Percy's Guide to Proper Dreaming

Chapter 1

Percy's eyes opened. He was lying on his bed, in his room. He was not in the bizarre world that he had just experienced.

For a few seconds he lay there, catching his breath, trying to pull apart the dream from the memories of the day before.
He looked at the clock sitting on his bedside table. 7:17. TUES.
A school day. He quickly got dressed.
He pulled thin grey trousers over pale skin and a creased white shirt over scrawny arms and torso. His final touch was a burgundy beanie, carefully set over the greasy brown hair that shielded his shallow eyes.
His pointed face was studded with freckles, and his straight teeth, though rather attractive, were permenantly hidden by a reserved half-smile.
He quickly donned a pair of wire glasses, and grabbed his books.

He looked like the classic, non sociable, nerd, especially when he was fiddling with his glasses wires, or absentmindedly solving Rubix cubes. And he fitted this role well.
Annoyingly, it seems that fulfilling this role also resulted in him being legally blind. Without his glasses, he was nothing.

Percy went downstairs to eat breakfast. What did he last have for breakfast? Crayfish and chocolate. He felt the smooth, milky balls of chocolate roll around his mouth, melting lightly on his tongue, and the bombardment of the salt and umami meat juices flowing, crashing, mixing, complementing each other, crescendos, diminuendos, rests, releases, all picked up personally by every individual tastebud. A symphony of flavour. What a memory of a dream.

Percy was impressed. Often his dreams faded away within seconds, but this one was still wildly vivid in the front of his mind from the night before.
He'd been sitting on a smooth, white beach, eating each delicacy slowly, with purpose, savouring every bite.
He liked the memory, and decided not to forget it, scribbling it quickly on his hand. He could write out down properly later.

But why could he remember it?

This was the only thought able to compete with the presence of the memory itself. He could remember an entire day in the other world, and it'd been a day packed full of adventure.
After his interesting breakfast, he'd gone water skiing with a little blond-haired boy with a face he vaguely recognised, afterwards training with a circus troupe towards some far-off performance. He had been practicing the trapeze with an attractive female counterpart whose identity also escaped him. The experience was vivid, and even just the memory was enough to make his adrenaline flow like he'd never felt before.

Suddenly, he jolted forwards after a slap on the back of his head. "Eat your breakfast," sighed Percy's mother, Irene, "or you'll be late for school!"

He took off his glasses and started to clean the lenses. For someone as academically capable as he knew he was, he was rather prone to losing his mental focus.
His index finger slipped along the inside of his thumb and he lost his grip on the arm of his glasses, and they tumbled into the bowl of cereal he'd just put together.
Percy sighed.
It seemed he lost visual focus quite quickly as well.