I’m sitting on a bench in a psychiatric hospital right now, trying to convince my mom that what I experienced was real. But no matter what, she just doesn’t believe me. I think she thinks I’ve gone mad, and that’s why we ended up here. After all, my story may seem a bit absurd. But it’s all happened for real, I swear. I’ll tell you about it right now and see if you believe me.

So basically, last week our family was on vacation at a ski resort somewhere in the Alps. On the last day, right before I was about to go on my last run on the ski slope, it happened.

I was looking around myself, admiring the view at the top of the hill for the last time, when I saw a strange-looking man, really muscular and about seven feet tall, completely covered with a black ninja suit with a bandana covering his eyes instead of his mouth. He turned towards me and smiled, two forked tongues sticking out of his razor-sharp shark teeth. Instead of ski poles in his hands, he was holding swords. No one else seemed to mind him or even realize he was there. Despite not being able to see his eyes, I could tell he was looking straight at me.

I screamed and took off down the slope.

At first, it felt just like how a normal ski run should. Wind and snow were blowing against my face, and the speed and thrill made it so fun that I even forgot about the man behind me for a second. Then I heard him laughing, and I looked behind, alarmed to see that he was quickly catching up.

Due to my fear, I could not think clearly about where I was going and took a wrong turn. There was no time to turn back, though. That man was catching up. I just had to keep moving, even though I didn’t know where I was going. I took some more wrong turns and ended up on a perfectly straight downward ramp, a few hundred feet wide, blocked with dense forests on each side.

However, there was a huge problem ahead of me: a cliff. The forests were too dense to ski into without crashing into trees, and so the only direction to go was forward.

I looked behind me. The man was just a few feet away now, his mouth grinning in a cruel way. I looked ahead again, and I was about fifty feet away from the edge. I had two choices at this point: to stop and die from the knives, or to keep going and die from falling off the cliff. I chose to keep going, and I slid right off the edge. I was falling back-first now, facing the gray sky above me, completely covered with clouds.

Unexpectedly, the man skied off the cliff too and started falling right above me. He was grinning even wider, and prepared to throw his swords and impale me like a kebab. Frightened, I turned around, facing the ground, and prepared to die. The ground was getting nearer and nearer. But why did it look just like the clouds in the sky above?

I broke through the layer of clouds and saw the ocean underneath me. The ocean? Wasn’t I just in the mountains a second ago? I looked around myself. My clothing had magically changed into casual beach attire, and the temperature suddenly rose by about fifty degrees.

It was a perfectly sunny day, and there was no land around me as far as I could see. I was still falling though. And I knew that landing in water at this height would definitely kill me, and I braced for the fatal impact.

However, when the impact came, it was no more than just a light splash. The water wasn’t salty either, and was surprisingly shallow. I jumped off the smooth, concrete ocean floor and surfaced… in a swimming pool? In the middle of a pool party?

There were about twenty people, kids and adults, in this huge pool, laughing and pointing at me. One of the men, strangely familiar, who wore a black body-length swimsuit and a bandana around his eyes, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Nice dive, man.” I screamed and swam away from him as fast as I could.

However, I couldn’t swim very far before I smashed into the pool wall. Knowing he was right behind me, I quickly got out of the pool and ran. In my haste, I tripped over a long metal stick, and when I looked behind me, I saw it was a ski pole.

Then I gasped. The ground beneath me suddenly turned cold, and the setting around me shifted into a deserted field of snow with tall pine trees jutting out here and there. I was sitting, my back against one of the trees, and my skis and poles were strewn all about the place. I felt dizzy for some reason, and my head really hurt. I must’ve crashed into a tree. But how did I not remember the impact at all? All those thoughts were too much for my injured brain. I blacked out, just as I thought I heard some ambulance sirens in the distance.