To have stumbled into the favor of some oneiric power is to awake each morning gripped with impulses not entirely your own, mind stuffed with fresh memories from a night of visions more wild and vivid than ordinary dreaming or even waking life.
The thing in your skull stirs.
Wedged inside your head, its many spindly legs wrapped around the squishy mass of your brain, twitching and poking, it jerks your thoughts into alignment with the will of that entity that spawned it within you.
You don’t feel it until you do.
When it grows, molting inside you, the pressure builds. Limbs scrape ungracefully. Your pain is not the goal, but it consumes it for nutrients alongside its molt.
Suffer when you must. It is permitted. And it’s the only time you are truly free.
You will go about your life afterward, following whatever compulsions grip you, looking for all the world just like a human.
You haven’t been, of course. Not truly. Not in a very, very long time. But you’ve been suspecting so, and the thought no longer scares you, does it?