The One Where I Break Back Into Prison

So, I’m in prison. But this isn’t a normal prison. My cell, in fact the whole prison, is made not of concrete or bricks and mortar, but mud and sand. It’s all set hard and seems pretty sturdy, as you’d hope for a prison, but it puzzles me, as I have no idea where I am. Or what I’ve done to get here.

Anyway, I want to break out. But I don’t hatch a complex plan or meticulously pore over blueprints of the prison. No, I just open my window, which is about six feet up one of the walls. It’s about two feet in height and six feet wide and is one of those open-from-the-bottom, letterbox types. Anyway, I crawl out of the window easily enough, leave it slightly ajar in preparation for my return and off I go, into the night. Exactly where I go and what I do, I have no idea because my dream kindly skips all that and fast forwards to the early hours of the morning. The sun is just coming up, it’s getting light and I’m standing outside my window, trying to figure out how to get back in. The window looks about two feet higher up than it does from the inside. With time pressing on and morning inspections due at any moment (I don’t know the time but bizarrely I do know that ‘morning inspections are due at any moment’). I decide to jump up and get a hold of the outside ledge, hoping to pull myself through the window. The ledge, however, being made out of mud and sand, has been smoothed into a slippery and grip-resistant lip, rather than a lovely squared-off ledge. What purchase I can get gives me just enough time to try and heave myself up. I don’t have the upper body strength to pull myself up and I fall back to ground. I start to panic as I can hear the inspector’s keys jangling in the distance as he opens and closes the doors of the neighbouring cells. With next to no time to spare, I look around for something to stand on. I run across the small courtyard in which I’m standing and (now this is weird) I find a stash of about half a dozen dust covered traffic cones. I grab one and run back to the window. Wasting no time, I stand on it’s tapered end and manage to heave myself up to and through the window. As I’m lying face down on the ledge, I pivot so my top half is now hanging out of the window, reach down for the cone and throw it back to where I found it. Of course, it lands exactly where I want it to, why wouldn’t it?

I pivot around again and I notice that there is now water flowing under my door and into my cell. I then hear the jangling of keys and hear the lock click in my door. As I jump down from the ledge, splashing down into the now ankle deep water, I just have time to balance myself after landing before the door swings open and the inspector looks into the cell. I demand to know why there is water flowing into my cell in a show of mock outrage.

Then I wake up. Prison cells, mud huts, traffic cones, floods, crawling through windows. None of this has happened to me lately. Go figure.