Chapter 1

The next morning Harry slowly came back to the land of the living. As the darkness slowly drifted away from in front of his eyes, his ears were filled by the unrelenting and increasingly loud banging of his cupboard door. Just as Harry had struggled to his feet and opened the door, his aunt's lovely and melodious voice pierced his sensitive ears.

"GET UP you ungrateful brat! Go upstairs, change out of those filthy clothes and get to the kitchen! You have five minutes. Or I'll let Vernon have his way and lock you in the cupboard for the next three days." Petunia Dursley threatened said as she dragged Harry out of the cupboard and onto his feet, "Dudley wants hotcakes and Vernon needs his tea."

Harry blinked and stared at the floating box above Petunia's head.

"What are you looking at boy? Get to it!" she snapped.

Harry looked at Petunia and then shook his head before shakily replying, "I-I'm sorry Aunt Petunia. I think I must have just hit my head while waking up."

Petunia looked at him with a dirty frown for a second before she squinted into the cupboard. "Well I suppose you are getting a little too big for this thing now," she grumbled before she walked off into the kitchen.

Harry, after that odd encounter, made a beeline straight for the bathroom and stared at his reflection in the mirror, desperately trying to calm himself down from this state of utter terror that he was in. On his way upstairs he had seen Dudley in his room with a floating box above his head just as Aunt Petunia had, and with some trepidation asked him if he'd heard any noises in the night.

"Like a bell," he had specified, "the kind in video games that go, 'ping!'"

Dudley had scratched his chin and looked away from his Sega; one of the many things Harry was jealous of Dudley for; and replied, "Ping? No! Have you hit your head or something? Maybe I should tell Mum and Dad. They'll make sure you end up in some loony bin far away."

With a self-satisfied grin, he had waddled off downstairs, and Harry had shaken his head, wondering why he had even bothered asking.

Pulling his mind back into the moment, he looked back into his reflection's eyes and took a deep breath, pushing down all his fear into the depths of his mind. Bottling up one's emotions wasn't a particularly hard art to master, especially for a pre-teen, and soon a veil of complete calmness fell on his mind.

'Alright, I shouldn't panic. I need to think through this logically,' he thought to himself. One thing was for sure. Last night's dream wasn't a dream. And if it wasn't a dream, it had to have been some sort of hallucination.

It certainly wasn't a bad explanation, Harry decided. It could be some sort of drugs, or even one of those weird mushrooms, causing his hallucinations. Perhaps they had somehow made his way into his food or water, or perhaps they had been airborne. It was possible. Definitely possible.

A strange image of a man wearing a cinema projector on his head suddenly flashed into Harry's mind, and bemusedly, Harry took a moment to consider the strange idea that something could actually be projecting a screen in front of him. But as soon as that thought made it into his mind he immediately dismissed it. Aunt Petunia and Dudley hadn't noticed anything on him, nor any projections.

Another strange thought floated into his mind.

He could see those boxes clearly without his glasses, and that implied only one thing. That he wasn't seeing something real. That whatever was happening, it was happening inside his mind.

An odd, almost insane thought drifted to the front of his mind...one that had occurred to him last night, but that he had discarded in the heat of the moment.

'My life is a game.'

"No . . ." he thought with a rising amount of panic. These strange...weird...out of ordinary ideas that he was thinking of...they were not something that he would have thought of by himself. He was a fairly reasonable kid and this was too far out for him to have thought up on his own. Something was definitely influencing his mind . . .

'Drugs,' he thought with a spike of panic, 'It has to be drugs!'

Thankfully, there was a quick and easy way of testing that. Being Harry in the Dursley house meant you only got to eat and drink the bare minimum needed to survive. That meant he could easily check everything that he had consumed in the last few days. Quickly pulling on fresh clothes, Harry ran down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge and grabbed the remaining few loaves of bread that were remaining from the package he had stolen from last night. They were the only thing he had eaten in the last 3 days, and if there was anything in his body that had gotten in there with his mouth, it would've been through these.

Checking to see that Dudley; who was seated at the table; wasn't looking, he crumbled the bread into dust, dropped it into Dudley's juice, and used a spoon to stir it in. He then took it over and handed it to Dudley. The boy took it, gave it a dainty little sniff, tossed a smirk towards Harry, and downed the entire glass before letting out a loud burp. He then jumped off the chair and waddled off upstairs. Throughout it all, Harry watched him with keen eyes.

Nothing.

No reaction at all.

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