The mattress he was lying on was lumpy.
He squirmed around several times, but it made no difference. Something was wrong. Opening his eyes, he saw the room was dark, much too dark. Looking around, he wasn’t able to see much, but enough to know that the place was unfamiliar to him. Climbing off the bed and standing in the dimness of the place, his eyes gradually adjusted to take in his surroundings. Slowly, it came to him that he was in a prison cell… a small, dark prison cell. He walked to the bars and felt them. They were real enough. He did the same, going around touching the wall behind the bed and the cold metal of the rest of the cage.
He sat back down on the edge of the bed, trying to make sense of it; of any of it. In that moment, what was most concerning, really quite frightening, was the fact that he had no memory of what events took place prior to his ghastly situation.
Squirming again, he was aware of a lump in the back pocket of his jeans. He stood up. Doing this, he realised that he was fully dressed. At the same time, he found that he’d been sitting on a key. It was an old, slightly rusty key. With virtually no hesitation he found the door and tried it.
The door opened and he cautiously walked out into what appeared to be an equally gloomy hallway. He was moving slowly through the passage when an ear-piercing alarm sounded. He froze. Had he triggered it? Would his captors now show up? Should he have given more thought to his situation before breaking out?
All of these questions became irrelevant.
Blinking once or twice, he opened his eyes fully. His bedroom never looked so good!
He lent across and switched his alarm off.
Everything about the reality of his own personal waking world became clear to him.
However… how the key to the little-used padlock on his garden shed came to be in the back pocket of his pyjama trousers will never be known to him.