Once again, I wake up trying to figure out which of my limbs are actually real.

It's my own special little form of sleep paralysis, and the fact that it occurs nearly every single morning has not made it any less terrifying over the years. I dream every night, though I don't usually recall it beyond a few vague feelings. When I do remember, though, I know myself as something vastly different. A monster with ten hard, claw-like legs, scraping away at something rigid, yet soft. Digging. I'm trapped underneath somewhere impossibly deep and horribly suffocating, and I have to get out but I don't know why. Every night, I learn to move my horrid new body in order to burrow towards freedom, and by the time I wake I've forgotten my old one entirely.

So here I am. I try to twitch a muscle, move a leg, but I guess wrong. I expect to grab and pull my covers off, but all I flex is a phantom. Next, I move a leg instead of an arm. I cycle through every part of my body, twitching and gasping for breath as the ever-present fear of never figuring myself out again screams in the back of my mind.

But of course, less than a minute later, I remember how to be a human and everything is fine. If nothing else, I suppose I rarely struggle to stay awake after all this. I get up out of bed with my heartbeat still hammering, and walk across the room to silence my blaring alarm.

Today's a school day, so I'd better go take a shower.

I grab some clean clothes, head to the bathroom, and strip down. The girl in the mirror isn't what the still-waking part of me expects to see, but she's nonetheless the same as always. My straight black hair and slightly thin eyes hint at my half-Asian heritage, but it's not super noticeable unless someone goes looking for it. I'm still pretty pale thanks to my mom's side. My little brother got way more of the other end of things. I'm fine with that, as I've never even been to Asia and my dad never talks about where he was born much anyway. I'm thoroughly American, which is to say I've lived my whole life in the United States and not, y'know, the thirty-four other countries in the Americas that we've decided to completely steal the title of 'American' from like the arrogant pricks we are.

Anyway, after a quick check to ensure I'm still me, I take a quick shower (defined as merely forty-five minutes instead of an hour and a half) and emerge to dry off, get dressed, eat breakfast, and put on a light coating of makeup before covering most of it with a facemask and dragging my abusively heavy backpack to wait for the schoolbus. I don't run into my parents for the entirety of my morning routine, since my dad doesn't bother to get up at the ungodly hour I have to go to school and my mom is already gone by the time I get out of the shower. My brother and I manage to share a single grunt of communication, but that's about it. The agony of waking is almost entirely forgotten. I understand that my dreams are pretty darn weird, but I'm so used to them that I find them even more mundane than simply going to high school.

So here I am, waiting at the bus stop and doing little other than getting annoyed whenever one of my yawns forces me to readjust my N95. I have a driver's license, but even as a senior I don't have a car to call my own. It doesn't really bother me; I don't like driving anyway. The bus is fine, and it's not as though it lacks good company.

"Hannah!" a familiar voice calls out, and I turn to grin at its source. Speak of the devil.

"Hey, Brendan," I greet him as my excessively tall friend happily bounds up to me. And when I say excessively tall, let me assure you I mean truly, exceptionally, stupidly tall. Brendan is six foot eight, which means my piddly five foot two puts me at eye level with his armpits… if I look up. The poor guy has not taken his growth spurt gracefully, either: he's worryingly thin and knobby-limbed, a complete beanpole without much in the way of shoulder width or muscle. He's got blonde hair, big goofy glasses, and that special kind of pale skin that makes you wonder if vampires are real. (They probably aren't, but sunburns definitely are.) I met Brendan in elementary school when I walked up to him out of the blue and declared that he had the same name as my rival in Pokémon Emerald, and therefore he was my rival in real life. We've been best friends ever since.

"How's the morning treating you?" he asks, his voice a bit muffled under his own mask.

"Just another refreshing day in the plague-apocalypse," I grumble. "Plagocalypse? You know what I mean. It's cold and I'm tired and my body's sore from sleeping weird and the planet is dying and there's still COVID everywhere and yet half the people we go to class with aren't even vaccinated."

"So… grumpy?" Brendan interprets. "You sound grumpy."

I open my mouth to answer, then close it.

"Yeah, okay, I might be grumpy," I admit. "Take my mind off it?"

"Sure!" he says happily, and immediately launches into a story about a Pathfinder game he's been playing in which his character—a mermaid summoner that can't walk so she sits on top of giant magical servants and rides them into battle—helped the party's sorcerer successfully seduce a sapient house by enlarging him enough to polymorph into an awakened gazebo. Which, of course, forces me to ask questions like "why do you need this sort of leverage on a house?" and "did the sorcerer agree to this plan?" and "if you have access to eighth level spells, couldn't you have solved this with dozens of methods that don't imply the existence of house sex?" This, of course, means the story gets rewound a ways back to give me 'important context,' and things only get sillier from there.

Brendan loves tabletop games. Once he starts talking about them he will absolutely never shut up, and it's great. I love hearing him ramble about the crazy nonsense he and his groups get up to. I don't play much myself, but I've played enough to know what he's talking about and that's all I really need. I enjoy tabletop games, but I simply don't have the time for them. Brendan plays three or more five-plus hour games a week. It's basically all he does outside of school. Between my classes, my job, and my sort-of-leisure-time-sort-of-other-job, I haven't been able to fit in time for a tabletop game in at least a year.

Inevitably, the bus ride is over long before Brendan's story. This is entirely expected; I suspect this particular one will last through lunch period and the ride home as well. He can seriously talk about this stuff forever, and I find myself with a delightfully goofy grin on my face throughout all of it. Unfortunately, we have to go to class eventually, and despite the pleasant start I spend the day antsy and exhausted for no discernable reason. My body keeps trying to pass out, which is unusual for me. I didn't stay up late last night or anything. Perhaps I'm simply tired of bullcrap.

Still, I push through my exhaustion, ignoring most of the lectures in my classes in favor of simply doing the assigned homework from the textbook. I learn the same things that way, and it's a much more efficient use of time. I'd rather read than listen anyway. The teachers let me do it, too, since I'm getting straight A's and not bothering anyone. Pretty much all of the teachers like me for those two very simple reasons, and I'm happy that way. I go to a public school but it's pretty upper-middle class; there isn't too much in the way of nasty bullying, at least not in terms of physical violence. It still doesn't hurt to be one of the kids the faculty will actually go to bat for, though. I don't have the energy to deal with high school bitchiness today.

When we finally get to lunchtime, I'm both exhausted and absolutely ravenous. I bribe another friend to drive Brendan and I out to eat, where I purchase and eat three different hamburgers, against my better judgment. I just feel worse and worse as the day goes on, though. When school ends my head is throbbing and I'm itchy all over so I'm probably getting sick, but I just down a bit more than the medically recommended amount of ibuprofen and power through. I'll be home soon, and then I'll have to go to work. and then I'll get to rest. Not before.

"Hey, Hannahgator," my dad greets me when I finally get home. Apparently I used to bite a lot as a kid, so he's been calling me that since I was around two years old. And yes, he worked today, despite getting out of bed after I left for school and getting home before me. He's a dentist, and he works from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon. What kind of hours even are those? It's infuriating.

"How was school?" he asks.

"Fine," I lie automatically. "Will we have time to grab food before my shift?"

"Uhhh… yeah, I think we can swing that if we head out in the next few minutes."

I thank him and rush upstairs to drop off my school things, double-check my makeup, and quickly throw on my work uniform. Then I run back downstairs and hop into my dad's already-running car, and we head out to grab a Little Caesar's pizza, which I eat nearly all of in one sitting. What the heck is up with you today, metabolism? Geez.

"Anything interesting happen today?" my dad asks.

"Nope," I answer truthfully. Me feeling like crap isn't particularly interesting.

"Could you… maybe try to give me even two sentences to work with here?" he presses to my mounting frustration.

"I'm tired," I grunt. "I have a headache."

"Did you take—"

"Yes, I took medication. I'll be fine."

The conversation thankfully doesn't continue after that. I'm dropped off at my job, which is of course in the food service industry and therefore terrible. Money is money, though, and I'll need to earn a lot of it if I expect to be able to afford college and not end up in a crippling, infinite debt spiral. I work at what the industry calls a 'fast casual' restaurant. You know, the kind where there's no drive through and everything costs three times as much as McDonald's but they still have the food ready less than five minutes after you order it? (Or at least we're supposed to have the food ready five minutes after you order it.) Yeah, it's one of those. I'm working at the register tonight (oh goodie) so it's time to turn on Customer Service Mode and pretend that I'm happy to see everyone. Which, to be fair, I'm actually pretty good at. People can be very annoying, but it only makes things worse to take it out on them. Self-control is the key to a good experience at work. Whatever the manager says to do, I find a way to get it done, no matter how ridiculous or inane. It is, after all, work. I don't come here and expect to do what I want to do.

At least my shift is boring and uneventful. I really needed that, today. There aren't many customers so I just focus on cleaning the whole time, which of course makes my boss very happy. I've got to keep her happy so that I can be the next shift manager. They make two more dollars an hour, after all.

I carpool home with a female coworker I barely know and I don't particularly like. Thanking them for the ride, I get out and trudge inside only to get ambushed by my mother, who scoops me up in a hug that I tolerate with dignity.

"Welcome home, honey!" she coos. "How was your day?"

"It was fine," I insist.

"Your father said you had a headache?"

"I probably just need sleep," I tell her, both to reassure her and to hope she takes the hint and lets me go do that.

She, of course, does not.

"Did you have a good time at work?" she asks.

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"It was slow," I inform her.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Days like that are always so boring."

I mean, no, you're completely wrong, I like the slow days. But I'm not going to say that, lest I receive that disappointed look.

"I made it through," I say instead. "May I go?"

"We've barely even started a conversation!" she complains. "I'm your mother, don't I get to talk to you at least sometimes?"

I don't know what to say to that. I'm too tired to find the right answer. Customers are easy to talk to because all of them want things and I can just give those things to them. But I don't know the correct answer here, and I'm taking too long trying to think of one, so I just shrug. Which is, of course, a mistake. I get a look.

"I've picked out more colleges for you to apply to," she says, and that conversation starts. None of the things she shows me look appealing, so I try to guess which one she seems to like the most and pretend to express interest in it. I guess correctly, and I'm rewarded with a slightly faster end to the conversation. If I didn't pick her favorite, she'd have tried to convince me to change my mind until I did.

Finally, I'm free to head upstairs. I walk into my room, shut the door, glance longingly at my Switch before ultimately deciding that collapsing into bed is my only real option. Which sucks, because I hate going to bed almost as much as I hate waking up. When the dream starts, it's just as jarring as when it ends. I haven't seen a therapist in years, but I did talk to my old one about my dreams. They were a curiosity, a strange quirk noteworthy only because they caused me distress. Nothing we tried ever stopped them, though, not even sleeping medication. And ultimately, my therapist and I both decided the dreams weren't really worth the effort to try and stop. They're disruptive and unpleasant, but… well, only for about five minutes of my day. They never change. I'll learn to deal with them.

I sit down on my bed, peeling layers of clothing off. I know that as soon as I lie down, I'm going to pass out. So I hesitate, just a bit. But ultimately, I know I need rest. So I get under the covers, go to sleep, and immediately wake up as something else.

New sensations pound at me with horrid lucidity. They are familiar, but until now it has only been in that dream-like way where many things you've never done or never been feel familiar. Tonight, I remember falling asleep. Tonight, I know I am dreaming. I try to scream as alien sensations attack my mind, but find that I cannot breathe. Blood pulses rapidly through my body. I have a heartbeat but no breath!? I'm going to die! My panic rises higher and higher, and with it I take my first clattering steps.

Two, then four, then six, then eight, then ten legs all step forwards in sequence, each extending from my body in a radial pattern from my orb-like core. I look like a spider without a head, and I know this because I see myself, my senses somehow ignoring the pitch darkness and showing everything in a wide radius around me. It's not sight, not really. I have no concept of color, by which I don't mean 'everything is black and white,' I mean that color as a concept does not exist, I merely understand the shape and texture and composition of everything around me with complete ignorance of how it reflects light. This sense has a limited range, but it goes in all directions and doesn't care if objects are in the way: I feel myself, I feel the walls around me, I even feel the inside of my own body. I see my chitinous exoskeleton, the mouth at the bottom of my circular core, the way my many-segmented legs move in undulating patterns as I walk. I also see my tube-like heart and the proof I will not suffocate: openings in my body lined with thin, page-like structures passively let air flow over them to collect oxygen. Book lungs, they're called. I remember feeling a need to learn how spiders breathe once, so I looked them up. I suppose this is why. The lack of breath is a sensation I'm not sure I will ever get used to.

The area around me is much less interesting. I am in a tunnel, a jaggedly-dug tube traveling in a single direction. Everything around it, for as far as I can sense, is solid matter. It's layered, fibrous, and rigid. It's wood. I'm trapped inside a giant chunk of wood?

It doesn't matter. I need to dig. I know that in my… er, exoskeleton. (Oh god, I don't have bones.) My legs are sharp, and with my front legs—defined as the legs pointing in the direction I want to go, since I'm radially symmetrical—I start scraping away at the inside of my prison, digging great gouges in the end of the tunnel in front of me, consuming the shaved wood, and making progress cut by cut. It's relaxing in a way, almost meditative. My panic falls for the first time since my dream started as I work away, putting all my attention into being productive, into doing something, so that I don't have to focus on the horrid nature of my circumstances. It is the best kind of distraction: the kind I feel good doing. Even though the tunnel seems endless, I keep making headway because that is all I know. My body is tough. I'm not getting tired, even after what must be countless hours of work. The wood tastes horrible, but something about it invigorates me, fills me with the power to keep going. I'll eventually suffer from fatigue of the mind, but my body will not falter.

So. This is the nature of my dream. Is this what I experience every night? Will I remember this when I wake up? I don't know. I don't have any way to know. Despite the trance-like state of my work, I feel strangely… awake. It feels new. It feels exciting. It makes me think I'm almost there. This tunnel is impossibly long, but even as I start to get sleepy, I carry on. Something urges me to.

That's when I feel it. The end. I have been digging this tunnel my entire life, and I'm finally at the end!

I have been digging diagonally upward, I note. At the edge of the seemingly infinite wood there is a relatively thin layer of soil, roots, and what I can only assume are plants. The roots burrow deep, many of them worming into the wood below and eating from it much like I do. And above it all is glorious empty space, glorious freedom. The closer I get to the surface, the more of it I feel. Rolling hills, broken boulders, shrubs and grass and moss. It's like the plateau on top of a mountain, where only the heartiest of plants survive the thin air. Smaller animals wander about as well, making the toothy, lamprey-like mouth at the bottom of my core start to masticate with anticipation. Something to eat besides all this ding dang wood! I'm going to be free!

I hurry through the layer of dirt, avoiding the many rocks along the way, until finally I burrow myself to the surface! I pop my body out of the hole I've been trapped in, attempting and of course failing to take a deep breath. Still, I feel the fresh air flow into my body and wriggle with delight. It's so open and flat here! I feel the warmth of the sun on my body! I wonder how far I can… see?

I can't see. My lack of vision wasn't due to the darkness of the tunnel, I simply don't have eyes. Even though there is nothing blocking me, nothing but open space, my sensory perception simply stops at the same edges it did before, only showing a radius of about fifty of my body lengths in every direction. And as that realization sinks in, as my instinct to dig dies away to nothing, I'm left with nothing to do but recognize the utter absurd horror of my situation.

I am a monster, and everything around me is wrong.

The animals and plants around me are nothing like anything I know from Earth. It all looks relatively benign until it moves, at which point even the smallest, most harmless-looking critters undulate into warped nightmares, their bodies stretching and twisting around strange patches of barren land where no plants grow. Hesitantly, I move towards a small creature next to me, and it scurries off in a disturbing zig-zag pattern without ever actually seeming to turn. It's avoiding the barren patches, and I don't know why but it can't be good.

I shudder nervously. I've played enough Pokémon Mystery Dungeon to know where this is going. I'm in another world, aren't I? This is too lucid, too real. And try as I might, I'm not waking up.

I scuttle along the ground, my movements instinctive and natural unless I try to think about them. The prey around me—and it's difficult not to think of the creatures as prey—all seem to be much faster than I am, much better-suited to the zigzagging paths required to avoid the seemingly-dangerous barren zones. If I want to eat them I… wait, wait wait! Why do I want to eat them? Could I please focus on the absurdity of the situation right now?

I spin in a tight circle, rotating like an office chair as my legs easily scuttle to pointlessly reorient. I don't have a forward or a backward, only an up and a down. I have even less need of rotating to zig-zag, even though I don't really understand how the other creatures are pulling that off. And while yes, this situation is absolutely impossible, I feel hungry and tired. On the off chance all this is real, I should focus on getting food and shelter. And if this is fake, well… why not get food and shelter anyway? It's not like I have anything better to do, and the dream is denying me any control over my surroundings despite my lucidity. Maybe I'll manage to think up something tastier than wood fiber if I have to work for it.

I spend a while chasing smaller, herbivorous-looking critters, and though I start getting better at controlling myself I ultimately fail to catch anything. I do manage to chase a tasty-looking morsel all the way back to its burrow, but unfortunately it's too small for me to crawl my way in. I can, of course, 'see' into the burrow without issue: there's a thin tunnel down and a cozy little room at the end of it, which would be plenty big for my body if the way in wasn't so thin. Although… hmm. As much as I'm not a fan of digging, it would be pretty trivial to widen this hole enough to enter, stab the occupants with my legs, and swallow them up. I find myself weirdly excited about this idea, considering that it involves eating raw meat. I'd be disturbed to even consider that while awake. Plus… you know. More digging.

I spin around some more as I think, an odd nervous tic that I suppose I'll have to live with if this all turns out to be real. In the end, I decide to go for it. Whether these are my new instincts or the pull of some strange dream logic, it's not as though I have anything else to do. I stick a few of my legs down the hole, yank on the dirt, and start widening the tunnel.

The occupants, predictably, do not like this. The fuzzy little things remind me of chipmunks, and though they chirp and yip angrily at me, I do not find myself particularly intimidated by the display, not even with two of them ganging up on me. When I dig far enough to stick a leg into the burrow proper, one manages to bite me. …Or at least they try. The critter's teeth gnaw uselessly on my carapace, and a simple application of force is all I need to push the leg through the rest of its head, killing it. A shudder of mixed revulsion and satisfaction fills me, but I don't hesitate to do the same to the other animal. My hunt is successful.

Now then. How do I, um… how do I eat them?

My mouth is on the underside of my body, which is of course raised up into the air by my legs. My legs are sharp and not the least bit prehensile, designed for digging and climbing and killing, not object manipulation. I could stand over the corpses and then… sit on them, basically? That would get them in my mouth, but it just seems gross. In the end, I enter the burrow and scuttle overtop my prize, balancing myself on five legs while the other five wrap underneath my meal. I bring it up to my mouth with all the precision and gripping strength of a carnival claw game. I drop the corpse a few times, but ultimately I am successful. The meat is juicy and bloody and far more satisfying than wood fibers, though after eating both my prizes I find myself feeling… bloated. I guess I did just swallow at least a quarter of my own body weight.

Scooting down onto a not-so bloody part of the dirt, I curl my legs up under me, causing me to roll slightly like a ball. It's comfortable, though, and I feel myself getting tired. Freedom, food, and shelter. Today was a good day. Quickly and easily, I nod off to sleep.

…And I immediately wake up, my alarm blaring in my ears. I try to jolt upright and ready my clawed limbs for an attack, but all it does is cause my fleshy body to spasm wildly as every instinct comes out twisted and wrong. I'm huge and I'm heavy and I'm soft and everything is shaped wrong and I can't feel anything around me and I'm not breathing I have to breathe now I have to BREATHE!

Air comes in, air goes out. I open my eyes. Air comes in, air goes out. I'm Hannah, I'm human, and I have no idea what just happened. My dreams… aren't normally like that. I don't usually remember that much. There's never that much to remember because I never escape the tunnel. Everything feels so wrong. Slowly but surely, I flex my muscles, reminding myself which body parts go where and how they move. It takes me a lot longer than normal, but I still get up after about six minutes to finally turn off my alarm. Holy crap, that was all so disturbing. What a freaky frickin' dream.

Yawning, I stumble into the bathroom, wincing with every step. My toes all hurt, I must have kicked something in my sleep. I strip down and hop into the shower, doing my best to let the warm water wash away those disturbing memories. It's calming. I like water. There's a reason I get up early to take long showers, despite all my complaining about having such little time. This is how I center myself and get ready for the day. When I have a good job and my own place to live, the first thing I'm doing is buying a hot tub. That's my promise to myself.

Unfortunately, the calmness quickly ends as the water in the tub runs red. I start to panic immediately. It's way too early for my monthlies (and it's been years since they could sneak up on me in the first place) so I have to be injured somehow. But where? Agh, my toes, of course! The pain is more serious than I thought! I squat down, pinching my big toe ever so slightly. A shot of pain jolts down my foot, causing me to let out a hiss and a small squirt of blood. I get similar results from every toe, and the more I poke at them the more wrong they feel. I think… I think there's something wrong with the bone. When I press down hard enough, it almost feels like it's poking out of my toe from the inside. Which would explain the blood, but… that's impossible, right?

What's happening to me?