Dear Journal,

Today was just like every other. I woke up around nine, went down to the library, and got on the internet. Schoolwork is boring; I might have partially ignored it. Maybe that's why I do so poorly recently. I don't know what it is, but something about all of it just seems so mundane lately. I went to the websites I always go to. I went to the forums I always frequent. This time, I even asked questions in the Ask Me forum.

Lunch was good; it was from Subway. I really need to stop doing that; I don't have much money. Maybe I'll be able to get a job soon. I keep hearing that the recession is over, after all. Oh well, at least I had My Little Pony to cheer me up. It isn't just the show, either, but the fan base. A lot of people are fans of many things, but this is a group that is actually fun to talks to. They're incredibly positive, and make me feel better about myself.

I like it.

Today, I read a few more fan fictions. Most of them weren't all that unique. There is also a group that I decided against reading, on the basis of what they we about. How could somebody actually transpose himself or herself into it? It would probably have a lot of things about how the Mane 6 somehow mystically became their instant best friends. Perhaps the guys would fall for whichever they have a crush on, or something of that nature. But after reading, and dinner, I decided that I was going to try to write something.

But I have nothing.

The night has been spent watching some of the episodes, trying to get inspired. It isn't as easy as you'd think. When I opened up my word document, I thought that this was going to be a breeze. I just type up something about some event from a different perspective, or maybe a small change that does something big. It should be easy, but I have nothing. My mind keeps going back to how somebody could really transpose himself or herself into a story. I still refuse to do it, but there is something to be said about how good it would be. I don't even mean story, but actually living there.

I wouldn't even mind if it was simply mundane things, living a life of however long ponies live. How old do ponies get? Granny Smith has to be a hundred, maybe even two hundred. Age aside it would be great. No more fighting, no more being homeless, no more being abandoned. My life isn't horrible, but something about this always pulls at my mind. Maybe this is why I got pulled to this story. I want to watch somebody in an idealistic society, even if I can't live in one. It might, no it would be, nice to live somewhere like that.

I live in the real world, though. Oh well, time to head to bed. I'll write something up tomorrow, if I get the time. Let's hope it’s a little less mopey than what I came up with today.

With those last words, Michael saved his electronic journal. He shut down the word program, listened to a couple more songs, and went to bed. The next day promised to be more of the same, but that was all right The prospect of any small deviation was enough, any small change needed to happen. Perhaps he would actually do his schoolwork, maybe. One final check about the time, it was earlier than he usually went to sleep. It didn't matter, he would likely sleep until about nine in the morning.

He would be woken up by the sound of the alarm, most likely.

That night, sleep came quickly. It wasn’t that the day had been hard, but the previous day had him going to sleep later than normal. What does he dream of? There are quite the weird dreams, some that won’t be mentioned. Some are of mundane events. The dream of the night started with the mundane act of watching My Little Pony. The episode in question was A Friend in Deed. It had the song that Michael enjoyed the most. That episode ended, and then it was time for the dream to move on to something else. Was it another episode?

Nope, this time it was something that hadn’t happened before.

Maybe it was his train of thought before he had gone to sleep, the idea of being a pony, which caused this particular dream. It wasn’t anything special. He wasn’t instant BFF with Pinkie Pie. Fluttershy didn’t immediately open up. Applejack didn’t do whatever Applejack likely did in those types of amazing wish-dreams. Everything about it was mundane, the life of an equestrian being played out as if Michael wasn’t somebody special. He was just another pony; he was just somepony with a home in Ponyville. Around this time, he knew he was dreaming. There was no way he was the pony named Hokey Smokes.

This was normally when he heard the alarm, yet that wasn't the case. All he heard was a voice, one that he hadn't heard before. Had he forgotten to lock the door again? It might have just been more dreams if that was the case, but the voice didn’t stop. Eyes slowly opened, as if for the first time. If it was a dream, then it would be obvious. His dreams, the ones that dealt with home invasions, always ended with him getting knifed. Maybe I should go see a doctor about that. It probably isn’t normal.

The voice didn’t stop, and it was starting to worry him. It spoke of medical problems. Michael wasn’t the healthiest person alive, but there was no need for this. Maybe this is my body’s way of telling me that I have a problem. I’ll just have my mom look into it tomorrow. Or maybe I should get up now. At the very least, I can go see what time it is. Maybe it’s around eight anyway. Then I can call her up and… There was the sound of a door closing, which seemed to be a good time for him to try to force himself to move. With that thought in his mind, Michael opened his eyes to the world around him.

All he had to do was reach over, grab the phone, open it up, and check the time. Hand reached out, went to grab the phone, and felt an empty table. It was still night outside, Michael was tired, and he rolled over to go back to sleep. A whole ten minutes dragged by before he was startled awake again. This came from a single image that shot through his mind. His ten fingers didn’t look like ten fingers. They looked like a hoof.

Yep, it was a dream.

Once again, Michael did his best to go back to sleep. It was hardly simple, but the idea that the entirety of everything was a dream was enough to make it possible. This time, however, the dream was gone. His pony-dream was replaced with darkness, his body slowly merging with the nothingness of the void. Perhaps that was a sign of something, but it didn’t really matter. He had never had a dream like that before, at least not that he knew of. It might have been something he had eaten the last day.

Several hours passed, and then he finally awoke again.

Once again, he was awoken by the sound of a voice. Once again, it was a voice that he wasn’t completely sure he knew. It didn’t matter; they were hopefully going to turn out to be somebody who wasn’t wielding a knife. Eyes slowly opened, and it turned out to be a doctor. There was something wrong about this doctor, at least by what he was seeing. This horse was a doctor. Could horses be doctors? That was a good question, with the hopeful answer being yes. Eyes went wide, a panicked expression on his face, and then there was a look over to some machines.

“He’s coming to.”

Huh? What? I’m definitely losing it. Horses can’t talk. Another few moments, and the breathing tube in his mouth was starting to cause him to gag. It didn’t feel good to have it removed, either, until precious oxygen entered his lungs. Within a few minutes, he was able to start using real words. “What’s going on here?” This is a dream. I know this is a dream. All I have to do is control is, go through whatever message my subconscious is trying to send me, then wake back up for…

He knew he had fallen asleep, he knew this was a dream, but that was it. What did he need to do? A blank expression was on his face, and the doctor was obviously aware that something wasn’t exactly right in the room. It might have been more accurate to say that somebody wasn’t right in the room. There was only one thing that could be done, though, so the doctor let out a sigh. “It’s been a few years. I didn’t actually think you’d still be alive, but it’s a good thing you’re a fighter.”

That didn’t answer any question at all; it only told him something that he already knew. He knew that he was in a hospital. The continued expression, as if he was completely lost, led the doctor to ponder something for a moment. Michael didn’t want to say anything, but he was starting to get bored with the idea of looking at a doctor. Even a doctor that is a horse tends to get boring after a while. There was nothing else to do, though, until a single question was asked.

“Tell me your name.”

That’s easy! Why doesn’t he know my name? It is my dream, after all. “I am…” Perhaps it wasn’t as easy as he thought. The man-turned-horse couldn’t quite remember what it was that he should say. A few ideas came to mind, but they were probably wrong. What was his name? A few minutes passed, without another more word being spoken. The doctor was the one to speak next. “All right. Where did you come from?”

More easy questions, but they turned out to be answered with a blank stare. There was no way that the man didn’t know his name or where he came from. All it would take was more thought. The fact that another ten minutes passed by without a single word was slightly embarrassing. It only ended when the doctor let out a sigh. “Four years in here. Everyone else knows your name. The nurses weren’t too thrilled by the idea of somepony taking up a bed for that long, but that’s hardly important.

You can get up now, Hokey Smokes.”

That name sounded familiar, as if it was a part of a dream.

The order was given for him to get up, though, and so the man stood up as his body remembered. Two legs on the floor, another two in the air, had been what his brain had told him. It was the last way that he remembered standing up. Another ten seconds later, his two front limbs were on the floor as well. Wha? Everything about this situation felt strange, with a couple of nurses walking into the room with a wheelchair. Yep, I’ve completely lost it. I know this isn’t right. This can’t be right. What is right, though? Come on, I should know this one. Who am I?

“No, no. What is my real name?”

The doctor looked at him funny, then without a single second of hesitation. “Hokey Smokes.”

Hokey Smokes? That was obviously not his real name, he was sure of it. He wasn’t sure what his name was, but that sounded to be unreal. That didn’t even sound like a real name to him, which meant that it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter, though, as the man was going to be wheeled out to somewhere. The doctor had gotten in touch with somepony, which meant that he was going to get taken care of by them for a while. This was a dream, or so he told himself, which meant that it wouldn’t last long.

He could then to back to whatever it was that he did.

These nurses are nice and all. It’s a shame that they’re going to turn into nothing when I get back to… errr… ummm. Best to not think about it too much. With time, it will come back to me. The entire trip was made with him being in deep thought, or at least thinking. The place that he ended up at was a small house. It looked to be made of brick. There was a small chimney at the top, and there was smoke coming out of it. A white house with a chimney and a fence, that seemed to be something that might have been normal. He wasn’t entirely too sure.

“I’m sure it won’t take too long.”

An elderly horse, or at least to the wheel chair bound man he looked elderly, walked out to take the wheelchair and wheel him inside. “Don’t worry. It won’t take long, and we’ll find you a place of your own. I’m sure you’ll find that there’s plenty to do out in the country. We don’t need town!” With those words, Michael started to laugh. It was a nice gesture, and the man was nice. How did I come up with him? Oh well, it’s likely nothing too big. I’ll just have to try to remember, maybe it’ll come to me after I wake up tomorrow.

“I was just about to fix a sandwich. You look like you could use one as well.”

Before anything could be said, Michael had a sandwich sitting on his lap. Why had he been pushed here, anyway? Front limbs picked it up, between his hooves, and then he moved over to another chair. It wasn’t easy for him to do this, it felt weird, but as soon as he sat he looked down at the sandwich. Wait a second. Who eats flowers? His stomach rumbled, though, and soon enough the answer was that he ate flowers.

They tasted pretty good, too.

“I think I’ll let you get settled in. There’s an extra room down the hall, with a bed. They also gave me this, said it would help with your recovery.” A journal was in the man’s mouth, and soon it was in Michael’s. The walk, on all fours mind you, didn’t take long. It felt weird to be doing this, though he couldn’t say why, but there was something about it that just seemed wrong. Maybe it was nothing. When he got to the room, there was the urge to write in his new book. At first, he tried using his hooves. That didn’t work out as well as he hoped. Over the course of the next hour, he tried everything. Writing was hard. It was only after practicing writing with the pencil in his mouth that he finally started to get somewhere.

The words flowed from him, as if he had been doing this all his life.

Dear Journal,

There are so many crazy dreams. I don’t know what caused this one. Did somebody spike my drink? Am I watching too much MLP? What could cause this sort of a unique set of events? Dreams, I know, are a way of telling you something that you don’t already consciously know. What is my lesson here? What piece of knowledge am I missing? That doesn’t even begin to dig into the basic questions that I know I should know.

Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? Philosophy aside, I don’t know how I even got to the hospital. What did he mean by four years? This is all a dream, but dreams are ways of telling us something. If I can decipher this dream, I’ll be closer to knowing a lot more about myself than I already did. Oh well, all I have to do is go to sleep. Everything will make sense when I really wake up. That is how it goes, after all. This is all about to become nothing more than a weird fantasy…

With those final words, eyes closed and Michael went to sleep.

To say that sleep came easy would have been an understatement. The dream that came with the sleep was the thing that didn’t come at first. For what seemed like forever, though it could have only been minutes, Michael was in darkness. There was nothing around him, nobody there to see how he was doing. What was happening? Would he wake up in another hospital? Would he forget who he was again? The name that he was given, Hokey Smokes, didn’t seem right. Something about it just didn’t feel right at all. If that wasn’t right, though, then what was?

Who was he?

The darkness gave way to a bright light. There were sounds that he couldn’t quite recognize. There was the sight of walls with a mish-mash of wallpaper. It all felt so real, it all seemed so familiar. Michael got up, and he was standing on two feet. Perhaps the other thing had been the dream. He walked around, almost stepping on a cat’s tail. The feline, bright orange, ran away from him. Did he have a cat? The house had two floors, and the next expanse of time was spent going over them. It seemed so familiar, but Michael couldn’t quite understand why.

“Wake up. You can’t sleep all day.”

The voice seemed to come from nowhere. Only when he looked down at the cat did the source become obvious. “Come on. Get up.” Another few lines from the cat, and then there was a strange feeling of being nudged. A shake of his head, and then everything faded away to become the other house.

Everything had faded away to become the world that he had woken up in. It was where the hospital had been, where he was given a name, where there was an elderly horse that was taking care of him. What was the name that he had been given? “Hokey Smokes.” The words were foreign to him, yet he spoke them.

“No, silly, that’s you.”

Oh right. This is all real to him. This is all just a dream to me. I’m going to wake up at any point, and I’m going to be… at that house. Where was that, anyway? And I was walking on two legs. And then there were those fingers. It was weird. The confused look must have confused the man as well, as he soon put out a hoof to help the confused man up. Help wasn’t really needed, but it was completely welcome. There was something about this whole thing that screamed false. This had to be a dream; he just knew it. How could this be real, while the other thing was the dream? This felt unreal, so fake, while the other thing had called out to him as if he had known it the entire time.

Walking on four legs felt strange.

“I have some things I need to do today. I’m going to trust you to stay out of trouble here. There are some books downstairs, great stories. I might get some more from the library if you like them…”

It was a nice offer, and Michael gave a nod. He was determined to figure out what was wrong. There were books there. A slimmer of thought came through. A people were defined by their literature. Not only that, but his dream would be giving him hints about what he was supposed to learn. All he had to do was find a book to read. All he had to do was find the book that would give him the information that he was supposed to have by the time that he woke up. I won’t find it up here; I have to go get those books. And… here I go. With that, he started his way down the hall and to where the bookshelf was.

The man hadn’t been telling a lie, there were a lot of books. There was one that caught his attention, though. This wasn’t a story, but a history book. Was he supposed to do something about history? The only thing that really confused him was the name of the history book. Well, no, this can’t be a history book. That name, of the place, is just wrong. I would know if it was real. Then again, I still don’t know my real name. So maybe I am in… how do you pronounce it? Equestria? That just sounds fake. There was nothing else for him to do, though, aside from continue on and read how the country was founded.

The story was good, if a little bizarre.

The part that he couldn’t quite believe was that there was a leader whose name was Pudding head. The others had weird names, but that was the weirdest. The end of the tale was when the kingdom was founded. Not only that, but everyone was happy. It seemed to be the perfect tale, which made it seem as though it was a complete work of fiction. How could everything end in such a happy manner? There had to be something wrong, there had to be. The book was sat back where it came from just as the door opened. How much time had passed, anyway?

“I had a feeling you’d like reading.” A wink came with the line; the elderly man didn’t even stop walking until he reached the kitchen. “Time for lunch, I say.” The sound of a rumbling stomach told Michael that he was right; it most certainly was time for lunch. What was on the menu today? Was it his favorite meal? What was his favorite meal? Everyone had one, even him. It would come back to him eventually, but that was the least important fact that he had forgotten. There was still the matter of his name, something that was definitely important.

Hokey Smokes wasn’t his name, he knew it.

“I hope you like hay.”

Did he? I might as well try it. There will be nothing lost if I do, I might like it. A nod came as the response, though the question still went through his head. What if he didn’t like it? I probably will. I am really hungry, after all. I’ve probably eaten worse too, after all. Everything was set up, and then the two of them had a quiet lunch. It was quiet, at least, until Michael decided that it was time for him to open his mouth to ask questions.

“Where am I?”

That question seemed to be something that caught the man off-guard, as if he hadn’t expected to hear it. A hoof moved to his chin, as if he was rethinking of how to put it. “We’re about an hour from town. Manehattan. It’s a nice place. That’s where the hospital was.”

It was a good answer, but it told Michael nothing. I won’t be getting an answer from him. He’s a figment of my imagination. If I don’t know what this place is, neither will he. It’s only how it works. “Thank you for helping me out. It’s good to know I woke up to some nice people.”

When lunch was over, the man left again to do some more of the day’s labor. It wasn’t long until Michael was reading again, something that he knew he could do indefinitely. Not only that, but it just felt right. There was something about this that seemed normal, which seemed like it was right. The entire day was spent reading, the dinner bringing silence with a side of a salad for him to eat. Maybe later, I’ll get some sort of fruit. After all, it seems like plant life is going to be the only thing he has around here…

That night, he went to sleep without writing a single word. His entire mind was focused on what it was that was happening to him. Michael still wanted to know where he was, who he was, why he was. Every dream had a purpose. What could be the purpose of a dream that had such bizarre things in it? It would all become clear in the morning.

-Four days later-

Nothing was clear, though there was the urge to write in his journal. It had been five days since he had awoken, and each day had him learning a little more about how to live his life. The elderly man seemed to hoping that everything would fix itself, but it hadn’t yet. Michael was afraid he’d never know his name. He was also afraid of what was slowly happening. There was nothing wrong with adjusting, really. Walking on four legs started to seem less unnatural. The food started to seem even better than before. Writing became more natural. It was the thing that he wrote about that concerned him.

Dear Journal,

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been busy. I have had a lot on my mind, but not enough time to put it down in words. That’s just dreadful, isn’t it? Oh well, it’s time to tell you about the thing that happened to me earlier today. When the man calls me by that name, Hokey Smokes, I know that he means me. It isn’t my name, of that I’m sure, but he means me. I force myself to reply, the thought process there in my mind.

Today, I didn’t even have to think about it. It’s becoming normal to be called that, my mind is adapting. That’s all we’ll and good, but what does it mean? Am I losing myself? Was there anything there to lose? Maybe I just need to get out of here. I was told that there is a town about an hour from here, called Manehattan. Maybe I’m supposed to go there before my dream ends; maybe the town holds the lesson that I’m supposed to learn before my dream ends. Maybe my name is there; maybe the details of my life will become mine again.

Until next time.

With those last words, Hokey Smokes opened the door and walked out. The man had been nice, but he needed to get some fresh air. There had to be answers in Manehattan. There had to be something for him in the world around him. The first steps were the hardest, but he was soon making his way toward where his destiny obviously was. He had to go to Manehattan; he had to figure out who he was before he lost who he was.