He was still screaming when he woke up.

Nathan sat on his bed, his whole body covered in sweat, and looked at his surroundings when his eyes adapted to the darkness. He touched his arms, then his face. They seemed real, everything around did, and so was the soreness of his throat. He checked the time on his phone: two in the morning. He got out of bed, being in no hurry to go back to sleep after the last dream, and began walking in circles around the room. Then his eyes fell on the familiar green bottle on the table and suddenly he felt angry at the liquid within. Or, as he was certain, poison. He grabbed it and stormed outside, pouring its contents into the sand and throwing the empty bottle towards the sea, blinded by rage. He knew he hit the mark, hearing it splash into the waves. He shook his head at his act and stormed back inside, slamming the door behind him. He sat on the bed and hid his face in his hands, waiting for the anger to subside. When it finally did, he lied down on his back. The mattress was still wet from his sweating, but he paid no mind to it. He closed his eyes and fell asleep soon after.

He heard the sound of a voice whispering his name. A low, feminine voice, oddly familiar. He scrambled out of the bed in search of its source in the dark. Each time the voice spoke the walls and the floor of the beach house seemed to vibrate, shaking the dust from the corners of the roof onto his head. The sound seemed to be coming from the outside, luring him to get out, and so he followed. The moment he stepped through the door he noticed a silhouette standing in front of the house. A tall woman in a white dress, standing there and staring at him. ‘You have forsaken the gift, Nathan,’ she spoke in an amused tone, as she smiled at him. ‘Why?’

‘What gift,’ Nathan asked, dumbfounded. ‘Who are you?’

Suddenly, the smile was gone, replaced by honest scorn. ‘Who am I? You come here uninvited and you dare ask who I am? You miserable bug. You ought to be punished.’

Her body began to contort, to widen and to elongate. It took Nathan a moment to register what was happening. She was growing before his eyes, larger with every second. When she was done, he had to lift his head all the way up to even glimpse her hateful face; she must have been at least two hundred feet tall by then. Her eyes were burning, literally: there was smoke coming out of her eyeballs, thick clouds of black fume. He was frozen with hear at her sight. Then, the giantess moved, lifting her foot over him and the beach house. He managed to dodge the impact in the very last moment, leaping into the sand as she put the foot down, crushing the house with loud noises of cracking wood. He quickly got up and started to run ahead. He knew she was behind him, he could feel the ground shake with each of her steps, he could hear the sound they made, as well as the seething of her breath far above. It seemed to last forever, his pitiful attempt at escaping her and her slow but certain chase. Until he tripped and fell on the sand, turning to see her massive foot fall upon him. He felt his bones shatter as the giantess twisted his form into the ground, his organs liquify and he screamed and instinctively closed his eyes as he felt the excruciating pain overtake him.

He opened his eyes. He was now somewhere else. Two suns, one bigger than the other, hung in the amber-coloured sky. He was staring at something that seemed like a mountain, albeit a rather narrow one, ending with a rugged hill. It seemed to rise miles in the air and a few loose clouds gathered at its top. At the bottom and to the side, he noticed a forest of golden, thin trees, far in the distance. The ground he was standing on was a layer of some soft hide, stretching as far as he could see; to the mountain, to the forest. The former, he realized, was covered in it as well. He turned around and found another two mountains, albeit shorter, loom before him. On the top of each he could distinguish some form of a structure, a spire perhaps? He couldn’t quite tell. Something began to rise behind the mountains, something so large he had trouble grasping it in its entirety until it stretched to its full extent. A woman’s face, a face he saw before. It was frozen in an indifferent expression and her golden hair weaved as it hung still above him. Thick vines full of thorns entwined it where her eyes should have been. Her lips, dry and cracked, parted and the colossus spoke: ‘INTRUDER. PURLOINER. HAVE YOU COME TO MY GARDEN TO PLUNDER ITS FRUITS? HAVE YOU TRULY BELIEVED YOUR TRESSPASSING WOULD BE UNNOTICED?’

Nathan froze in fear once more, realizing where he was and what he was now: a minuscule speck against a continent of female body. Another large object appeared in the sky – her hand. ‘KNOW THIS, THEN,’ she spoke, each word a thunder, ‘I CANNOT SEE YOU, LITTLE THING, BUT I CAN FEEL YOU. AND I WILL FIND YOU.’ The hand began to descend upon him and Nathan once again found himself running, down her stomach, past the abyss of her navel as a hundred foot tall finger chased after him, threatening to wipe him away, like the speck he was in comparison. He ran still until he reached the forest, hoping to hide among the foliage, behind one of the impossibly tall, thin tree, each as gold as the colossus’s hair. It was then that he noticed a crevice far ahead, so large it could easily swallow him whole. The finger passed above him and fell upon the crevice, parting it and partially diving inside. ‘FOOL. IS THAT WHAT YOU RESIGN YOURSELF TO? TO FEAST YOUR EYES WHILE YOU STILL HAVE THEM? VERY WELL.

A smell invaded the air, a heavy, intoxicating musk replacing anything else he’s been breathing up to this point. Nathan knew what it was, knew where he was. He held on to the trunk of the tree as his surroundings were shaking, as was his entire world. As the disdainful voice of the woman the body of whom he was intruding upon changed into gasps of pleasure. And he laughed, laughed at the grotesque of his situation, at the fact he was trapped in the nightmare of clinging to survival while the source of it, the woman, was simply…

Something hit his head, breaking his madness, and fell to the ground. A small object the size of his hand. He picked it up – an apple, gold and soft to the touch. He bit into it without thinking and blinked.

The roof, the ceiling. The top of his beach house was what he was staring at. He felt a sour taste in his mouth and checked the time again. Six in the morning. It was light already, the first shy rays of the sun pressing through the shutters. He sat up and felt himself around the body again and again it felt real. He looked towards the door. ‘Only one way to find out,’ he thought and slowly walked over to it. He took a deep breath before opening. As he took a step outside he was greeted by the dawn, the red disc of the sun lazily rising above the horizon. He heard noises and looked to the side. Some beachgoers were taking photos of the view, early birds catching the biggest worm there could ever be. Nathan smiled; he was back in the waking world.   

He had a coffee to start off his day, then grabbed the towel, a liquid soap and fresh clothes as he made his way towards the communal showers, a minute or two walk from his beach house. There was no other soul there, the sun-catchers he had seen earlier probably having gone to bed to catch up on the missing sleep, which suited Nathan just fine. He went under a shower and started to wash the grime and the sweat from the night before, the cold water getting rid of whatever fatigue he was still bearing. It felt like the most relaxing shower he’s ever had. But he couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was weird about it. Such as the fact the shower seemed unnaturally tall. Or that the valves seemed to be much larger now than a minute ago. Or that everything seemed to be getting taller and larger. A panic set in once he realized what was happening. He was shrinking. Was it the water doing it to him? Yes, it must have been; he had to get out but, as he soon realized, he couldn’t move his legs, nor his body. Nor scream for help. He stood there, frozen, paralyzed, dwindling down more and more and by the time he felt he could budge his limbs, he was getting so small he risked getting washed down the drain. He tried to run, but the rushing water quickly carried him towards it, and before he knew it he was holding on to the edge of a hole, screaming in his now inaudible voice, before being washed away and carried with the torrent, passing out from the lack of oxygen.

And now he felt cold. He opened his eyes and saw he was lying on a sheet of glass, a transparent surface extending hundreds of feet in every direction, ending with high walls. Where was he? He had no idea what that place was, too absorbed by the deathly cold of the place. ‘Hello?’ he spoke out, not really expecting an answer. ‘Anybody there?’ He noticed something move in the corner of his eye and when he looked towards it he saw another horror spectacle. A female face, as large as before, so colossal he was but a speck, a freckle compared to it, was rising above him. The same sharp nose, the same lips, the same brown eyes now more akin to two moons, staring him down. The impossibly gigantic woman was wearing white again, this time however her attire consisted not of a dress, but of a lab coat. She brought one hand, clad in a white latex glove, to her face. She was holding a black rectangle in it, the size of a city block – a recorder.

‘THE SUBJECT HAS ENTERED THE CRITICAL STAGE,’ her voice howled, the force of it pushing Nathan to his knees, his hands spontaneously reaching out to cover his ears, ‘APPROXIMATE CURRENT SIZE: ONE. POINT. FIVE MILIMETERS. THE SUBJECT IS EXPECTED TO ENTER THE SUB-ATOMIC RANGE IN THE NEXT. TWENTY. FOUR HOURS. CONCLUSION: FAILED. IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF THE EXPERIMENT.’ She turned the recorded off and set it aside without breaking eye contact with Nathan’s tiny form within the petri dish. She stayed silent for a moment before speaking up again: ‘I AM SO DISSAPOINTED IN YOU, NATHAN. YOU SHOWED SUCH POTENTIAL AT FIRST. NOW LOOK AT YOU. AN ANT, NO, LESS THAN THAT. TRAPPED. FRIGHTENED. CLUELESS.’ Her tone was leaking with disdain and her face, still and neutral up until now, momentarily distorted into a grimace. ‘BUT I’M WILLING TO GIVE YOU ONE LAST CHANCE.’ She clenched her hand into a fist with her thumb extended, as she began to lower it into the petri dish. The moment it was close, Nathan started to run, even if doing so was pointless, given where he found himself in. ‘NO, YOU IDIOT,’ she seethed, ‘WHY DO YOU STILL NOT GET IT? THE POINT IS NOT. TO. RUN!’ Having said that, she quickly traced and pinned him down with her thumb, easily crushing his feeble body beneath it and twisting her digit for a good measure.

‘Why am I not dead? Or am I?’ Nathan wondered, as he woke up in his bed, inside his beach house, yet again. He didn’t bother to check the time. In truth, he was afraid to. As he was afraid of doing anything else. He didn’t know what time it was, he didn’t even know whether he was awake this time neither. Reality and the dream, or more specifically nightmare, seemed to intertwine, to intermingle. To contract into a point where one was indistinguishable from the other. The room wasn’t exactly dark, nor was it exactly illuminated; a twilight that could indicate it was either dusk or dawn. ‘The hour of the wolf,’ Nathan thought, the words creeping into his mind out of nowhere, ‘The hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. How did the rest of it go?’

And then, without a warning, there was a knock on the door.