The Dreaming Man

Once upon a time, there was a man. Not any particular man, just a dreaming man. A dreaming man dreaming about whatever dreaming men dream about. Suddenly, his dream came to an end as he awoke within a pitch-black room.

'Where am I?' the man pondered dazedly. He ponderously moved about, feeling his way through the darkness until he came across a doorknob. A wave of relief rushed over him as he turned the handle. To the man's dismay, the knob wouldn't budge. He tried knocking the door down, but he just ended up bruising his shoulder in the process. He tried the door again, possibly expecting different results, but to no avail. after trying it a third time, the man disregarded the door to find another exit. To his surprise, he suddenly hit his knee against a small side table with a shadeless lamp perched atop it.

"A lightbulb!" the man exclaimed to no one in particular. "there must be a switch somewhere!" as the man made a mental map of the location of the table, he tripped over a small, flat box. He sat up and ran his hand across the rough top of the box. Pressing down harder in an attempt to open the box, he slid his hand along the box once more. Suddenly, the room was bathed in a dim glow, and the mysterious box was proven to be a treadmill. As the treadmill came to a halt, the lightbulb began to dim. A nagging feeling in the back of the man's mind told him that if the lightbulb were to dim completely, it wouldn't turn on again. Not wanting to take any chances, the man hopped on the treadmill and began to walk. Looking around the room, he saw the door he had stumbled upon earlier, as well as the small table with the lightbulb currently illuminating the room, which was, for some odd reason, in the dead center of the room.

'How peculiar,' the man thought. Looking around the remainder of the room, it came to his realization that, other than the door, table, and treadmill, the stone-walled room was empty. Despite the infinitesimally small probability that he seemed to have, the man kept trudging on, hoping that a way out would soon reveal itself in the light.

Day after day, the man kept walking and slowly descending into madness and obsession. "the lightbulb," the man gasped out, drunkenly slurring his speech with the exhaustion each pounding step presented to him. "The lightbulb must stay on-it will show me the way out! It must!" as the man burst into maniacal laughter, he collapsed, his last breath, a scream echoing through the stone confines of the room. The lightbulb dimmed, then burned out.

Suddenly, the door clicked open.