Soon Orin started to show the first symptoms that our guide had warned us about. His indigestion worsened, especially after he had drunk some water.

“Let me take a little nap. I feel too full, and it’s hard to breathe,” he said. The meal and the pleasant weather under the trees made us feel sleepy, especially Orin, and he fell asleep immediately while the rest of us kept talking.

I felt drowsy too, but I did not want to sleep so I stretched and walked towards the four stones. My mind was rambling while I walked around them, scrutinising each of them closely. I started wondering if these stones had rolled to this spot on their own to rest at this specific position. But, if this was the case, why were there no other stones like them anywhere around?

If there had been similar constellations of randomly scattered stones nearby, those four could have been coincidentally rolled down to the four corners of the clearing to form the precise pattern in which they were arranged now. However, the surrounding terrain did not support this theory and I couldn’t help noticing that those stones were positioned in a very unusual way.

But if they were not formed by coincidence, how else had they gotten here? There were many open questions about several mysterious places in the world for which scientists hadn’t been able to find explanations yet, let alone solve the mysteries of how they were created and why they exist.

Actually, I had always been interested in these mysteries, like the strange geometrical symbols in the corn fields called Crop Circles. Many have tried to prove that they were created by humans and not by aliens. Many experiments had been conducted in similar fields, but no one had ever been successful in bending plants in the same way that they had somehow been bent in the Crop Circles. The plants there had been flattened but would rise back into their upright position again, and still be alive. However, in all experiments that were conducted, the crops bent, but then snapped, withered and died. In addition, the way they were flattened was far beyond what could be done with human tools. For instance, each plant in the crop circles had been bent at a perfect angle and the pattern radiated out symmetrically from the centre.

Perhaps my early interest in these mysteries had perked my curiosity; I always been fascinated by new scientific discoveries of mysterious or historical places.

The cool wind blew into my eyes and I suddenly felt drowsy. I shook my head in an attempt to shake off my drowsiness and was tempted to take a nap to recharge before walking back.

But then I thought that spending more time to appreciate those wonderous stones would be more worthwhile than taking a nap. So I decided to restore by energy by jumping up and down, flinging my arms left and right and shaking my legs. While I was doing that, I suddenly felt the urge to run around the stones. At the very least, I might set a new record by being the first person to do so.

After kicking and jumping around for a while, I felt a little better.  The drowsiness had subsided, but it wasn’t completely gone. I picked up speed in my run and zigzagged between the four stones. I first ran around the outer side of the stone formation, then in a tighter circle on the inner side of them. I ran clockwise, then anti-clockwise. While I was running, I heard one of my friends shouting, and I recognised Sun’s voice.

“Hey Tim, you must be craz …” his sentence was suddenly cut off by a loud noise that crashed through the air like a bolt of lightning striking very close to me. My instincts took over and I crouched down with my hands covering my head and my eyes tightly shut. I lay still and waited for the sound of the next lightning bolt.

But there was only silence. I waited for several seconds for the next lightning strike to hit, but nothing happened. After a few minutes, my curiosity got the better of me and I started to wonder where this deafening noise had come from. I slowly opened my eyes, stood up, and looked around. I was stunned by what I saw in front of me. I shook my head and slapped my face a few times, thinking that the drowsiness had caused my eyes to blur.

The whole scenery around me had changed, except for the four stones. The ground which had been covered with leaves, small branches and weeds before was now cleared like a backyard that had just been swept, offering me an unobstructed surround view for at least fifty meters. Beyond that radius, I could make out huge pine trees, all lined up in neat rows. I couldn’t guess how old they were since I had never seen any trees that big before. The two- or three-hundred-year-old trees I had seen before were tiny compared to these. I also noticed that they all seemed to be well taken care of, like carefully pruned trees in a park.

I immediately jumped up and sprinted away from the stones. When I turned back to look at them, I could see them towering high above the now cleared landscape. Now they really looked as if they had been placed there intentionally, as though they were a symbol or a memorial for something. I ran until I arrived back in the area where I had left my friends and started to look for them, but I couldn’t find anyone. I ran back to the stones and walked around them again, all the while loudly calling out the names of my friends.

“Hey! Orin, Sun, Kate … Where are you?” Silence. In that moment, I felt very frightened and started to panic. Adrenaline was pumping through my body and I had goose bumps all over. I called out their names several times and looked around the stones and the trees, but I couldn’t find a trace of them.

Slowly my brain started to function again. I hurriedly took my phone out from my pocket but there was no signal. I tried switching it on and off several times but there was still no network signal at all. I looked up at the sky and I noticed that it was bright blue with something like a rainbow in it. It was such a beautiful sky, like the ones described in fairy tales. I thought about what had happened and looked down at myself, at my hands and feet. Everything was the same, nothing had changed. I started to ask myself what had really just happened.

“Maybe I’m dreaming,” I said to myself, or maybe I had eaten so much that I had fallen asleep.

“Yes, that must be it,” I concluded. I then checked my senses by lifting my arm and pinching it.

“Ouch! That hurts!”

Unconvinced, I tried everything I could think of: rubbing my eyes, slapping my head, trampling my feet, kicking, jumping, rolling on the ground, tossing and turning my body, smelling the earth, smelling my armpits, taking off my backpack, opening it and smelling that as well. I did everything I could think of to prove that this was not a dream. If someone had seen what I was doing, they would have thought that I had gone mad. After undergoing these physical and sensory tests, I knew that it was real and this was surely not a dream.

“Well, if this is not a dream, what is it then?” I asked myself.