I did a black and white version just for fun. Since I cannot decide which I like better, I will post them both. (In case you already viewed the color version, the story below is identical.)

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You stole a rare artifact, and the evil witch to whom it had belonged cursed you to suffer a destruction of your existence via your own nightmares. Fortunately, you were trained in the recognition of spells and realized with a smirk that you could overcome her magic; she was unaware that the guild had trained their members for this very situation. The strenuous hours of meditation had provided you with a degree of dream-control.

The clown lunged at you with a steak knife in the “typical fashion” just as you undid the rope and slapped yourself upon the face. For a moment, you feel relief behind the darkness of your closed eyes. As you open them, you find yourself strapped naked to a ridiculously large frying pan, as a vicious looking serpent with void-like holes for eyes is about to roast your flesh from head to toe. His mouth opens as you start banging your head against the metal, harder and harder. You black out only to open your eyes as a tiger lunges for your head. You roll out of the way; his claws graze your chest. The flash of white-hot pain jars you awake only to find yourself on a beach at night. Slowly, unnatural aquatic arachnids, bipedal eels and octopi with razor sharp teeth emanating from their heads approach you from the water. More worrisome is the fact that your hands are bound behind your back. Not waiting for them to devour you, you launch your foot into the nearest gaping mouth. You awaken right before your dermal layers are peeled off, thus saving you from a significant amount of pain. Yet, you awaken again, stuck in a mound of sand that is solidifying all around you…no, your arms and legs are deteriorating into sand, your lower extremities already a pile of coarse grains beneath your shirt. Lacking digits with which to interrupt the dream, you scan your surroundings, looking for any means to stop this ghastly fate. Not seeing any useful tools, crevices or sharp objects, your quick-wit and honed intuition buries, half-instinctually the sandy appendages of your arms into your own eyes, burning the dream away.

You find yourself waking from a strange dream about sand, shores and the ocean, your mind foggy, dull, confused but relieved, only to discover yourself, in medias res, transforming at the very same shoreline you have been seeking to escape. You would write this off as yet another dream in the sequence, only it is too visceral, and the expansion and atrophying of various parts of your body, the squirming-squeezing sensations, command your attention and will not relinquish their grasp of you. Worse, you cannot seem to decide if this is a dream or not, since, every time you attempt to contemplate it, some twitch or crack of some foreign appendage or extremity distracts you, sucking upon your mind to layer it with your body. You scream as the dream locks into place. The witch’s retribution had chosen its form.

You whole body seems to increase and decrease in flexibility at the very same time. That is, you find yourself able to twist your whole body in curved arches you were never able to before, but these arches are larger, more gradual and more pervasive, adequately equipped for propelling you through the water, but not for fine motor skills. Your whole body has sensations like a semi-flexible tube of rubber. You try to locate why this is the case but something else starts to happen before you can determine anything.

You feel like a Picasso painting as your mouth pushes outwards; your nose pushes up between your eyes and down the back of your head into a blow hole; your eyes descend, level with your lips and your ears shrivel away. It feels as though a sculptor is squeezing and turning your facial features all around, and at the same time, your face hardens with tough skin into a distorted bust; your facial muscles disintegrate, preventing you from moving your lips or twitching your nose. You cry out your fear, confusion and frustration in bursts of squeaks clicks and chitters as your neck bulges to the diameter of your neck. You can no longer move your head, except in conjunction with the rest of your body. You lose your spacio-motor awareness as everything feels out of place, and you cannot tell where your various body parts are oriented. It seeks to snap your mind to fit it to the new body. Your brain begins to rewire to make this strange orientation of your body parts feel comfortable, but as it does, you are losing familiarity with yourself. The experience is like slipping away into a ghost yet while solidifying into something entirely alien, fading away and reemerging at once. You are slipping, and cannot hold onto yourself.

A dorsal fin shoves its way out of your back, against your will. Panic sets in as your arms start to buckle under your own weight, the bones turning soft as your arms shift to flippers; thin, film-like skin compresses your lower extremities into a massive cylindrical frame, the skin growing thick and rubbery in the process, your legs squelching as they fuse with your torso. You slap your developing tail fin against the water and sand with a loud crack. Your thoughts turn to striving to get deep enough into the water before you lose all pedal locomotion. It overrides all concerns with halting the transformation. All previous distress seems a trifle in comparison. Your body and mind are giving into the inevitability of the change, and with a sickening disorientation of your senses, they locking together and begin shifting as one. Deuil, a French word meaning mourning, used by Baudelaire to indicate “the relinquishing/giving in of the spirit at the moment immediately preceding death”---you are throwing yourself forward with ever muscle in your body, and a calmness descends upon you like the ripples of the water washing over your thoughts. Lucky for the dolphin, he arrives at deep enough water just in time for the flippers to give way and for the mind to slip into its comfortable state completely. Unfortunate for you, you never realize that being beached and drying up was only one kind of death and not the one that the devilish little spell had selected as your fati. The dolphin swims out into the ocean, a new life.