Gershwin and the sleeping Disneyland castle

Once upon a time, there was a boy called Gershwin, and Gershwin was an adventurer. He'd been all around the world. He'd been under the water in a submarine. He'd been to Mars. He'd been through pipes. He'd been to New York. He'd been to the North Pole. But today, he wasn't sure where the adventure would take him.

Today, Gershwin was going on a brand-new type of adventure, an adventure that nobody ever expected he would go on. But he was going to. He was going on a theme-park adventure.

Gershwin had been to a few theme parks in his life. He'd been to Chessington. He'd been to Alton Towers. He'd been to Disneyland. But Gershwin wanted to go to the best theme park ever.

He was still small, so he couldn't go to many theme parks because the rides weren't good enough for him. Well, he was too little for the rides. But Gershwin was a big adventurer, and he'd been on lots and lots of very exciting things, and he was sure he could handle a roller coaster in a theme park.

So he found the most child-friendly theme park he could, and that was Walt Disneyland in Tokyo, Japan.

Gershwin decided that's where he would go. He bought his tickets, and very soon he was on his way to the airport. The airport was one of his favourite places to be because it took him to so many fabulous places. He always went to the same airport, and today was no different.

He went in and he was greeted by everyone.

“Hello, Gershwin! Hello, Gershwin! Hello, Gershwin!”

Everybody greeted him, and he walked his way through security and towards the plane gate with no problems at all. He stepped on board the plane and found his seat. It was just a normal seat today, nothing out of the ordinary, because he thought he was going to have enough fun in the theme park. He didn't need more on the aeroplane.

Soon the plane was in the air, and he could see all the lights below him getting further and further away. Before he knew it, he was woken up, and the lights below him gave off a strange orange glow. He knew he was nearing Tokyo.

Very soon the plane touched down, and Gershwin could see all of the billboards in Tokyo Square lighting up. He jumped on a bus that was covered in pictures of Mickey Mouse, and he was whisked away to the entrance of Tokyo Disneyland.

Gershwin decided that he didn't want to go to Tokyo Disneyland after all. So he went back to the airport, got on the plane and flew to Paris. He got on the bus in Paris, which took him to Disneyland Paris, the place where he always goes and loves so very much.

It was very late at night by this point because he'd been travelling for three days, so he quickly went up to his room in the Disneyland Castle. Yes, the very castle in the centre of the park. He had a special room there dedicated to him. It was at the very, very top of the castle, and he could see everything from up there.

It was the place where Sleeping Beauty once slept, and he fell asleep into a deep, deep sleep.

Gershwin slept and slept and slept. It was like the Sleeping Beauty Castle had put some kind of magical curse on him. No matter how many times his alarm went off, he just slept through it.

Down in the park, people were roaming around, going on rides, laughing, joking, eating candy floss, eating popcorn, eating hot dogs. But Gershwin just slept on and on and on.

The fireworks came in the night, and the fireworks were outside the castle, bursting right outside the window of the room where he slept. Yet still, he didn't wake up. It was very strange indeed. There was definitely a magical something going on in that castle.

Down below him in the castle, there were shops that should have been open, but nobody had opened the doors. There was a walkthrough that should have been able to be walked through, but nobody had opened the doors. It was like the entire castle, everybody in there, had fallen asleep, just like Gershwin.

This went on for several days, until the security guards in another part of the park wondered what was going on in the castle. They went over and opened the door themselves. Inside, everyone was fast asleep. As the guards entered the castle, they fell asleep too.

Very soon, Mickey and Minnie came along to the castle themselves. Now, Mickey and Minnie were very special, and they could never be affected by magic. So they went into the castle and saw everyone was asleep.

Mickey and Minnie went all the way up the stairs to the room where Gershwin slept. They opened the door and saw Gershwin sleeping there.

“Oh no,” said Mickey Mouse.

“Oh, what are we going to do?” said Minnie. “I think he needs a kiss from a princess.”

So Minnie Mouse put on her princess outfit because she was Princess of Disneyland, and she gave Gershwin a big kiss.

Then Gershwin woke up with a big yawn.

“What a good sleep,” Gershwin said.

“Ha ha, he's woken up,” said Mickey.

“Oh yes, so he has. What about everybody else?”

Mickey and Minnie went to the door and looked out, and all of the guards, all of the shopkeepers, all of the staff in the castle were slowly waking up, confused as to what had happened.

Gershwin went out of the door, looked around, realised that everybody had been asleep because of him, and started laughing. It was a big laugh. He found it so, so funny, and all of the staff looked up and realised what was happening and laughed themselves. Everybody was laughing. All of the staff, all of the guards, all of the shopkeepers.

But Mickey and Minnie didn't find it funny.

Gershwin went downstairs and decided to finally go out into the park. He went on rides and rides. He went on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. He went on the Dumbo ride. He went on It's a Small World, and very soon it was time to conquer the ride he'd always wanted to go on: Big Thunder Mountain.

He queued up. It was a very long queue. He wished that he could make everybody else fall asleep again. He tried yawning, but that didn't help. Nobody fell asleep. He tried pretending to sleep, but he wasn't tired, and everybody else stayed awake, so he just waited in the queue for almost an hour.

He got to the front of the ride, and he stepped into the carriage. They put the safety belt down, and then the ride took off.

The ride went up and then shot down, down, through the water with a big splash. It went up again. It went round a corner. It twisted. It turned. It was so exhilarating. It was the best ride that Gershwin had ever been on. He could see Disneyland twisting and turning around him.

He went into caves. It was dark and dark, and he saw bats.

When he was going through the bats, he pulled out the laser gun that was right in front of him and shot them.

“Pew, pew, pew!”

They weren't real bats, so he wasn't actually killing anything. So that was good. But he did get points for shooting the bats.

As he kept on going, he realised that the bats were just held on string, and people were holding up big pieces of wood, waving the bats around so he could shoot them. He kept shooting until they came out of the tunnel, and then they went down and down and round and round a bit more, eventually coming back into the station.

Gershwin was exhilarated. He wanted to go on more rides, so he went to his daddy's favourite ride, the Avengers ride. In the Avengers ride, there was Iron Man and Miss Marvel and Spider-Man and Hulk.

The ride shot off faster than anything he'd ever been on before, even a plane. It shot around, and then it was in the dark again. It was pitch black, but every now and then a robot spider would jump out, and he'd have to use the laser gun to shoot that, just like Spider-Man.

“Pchow, pchow!”

He flew around some more, and round and round he shot the spiders. Round and round, he shot the spiders some more.

When he got most of the way around the ride, he saw a big flashing green button at his feet. So he pressed it, and out came a pair of glasses.

He put on the glasses, and he realised what he'd been missing all along. With the glasses on, everything wasn't dark anymore. He could see everything happening. He could see Hulk jumping around. He could see Spider-Man swinging past.

Very near the end of the ride, Spider-Man got captured by all the spiders because they jumped on him and started to spin him up in their web. Gershwin shot the spiders as much as possible.

“Piao, piao, piao!”

Eventually he managed to free Spider-Man, and then the ride came to an end. It was a really good ride, but the day was almost over. So Gershwin headed to the exit, where he got his score.

From all the rides he'd been on, he scored over ten thousand points, which was a very, very good score. It put him at number three on the leaderboard.

He ended up number three on the scoreboard. But he did recognise one name that was at number one, and that name was Dad. He realised that his dad had been here before and was in the lead by seven points.

Gershwin wasn't going to have that, so he very quickly ran back onto one of the rides. This was a Toy Story ride. It was on a Slinky Dog, and he went round and round, and Green Soldiers came from above. And aliens as well, and he had to shoot the aliens.

He shot them with Buzz's light gun.

“Pshaw, pshaw!”

He was shooting them, and every now and then other characters would pop up. There would be the pig. There would be Buzz and Woody. They'd all pop up, but he had to make sure he didn't shoot them, otherwise he'd lose points.

Soon the ride came to a stop, and Gershwin went back to the exit to see his score. He was now up at number one. He was at thirteen thousand points. That's ten thousand plus another three thousand. He was so much higher up the leaderboard than his dad, and he was happy that he could leave now.

As he left, he was given a pair of Mickey ears to celebrate his number-one score, and he wore them with pride as he headed to the bus.

The park was shut now. There were no more rides, and he would have to come back another day.

He got on the bus, which took him to the airport, and then flew home. He'd been gone for three whole weeks, which was a lot longer than the one day he expected to spend in Tokyo. But he'd spent three weeks in Disneyland, most of it asleep, and he'd still managed to beat his dad's score.

He got home. He sent his dad a message showing his score. His dad congratulated him, and Gershwin fell fast asleep.

Hopefully, this time he won't sleep for days and days and days, and he'll wake up when his alarm goes off in the morning.

The end.