continue to run. The leaves of the jungle wave at me, beckoning me to come and play but I continue to run until I reach a cliff. Without a hesitation, I throw myself over it and dive headfirst into the ocean of fruit punch waiting for me at the bottom. My friends, the dolphins, toss me up on the powdered-sugar beach. To say thanks, I grab a piece of the moon out of the sky and throw it to them, then race a shooting star back to the jungle. But after the race, I continue to run. I crash through hazelnut trees, papaya bushes and marshmallow weeds. The sweet smelling coconut grass sticks to my feet as I continue to sprint. My backpack became a sloth. I paused to set it down and watched it wander off. More running. Presently, I reach the sunset. Curious, I walk up to the sun as it slowly descends between a few stray clouds. I realize that the sun is nothing more than a hole in the sky. The light from the hole looked warm and inviting so I crawled through and stood up. It was cozy but the light was dimmer than I expected. Probably because the light was emanating from a small nightlight in the corner. I felt myself being drawn up the stairs and soon stood at my bedside, watching myself lie there. I was rather disappointed by what I saw. There was little light in the face that I saw before me. But no matter. The already dim light in the room faded even further, the warm stillness of the night wrapping it's arms around me like a blanket of stars. I bid the chicken, sloth and jungle goodbye as I finally began to drift off.
Tomorrow I would awake to a world where airplanes were big scary things, marshmallows didn't grow in the jungle and I had never actually seen the ocean, but I imagined it wouldn't be much like fruit punch. I would no longer be able to run on the freeway or race shooting stars. I was only 7 years old after all. I would dream of my sloth backpack and all of the wonderful things like the stars and fireflies while the day lasted, then I could visit them again at night. Because life is so much more exciting when one isn't tied down to reality.