Weary, my eyes wound around the clock, feeling out a button to send my hands to. It was morning, all right, but I wasn't - and never had been - a morning person.

I located the snooze button and jabbed hard to ensure a kill. With silence came darkness. My eyes shut out the bright curtain edges without trouble and I returned to the world I'd been pulled from seconds earlier.

As I re-entered my dream, I noticed a sliver of waking world had slipped in and begun prying open the doorway that was supposed to have sealed itself behind me.

Waking world was infectious; it grew in all directions, spreading mundane thoughts and stifling all my characters with images of their own implausibility.

It took all my effort to cram it back into the corner and I was half-way through evicting it when I realized it was already too late; my characters had disappeared, replaced by fountains of concrete, all of them spewing boredom and deadlines and things that had no purpose in my world.

Lists appeared on the walls as they solidified. The magic was gone - dried up and desaturated. I turned to the waking world, its tentacles waving unthreateningly, knowing it had already achieved what it came to do.

I sighed my defeat and gestured to the waking world to open the door so we could leave together. One nil.

I would try harder, next time. Perhaps lay a trap. Or have some of my characters watching the door. But now, they sleep and I leave town for a other day.