Story idea:
Title: Jet Lag
During a red eye flight, a passenger awakes, unable to distinguish between dreams and reality, and watches as the monsters from their nightmares take shape aboard the airplane.
Everyone traveling on an airplane has a story to tell. Where are they going? Where did they come from? Most of the stories cluttering the airport gates, shuffling to their seats, and disembarking to a connecting flight are stories that you’ll never get to hear. But they are stories you can’t help but wonder about when you cross paths with another passenger.
On a recent red eye flight, I was forced to wonder about a passenger’s story. Because the story jumped out into the aisles.
Since moving to Alaska, I have been forced to suffer through many red eye flights. Flying from the great wide north is not cheap, and the cheapest flights are often red eyes. At first, these flights were uncomfortable but doable. I would sleep on the flight and wake up in a new time zone, effectively resetting my internal clock. But in recent years, I have struggled to sleep on these flights. I listen to music, I watch mindless videos, I close my eyes, but sleep never finds me.
This was the case during my recent flight. But the two other passengers in my row had no trouble falling asleep. I sat uncomfortably in my window seat as they snored away. At least, that’s what I thought. As I resigned myself to sleeplessly closing my eyes, the passenger on the aisle seat stood up. But they were not going to the bathroom. They were not stretching their legs. They were sleepwalking.
The passenger began speaking to a brother that wasn’t there, stumbling as the solid ground of his dream became the shaky ground of the airplane. The attendants were called, another passenger stood up to lend support, and I sat dazed in my exhaustion, wondering for a moment whether this was all actually happening or if my sleeplessly closed eyes had slipped into a nightmare.
The sleepwalking passenger was eventually roused from their dream and returned to their seat, apologetic and embarrassed. Not wanting to embarrass them further, the incident was not spoken of again, but I couldn’t help but wonder at their story.
I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like to awaken, half in and half out of dreamland, to find yourself on an airplane. It brought to mind Richard Matteson’s classic short story, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Immortalized by William Shatner in the 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone, updated by John Lithgow in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), and re-updated (a little too far in my opinion) by Adam Scott in Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone (2019).
In the original story, the nightmare is outside the plane, a monster terrorizing those within. But what if the monster was inside the plane – brought to reality from a nightmare? That sort of nightmare feels all too real. Real enough to jump out into the aisles, into the clouds, and onto the page.
What stories have you wondered about on an airplane or in an airport?
Start your story in the comments below…