“OW! Miserable, moth**8&%@& **&^)()(**!!.” He was cut off in pained mid-rant when the room shifted again throwing him away from the wall and rolling him back across the floor and halfway to the bed. What is going on?! Did that freaking sign have something to do with all this?! He looked over to the sign, the bottom edge lit up and the bluish light moved up and down looking like two hills growing then receding. It reminded Travis of a shrug somehow. ‘I had nothing to do with it, Jiminy.’ “Jiminy?” Was this some kind of insult or put down? The only Jiminy that came to mind was the little cricket in that animated movie about some wooden puppet. ‘Got it in one’, the sign scrolled. Travis swore that somehow it had a smug edge to the letters.
A slight breeze reminded him he was still butt-naked. “How the heck do I get some clothes around here?!”
‘I told you, ask for them’, the sign replied with a smug flourish of letters. “Okay genius, how do I ask for them?” Travis thought the sign suddenly looked, well, impatient. ‘You ask by saying what you want.’ The sign scrolled the letters very, very slow, and big, covering the whole height of it top to bottom. It felt like it was trying to yell louder and slower, which made Travis more frustrated. ‘Remember the thong bikini.’
That shut Travis up, and he shifted to sit cross legged in the middle of the bright blue-green marble floor. “What I want, huh?” Travis stared at the sign, daring it to print something. The sign obliged, with ‘Exactly’ scrolling across it’s face with what Travis felt was smug satisfaction. He hated smug satisfaction in people, they were always so stuck on themselves. “Okay, I want a set of silk pants and a Hugh Hefner smoking jacket.” His naked rear suddenly felt a sinfully smooth cloth against it, as a comfortable, baby-soft coat settled around him out of thin air. He looked at his now-covered arms. “Burgundy.” ‘Yes, a satin burgundy smoking jacket just like Hugh Hefner’, the sign scrolled with a bored flourish of letters.
Travis glowered and took off the jacket. It his dream, obviously, how else could you explain Hugh Hefner’s smoking jacket? ‘It’s not a dream’, the sign scrolled with a series of contemptuous dots at the end of the letters. Travis started doing a slow burn. If it was his dream, he darn well could get what he wanted, and what he wanted was his regular pair of Dickies slacks, and his blue button-down shirt, his black belt with the Budweiser logo on it, and his Red Wing steel-toed boots. What he really wanted, was to wake up. He’d heard you could wake yourself out of dream by forcing yourself awake. Well, supposedly you could by hurting yourself, but he’d already bit his fingers and didn’t wake up, so what to try next?