This has got to be one of the most detailed dreams I’ve ever had. It was like a short film!

The driver grabbed the wheel tightly, desperately trying to maintain control of the bus. But the bus was not having any of it. The back end span around at full force, hitting several cars and a lamppost as it went. The passengers screamed with terror as they were flung across the bus. As the bus spiralled out of control, the grey garbage truck drove near. The grey garbage truck was too out of control. The driver of the truck leapt out of the door for his safety, caring not for his passengers. The bus driver was much braver/stupider and continued to wrestle with the bus. But try as she might, the bus was determined to crash. The driver screamed at the passengers, but as the bus collided with the grey garbage truck, her scream was deafened by the screams of the passengers. Seconds later, there were no more screams.

It was early one Thursday morning when Brian was woken by the sound of engines. He pulled on his dressing gown and stumbled wearily towards the window. As he looked out of the window, he saw nothing unusual. Cars. People. Noise. But Brian could still here the engines drilling louder than any vehicle. The noise unsettled him and the fact that he could not see where the noise was coming from unsettled him even more. He shook off the feeling and continued to get ready for work. Brian worked in a shop called Clothes-R-Us-4-U as a salesman of no real ability. For breakfast he had a slice of toast and a cup of tea. No sugar. He scrambled about like an egg, trying to find his keys and his tie. He was always losing his tie. Once he stapled it to his shirt so as not to forget it, but then he lost the shirt.

On the way to work he met his friend Graham, another salesman who boasted the title ‘customer service specialist’ to remind fellow salespeople of this gloriously insignificant title. Graham had just returned from his holiday in Tunisia, so the morning walk to work was entertained with tales of how he “slept with a million girls” and “drank gallons of beer”, none of which Brian cared much about. His lack of interest in Graham’s stories led him to hear the roaring engines once again. Out of the corner of his eye, Brian thought he saw a tank. A great big green tank with a great big green gun. But as he looked around he saw neither tank nor turret, just hundreds of people rushing about trying to get to work on time. “Are you even listening to me?” asked Graham. “Sorry, yes… Tunisia. You were on about the hotel.” replied Brian, hopeful that he had guessed the right topic. “Yeah, so as I was saying, the rooms were fifty feet wide, with seven king sized beds and…” Graham liked to exaggerate.

As they finally got to work, Brian separated from Graham to attend a meeting with his boss, Mr DON’T KNOW YET. The meeting was long and boring, as meetings usually are. He heard something about net sales figures and the company expanding and economies of scale. But for all this nonsense, Brian’s eyes drew him to the wall. He saw something. Something that wasn’t usually on the wall. What he saw was a small silver disc that looked not unlike a speaker. He had never seen it before, but assumed it was part of the company’s new ‘communication enhancement’ project. The company had recently put many projects in place to combat the recession that had just ended. Foreign employees were employed to replace other foreign employees, quality control was reduced and prices were increased and advertised as a sale.

On the way back down to the shop floor, he passed a man wearing a peculiar hat, shaped like a parrot. He thought this was unusual, but today his life was full of ‘unusual’ things, so he simply dismissed it as one of the new foreign employees. On the shop floor he met his colleagues Matthew and Sarah. He asked them if they’d seen the parrot-hat man. Sarah had. Matthew hadn’t. Matthew was a tall man with ginger hair and glasses that he wore “every Tuesday and Thursday”. Sarah was a small girl who was always very happy, which Brian liked.

Brian’s first customer was a man with only one attractive feature: his wallet. He bought several extra large jumpers that were clearly two sizes too small, but Brian remained silent so as not to offend the man, as he seemed very jolly and complimented Brian on his tie. His second customer was a woman with a large nose who lived seven doors down from Brian but still insisted on calling him neighbour. She did not buy anything, but complained about the length of a blue skirt, annoying Sarah who was wearing the blue skirt. Matthew’s third (and fourth) customer(s) was a pair of twins who wished to return a cutlery set they had bought from a different shop that was now closed. Respite came when Sarah’s American sister Sairah came in to offer the boys some pie, which it turned out had ‘magically disappeared’.

Suddenly, a woman rushed into the store, shouted something at George on the till and promptly rushed back out of the store. George announced that there had been a big crash outside the store, but not to panic because they had a plentiful supply of yellow umbrellas. Brian and his friends ran out to get a piece of the action (and possibly a piece of the aforementioned pie). The sight took them by surprise, as several cars were piled up and a grey garbage truck was on fire. The 999 team had all arrived. Ambulance. Police car. Fire truck. All defending the pedestrians and trying to stop the fire, while checking for survivors in the wreck. One group of policemen was trying to restrain a civilian who insisted on trying to put out the flames with his bare hands. As the salespeople looked on, a few injured people crawled out from beneath the fire.

Since nobody could do anything of use, they returned to the store to continue business as usual. Anyway, it was now lunch time and Brian was hungry. For lunch, the team went to a local cafe where they ate sandwiches. Brian’s sandwich had ham on. Brian again noticed the speaker-like discs on the wall. “Hm, must be a new gadget” he thought out loud, not that anyone was listening.

Upon his arrival back at work, the manager informed Brian that he would be working in the shoe department for the rest of the day since it had become very busy. Apparently people like buying shoes after they witness an accident. Reminds them of their priorities in life. Brian left his co-workers and went to work in the shoe department. His first customer was a spoilt teenage girl, whose face was plastered with make up and whose coat looked like it cost a lot more than it was actually worth. But the peculiar thing was this: As Brian handed the shoe to fit on her cocky little feet, he noticed one of the speaker-like discs on the inside of the shoe. He apologised to the poor mother and went to ask Charlie, the shoe salesman, what it was all about. “They’ve all got them in Brian.” Charlie told him. “I think it’s one of those things that ‘cleanses’ the feet.” So Brian returned to the child and sold her the shoes that she had screamed at her mother to buy.

Brian became very curious about the discs throughout the day. As he looked around he noticed them everywhere. On the walls, in the shoes, on the tills… even on Charlie’s glasses. He had seen them in cars, on busses, on bikes and lampposts. But what worried him more was why nobody else seemed bothered by them. Why nobody realised that something they thought cleansed the feet was also on walls and glasses. But his worries were soon put to rest, as the room began to shake. Everybody panicked, as everybody does when the room suddenly shakes. Brian grabbed the fire extinguisher. He didn’t really know why he did this, but the knowledge that if any kids tried to attack him then he could give them a good whack seemed to comfort him.

As the room filled with panic, the walls started to cave in on them. It was like an Indiana Jones film, but set in a clothes shop and there was no Indiana Jones. As Brian stood holding the fire extinguisher and trying to look brave, Graham, Matthew and Sarah – along with a host of other workers and customers – rushed into the room. “The whole of the first floor is being crushed!” they exclaimed in unison. Brian looked out of the window and saw that other buildings were collapsing in on themselves. He also saw that cars, bikes and old people on mobility scooters were also being pulled towards the collapsing buildings.

As his view returned to the store, Brian noticed that several people were gliding about in a strange fashion too. He quickly deduced that it was the people wearing the new shoes that they had just purchased who were acting odd. He shouted at them to take the shoes off before starting to move unwillingly himself. He examined his shoes and realised that there was a disc in them too, although he had not put it there. He had not even known it was there, but he managed to peel it off. He called his friends to take their shoes off too, which they did, but the discs in their shoes wouldn’t peel off. As he helped an elderly woman take her shoes off, the child from earlier was now screaming at her mother. Not because she was scared, but because she had just seen another pair of shoes she wanted. The pandemonium of the whole situation seemed to take over the woman, who gave the child a hefty smack. The kid soon shut up. During the chaos, the manager had entered the room and announced that he was retiring due to ‘completely unrelated circumstances’.

Unsure what to do in this unusual situation, Brian looked out of the window again to check everything was still being destroyed. As he looked however, he noticed the tank again that he had thought he’d seen earlier. It was a modern tank, shaped like a green armadillo with a gun on it’s head. In the cockpit he saw the parrot-hat man and a slightly smaller parrot-hat child sitting next to him. Both were laughing as they moved the vehicle through the streets, crushing everything in it’s path.

Brian alerted his friends and told them what he thought, which was this: the parrot-hat people had planted the discs everywhere which were magnets pulling everything in on itself at a given cue and the parrot-hat man was controlling them from in their tank which had a perception filter so nobody could see it. This seemed like a good theory, mainly because at the time nobody was really bothered to think up theories about why they were dying.

As the building began sinking into the ground, Brian decided that they should escape and – since he had thought of his theory – try to stop the parrot-hat people. They all agreed that escaping sounded far better than dying and ran towards the window. “Shouldn’t we try to get some of these people out too?” cried Graham. “Forget them, they’ve probably lived good lives and there’s nothing we can do.” Shouted Brian, before adding “And besides, nobody likes children anyway.”

Brian used the fire extinguisher to smash the window (he thought this looked a lot more heroic than simply opening the window) and they all jumped out. They landed (conveniently) on the top of the tank, but thankfully did not attract the attention of the parrot-hat people. Brian, still wishing he had his fire extinguisher, jumped into the cockpit, rendering the small parrot-hat child unconscious and the parrot-hat man surprised.

He hit the man with a wimpy punch, to which he laughed in Brian’s face. Completely terrified and without a clue what to do, Brian slammed his fist on one of the buttons on the control desk. The button happened to be for the turret, which spun round and knocked Graham off the tank. The parrot-hat man laughed at Brian’s attempts and Brian tried again. The next button he pressed eject the parrot-hat child into the air, leaving a large hole where his seat was. But the third button was by far the most successful. As Brian pressed a round green button, a cookie appeared from a slot, which Matthew leaned in and promptly ate. After several more button pressings, Brian finally gave in. He asked the parrot-hat man what he was doing in a deep heroic voice. The man’s reply was in a strange language that Brian thought must have been Chinese.

And that was it. That’s where my dream ended. Bit annoying because I wanted to know the ending myself, but hey, now you can make up your own ending and we’ll all be happy.