Decidedly a lovely morning

It is a sunny morning of an ordinary February day. She glances at her alarm clock on the bedside table, fails to conceal a yawn and with a vigorous impulse gets up from bed. She pulls up the blinds to let the sunlight flood her bedroom. It is a decidedly lovely morning. After a short visit to the bathroom she gets dressed and starts descending the stairs that lead to the ground floor of her duplex condo. She is halfway down the staircase when unfamiliar voices coming from the kitchen reach her ears. That baffles her. She enters the kitchen and finds alien people in the room, people she has never seen before, three of them in total. They are having breakfast, as signalled by the large amount of food spread on the table. This is her kitchen, it is her apartment, but she can't understand what those people are doing there. She doesn't even have a clue who they are. A man of about fifty greets her with a grunt. A woman on her late twenties and a teenage kid do the same.

"Good morning mom!" the latter say, almost in unison.

She stops dead in her tracks, unable to respond. "Mom?" she repeats to herself astonished.

"Finally she woke up", says the man in a loud, unfriendly tone, "you lazy bitch".

She looks around to inspect the place closely. It is indeed her kitchen, with its familiar domestic appliances, her microwave oven, her fridge and dishwasher, with her coffee-machine beside the sink and her cookbooks on the little shelf by the window. Everything about the place is normal except for the fact that this man is not her husband and the other two people are not her son and daughter.

"What the … what is going on?". Her words do not leave her mouth.

The three people in the room do not bother to make conversation and keep on eating their breakfast. She stands by the fridge staring at the group of strangers, inadvertently catching a fleeting glimpse of the shopping list she wrote last night posted with a magnet to the door of the refrigerator. It is the magnet her husband bought for her in Dresden last Easter.  The three of them munch their cereals and muffins in the most repulsive way and slurp noisily from their glasses of milk. They are a truly ugly lot, their fat bodies on the verge of complete malformation. It is a most disgusting scene. She can't believe her eyes, can't understand how she married that swine and gave birth to such loathsome children. Her face wears a bemused expression. It is not as much the oddity of the ongoing event what puzzles her most as the sudden awareness of the ugliness of her family.

"How could I choose this man? How can these two be my children?" she asks to herself.

Averting her gaze from them she aims all of her efforts at trying to come up with a logical explanation. Weird things have happened to her before. She has sometimes been dreaming and has been lucid enough to perceive in her sleep that she was dreaming. She has become unconsciously conscious that she was dreaming. It has even been fun once in a while. As that time when she entered this very kitchen and discovered there was a door in one of the walls that she had never seen before.  The door materialized unexpectedly one day. She had been living in this apartment for more than ten years. One day the kitchen hadn't got that extra door, the next day it had. She was only a little shocked by the revelation and asked her husband if the door had always been there. Not waiting for a response she opened the door and found a spacious room. Her practical self quickly decided that it would be the perfect place to store many of the goods that were filling the pantry, along with their bycicles and bookshelves. She went out to bring their bicycles and when she returned the room had evolved into a beautifully decorated cabin. It was odd but she didn't care. She knew she was dreaming and wanted to get on with the dream to find out where it would lead to. "We'll have to ask our neighbour if we need to buy a wrought-iron gate, don't you think?" she remembered she asked her husband. Actually, those experiences have been kind of amusing for her most of the times. The minute she became aware she was dreaming she managed to gain control of the situation. And she was able to enjoy the complete freedom that rules the world of dreams.

"Mom?. Am I their mother? Is this brute at the table my husband?"

It dawns on her that this too must be a dream. That group of people in her kitchen is just too irrational to be her family. "They are as phony as a three-dollar bill. They're playing a bogus role out of my own dormant will. There can be no other explanation."

She attempts to roll on to one side on the bed but her body doesn't move an inch. Her eyes wouldn't open either no matter how hard she tries to open them.

"OK, I must be dreaming. I know I'm dreaming. That must be it", she insistently  tells to herself. "This is no funny. Go on, it is time to wake up. Wake up!".

Motionless in bed she is perfectly aware of her sleep paralysis. Waking up in a conscious way suddenly seems an impossible challenge. She is surprised not to be struck with fear, as fearful as such an episode should be to anyone. The only way she can wake up, she decides, is by retracing her steps. Dispirited she takes a final look to the kitchen mess and starts climbing up the stairs to her bedroom.

"Back to bed again you sleepyhead?" grunts the man, which stirs a synchronized burst of laughter from the three people.

Voices fade away, memories retreat, slumber sets in bit by bit. She dreams of herself getting into bed and praying for sleep to come.