THIS STORY IS A REPLACEMENT OF the dragon's tree, WHICH DID NOT SEEM TO BE GOING ANYWHERE. IT HAS SOME OF THE SAME ELEMENTS AS the dragon's tree, BUT IS VERY DIFFERENT. I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY!

June 23, 2023
10:03 p.m.

Jeremy Drames would not be bad looking, if he ever smiled. He walks down the hallway with a swagger. His hands are in his pockets, his hawk-like nose pointed up, bright red hair slicked back, his mouth is permanently frozen in a sneer, and his hard brown eyes are glancing haughtily around the hallway. His employees live in constant fear of him, and he doesn’t care.
He reaches the end of the long hall and opens the door at the end, which is marked: “Dream Lab: Do Not Enter.” The Dream Lab belongs to him, the millionaire inventor Jeremy Drames. Inside the Dream Lab sits the Dream Machine, which is his most successful invention. All hospitals are now required to own a Dream Machine, and anyone with $300,000.00 lying around owns one as well.
Drames walks over to the dream machine and turns it on with the press of a button. Lights flicker inside the machine but Drames is not concerned, nothing will go wrong for him. The machine finally lights up completely, seeming to prove his haughty assumption that the world revolves around a man named Jeremy Drames.
He grabs a sky screen from the small desk by the door and snaps it to life. This machine obeys its master immediately and projects a series of numbers and mathematical equations into the air. Drames sets the sky screen back on the desk and begins to change numbers and solve equations, his fingertips sending the numbers flying through the air.
Soon, he sighs with pride. His machine works, and now his experiment should as well.

******
June 24, 2023
1:26 a.m.

Drames gets into his limousine, prepared to head to his mansion for a celebratory drink and to volunteer one of his employees to be his test subject. The driver sits up smartly when the door opens, and waits for orders. Once they have been given, the driver immediately begins to speed out of the parking lot reserved for Mr. Drames and into the busy streets.
They are quickly stopped by a traffic light, and Drames taps his feet impatiently. The driver sits nervously in his seat, wondering what punishment is in store for him, due to his employer’s impatience. Nervously, he honks his horn at the car in front of him, who still has not moved, regardless of the green light. The car still does not move, and the driver honks again.
Finally, the car suddenly takes off, speeding ahead as it hurtles towards another red traffic light. The driver heaves a breath of relief as he also begins to speed up, but he turns to the right instead of following the other car. Drames is unhappy that it is taking so long.
Three right turns and a left later, they are within sight of the mansion. The driver is finally relaxing, he hasn’t been fired yet. Drames vaguely notices the strange sound of tires squealing. He guesses that there must be an accident in the making here.
The last things Drames sees are the blindingly bright lights of a semi barreling towards them. The last thing he thinks is that he was right.

******
June 24, 2023
5:54 a.m.

The doctors look down at the famous millionaire, Jeremy Drames. He is alive, even well. In fact, they can’t quite figure out why he had slipped into a coma. All they could guess is that the late nights, the concussion, and the shock of the crash had all added up to throw him into a coma.
The head doctor hands his report to the man in the doorway as he walks out. The man steps in and walks over towards Drames. He smiles grimly down at him as the man, Martin, reads the report. It doesn’t look bad, but it doesn’t look good either.
Martin makes a split second decision and calls the doctors back in. After conversing with Martin for a few moments one of the doctors presses a button, and the bed on which Drames lies is raised up through a hole in the ceiling. The hole leads to the roof of the hospital, where a helicopter waits to carry the millionaire back to the lab which he had left not many hours before.
When he arrives, he is quickly take down the elevator and though the doorway into his personal laboratory. Martin confidently turns the Dream Machine on. He frowns when he doesn’t recognize the sequence running on the screen, but suspects it must simply be a more advanced sequence than those in most hospitals. He reaches out, and presses the button.
With that one press of a button, Martin has just condemned Jeremy Drames, the genius millionaire, to be trapped in the land of nightmares.
Sweet Dreams…