Lucas is, put bluntly, a sleeper. If he has down time, he sleeps. If he doesn't get twelve hours of sleep in a one day, he gets angry.

There is, of course, a reason. He likes to dream. To immerse himself in his own imagination is all that he likes to do. He enjoys the dreams. And, luckily for him, he dreams a lot. Some people he knows hardly get any dreams, but on a good night, Lucas might get three or four dreams. All the time, he would be blissfully unaware that he was, in reality, lying on a threadbare mattress in his room in Peckham.

That's not to say he hasn't had some lucid dreams. Sometimes something would click. Sometimes he could be in a ridiculous scenario - abroad the Starship Enterprise, for example - and not realise something was amiss, but other times he could just be walking along an ordinary-looking road and he would realise he was dreaming.

And that is where the fun begins. He can change things. Sometimes he would get ostentatious and put on a light show while not actually changing much. Sometimes, he might just inconspicuously walk through a wall. But as soon as he realises he's dreaming, he takes control and moulds it to his own liking.

This proves a problem sometimes. Right now, Lucas is in his GCSE maths class, learning algebra. Inevitably, he has fallen asleep. And of course, the math teacher, Dr. Hopkins, isn't too impressed. He doesn't really have much of a temper, but he has a voice that can bring down walls - and he's not afraid to use it.

"LUCAS! WAKE UP YOU LAZY SOD!" comes the shout.

It could easily have woken the dead, let alone a 15 year old kid who's only been asleep for about ten minutes. Lucas' head jerks up, smashing straight into the wall behind him.

"Now that you're awake, let's continue."

Lucas has lost all track of what's happening. So he does one of the few things he enjoys to do when awake - he took a page from his book and began to sketch his dream - today it was some kind of Matrix deal, except in the form of a first-person shooter. As a little extra, one of the guns was the one from Portal, so that made it extra-special. One of the more interesting ones, for sure, but just because it was a dream doesn't mean it wasn't nice to be shot in the face. And, considering Dr. Hopkins wasn't very attentive - it was only Lucas' snoring that had alerted him to the sleeper - he could get away with drawing it now, before it was forgotten.

Lucas' parents are worried about him. All he does is eat, work and sleep. So tonight, they have called a doctor in for a talk while Lucas sleeps.

"Well," says the doctor, "there's only one explanation. I'm afraid you might be losing your son."

Lucas' father replies "What? How so?"

"Well...put simply, he sleeps a lot. I've talked with his school counsellor, who has spoken with him several times about his persistant sleeping in class. Apparently, he really enjoys his dreaming."

Lucas' mother isn't too concerned. "So what?"

"I don't think you understand, Mrs. Williams. You see, Lucas seems to prefer dreaming to being awake. For him, it's like taking LSD or some other hallucinogen. I get people coming in for counselling about addiction to it all the time. It's not so much anything in the drug they are addicted to, but the highs they get out of taking it.

"This is why I'm worried. Lucas seems to enjoy his dreams too much. He could begin to accept his dreams as reality if we don't do something."

Lucas' sleep time, as a result of the meeting, is heavily restricted. For the last week, he's been allowed 6 hours on a schoolday, 8 on a weekend, and he's given ProPlus to take at breakfast to make sure he doesn't fall asleep halfway through a biology lesson or something.

Of course, Lucas isn't impressed. He doesn't really have friends, but people don't hate him either. He goes to one of the more friendly folk, Brad, to ask for help.

"Hmm...You want to sleep, even when there are loud alarm calls and ProPlus affecting you?" asks Brad.

"Essentially, yes."

Brad thinks for a moment. "You remember that series, Life On Mars? It had John Simm in it."

"Yes, I remember it."

"Well, at the end, DCI Tyler wanted to get back to 1973 - he'd accepted it as reality. To do that, he tried suicide. It worked - he didn't last long in the present, but it bought him seven years in the past. It might work for you."

Lucas is a bit surprised. "You're telling me to jump off a building."

"No, no, no, you just have to hit knock yourself out. Really hard now. But not too hard as to kill yourself. See, Tyler saw 1973 as the result of a coma - it could have been time travel, it could have been a dream as a result of the coma, or it-"

Lucas interjects with the answer. "It's a copper's graveyard. It's where they go after they die, and Gene Hunt is essentially God."

Brad is offended. "Thanks for spoiling it for me. Anyway, what you could try is getting yourself into a coma. That could get you anything from a few days to a few lifetimes' dream time."

Unfortunately, Brad is a bit of a slow thinker. Lucas thanks him and leaves, then ten seconds later, Brad says to himself "Wait a minute, what the hell did I just say?"

At the hospital, Lucas' parents wait for an assessment of his condition. The doctor returns, looking confused. "Well, all I can say is that he must have had a lapse of all common sense, or got emboldened by all the caffeine, but..." He pauses to rack his brains again. "...All the witnesses say he went up to a notorious bully and insulted his parents, his sister and called him 'Lardo'. I'm not sure why. But he was beat up very badly.

"Bottom line is, he's out. He'll live, but I wouldn't bet on him waking up too soon."

Lucas is a dreamer. And he knows he's dreaming right now.

The last thing he felt was pain. He'd done everything he could to aggravate a bully, and it had worked very well. Now he was asleep, and he had been for the last 57 hours - or at least, 57 hours by his count.

And he knew he was dreaming. For the last two days, he had been moulding his own world. His own reality where he is close enough to a god as makes no difference. He knows he could be anywhere in the real world right now - he could still be bleeding on the floor, he could be in an ambulance, or in hospital. But that world doesn't matter. That world isn't real.

That thought became a certainty. Lucas has rejected that world. The dream has become his reality. It doesn't matter if he dies or not in that unreal world. This dream, this lucid dream, is his home now. He belongs here.

He's happy here.