Dream ?

He closed his eyes. After a hard day of toiling, his eyelids weighed down as lead, and the hard floor might have been the Hilton’s suite for all he cared. Sleep embraced him like a long lost friend.
His breath deepened and as he let go of the world, the so called consciousness that weighed him down during the day no longer fettered him.

Each day he lived a new dream. Today, he was a seagull flying high over the Great Australian reef with its vibrant spectacle of life floating down below him. The cool breeze tickled his feathers and breathed life into his body. The predicaments of his life seemed as irrelevant here as a drop in the mighty ocean below him. All he cared about, was the flight: the sheer joy of it. Flying to him was more than a mere evolutionary means of transportation. Something deep within the fibres of his body stirred when he took to the air and a primordial voice whispered within his head. It asked him to ascend higher and higher.

His friends thought he was mad. After all, what gull would forsake the feast that the ocean held for them, and instead fly towards the clouds relentlessly each day only to come crashing down in the evening? But the young gull paid them no heed. He knew not what answers he would find above those clouds, but he knew that he couldn’t live without finding it out. And so every morning, he took a deep breath and dove off the cliff and with a majestic swoop of his wings, rose up again towards the clouds. As he rose higher, he smiled to himself as he thought of the inconsequential desires that bound his friends. As he rose higher and higher, their squawking faded away; the roaring sound of the belligerent waves was reduced to a mere grumbling, and life itself seemed to grow more insignificant. He sometimes wondered what life would be like if he weren’t a bird, What would it feel like not being able to fly. Would he still hear the voice within his head then ?

He shook his head and continued rising towards the clouds. Each day, he reached a few metres closer to his destination than yesterday, before he could fly no more. His spirit was strong but it was his body that gave in, and he would come crashing down into the icy waters of the ocean.
The clouds seemed almost within his reach now. His wings were pushing him with all their strength. The voice in his head kept on urging him to rise higher and higher.
But suddenly, the world around him grew dark. His body was no more and everything around him was swimming in a dark pool of nothingness. A light shimmered from far off. Soon, it was almost blinding and caused him to close his eyes tight. A far off ringing noise shook him from within and grasped him from that abyss and flung him into a new world.

The man woke up and turned off his alarm.