On the first night he dreams of a single day.
In his dream he can fly. Two great pairs of red feathery wings sprout from his shoulders, and with these he flies the Earth's circumference. He flies ten thousand miles above the surface. He flies ten thousand miles above the placid oceans and the mottled patchworks of land and the hard outcrops of civilization. In twenty-four hours he has circled back to his starting place, and suddenly his wings begin to melt, feathers disintegrating one by one into the salty sea and he plummets straight down. A second before he hits the water he wakes up, the roar of the waves pounding in his ears.
On the second night he dreams of a single month.
It is Christmas, and he has finally returned home after a long chain of final exams. He returns home like a triumphant hero, the winds of college braved. His family and friends greet him as if he has never left. He knows it will not be long before he departs again, but the thought just makes him treasure the present all the more. He uses the time to catch up with old high school friends, to shop for Christmas presents, to sleep until noon every day in his own room on his own bed. When the day finally comes, he bids everyone a teary farewell and steps into the car, but as he turns around for a final goodbye his vision dims and he wakes up.
On the third night he dreams of a single year.
He wakes up on a deserted shore, choking on spluttering sea water, clothes torn to shreds by the currents, hair soaked with brine. At first it is hard; the nights are cold and lonely, the animals ferocious and uninviting, the hunger ubiquitous and sharp. But he learns to adapt. He manages to find a stock of natural flint and makes himself a fire. By sampling only a few new plants at a time, he manages to eat without poisoning himself. The small rodents look nutritious enough, so he sharpens a stick and thrusts it clean through the chest of a small mouse. Within a year he has built himself a new home from palm leaves and tree trunks, and loneliness no longer stabs him in the gut every night. One day he spies a dark mass on the horizon, black silhouette against a burning sun. It is a ship, he realizes, and before his hopes could even soar he wakes up with tears in his eyes, in his own bed once more.
On the forth night he dreams of a century.
He is on another planet, not himself but something larger, covered in a foul slime, sliding aimlessly across the landscape. He devours anything he finds in his way, and for one hundred years he subsists. On the last day a strange object arrives from the sky, streaking a trail of fire before finally landing. A strange, bipedal organism emerges from within wearing a gleaming suit. The alien steps forward, reaches out an appendage, and then he wakes again into darkness, fingers desperately clawing at his own skin.
On the fifth night he dreams of an epoch.
Ceaseless waves, furious lightning storms, superheated pools of magma spouting from deep within the Earth's core. All it takes is a single instant - a flash of lightning into the water - and a bacteria is born, struggling forward on shaky, amoeboid legs and he remembers nothing else about those ten millions years but the sensation of being ripped from time and place into a stranger's body. His eyes open wide and he does not know who he is, where he is, when he is.
On the sixth night he dreams forever.
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