Fog

It's not that I specifically awoke to find myself in this place, so much as I became suddenly conscious of where I was and utterly unconscious of anything previous to that moment. I knew that I had a name, but was unable to dreg it up from the recesses of my muddled mind.

My first act upon "waking" (for I must call it that, though it doesn't quite suit) was to take in my surroundings. To my surprise, I found that objects' names jumped to me with curious ease. I was in a wood of some sort, how large, I could not perceive, for all around me floated a white fog. The mist was so thick about me that by looking at it my senses believed it to be concrete, and yet my hand passed through it as if it were not there.

I knew I stood in a wood because of the grasping branches which I could see quite clearly around me for a few feet or so before they faded upwards onto some phantom trunk cloaked in white. Dry leaves rasped to each other in a foreign language, and the host of unseen trees around me creaked disapprovingly at my presence.

I stood, alone and confused. What was I to do? I had a vague feeling that there was something I was forgetting. Had I always been here? Was there anything beyond these trees and this whiteness? Before I knew what was happening, I had begun to walk forward, and as I did so, I realized that I had legs, and could move them in such a way as to take myself somewhere else. The awe of this discovery led me to the next discovery, which was that I was in complete control of all my faculties, without even knowing what these faculties were.

I continued on my way for some time, musing on my newfound abilities. As I walked, I knew instinctively that I should step over that log, or I would go sprawling onto the mossy ground. I knew that if I didn't hunch my back in an effort to lessen my height, I would be clawed in the face by that low hanging branch. My face throbbed with an imaginary sting at the thought.

I had been walking for a quite a while before I noticed that the range of my vision had expanded; the mist had faded allowing me to see that I was entering a clearing. The patch of dew-laden grass twinkled in the sun, like my father's eyes when he told a joke. I smiled at the memory of my father, with his dove-grey beard and hearty laugh. And then, as the sun rose up and wiped away the mist, I remembered everything.