I emerged from the blackness to find myself on the beach. Strange, when I had fallen asleep I had been hundreds of miles inland. Lying on my back, staring up at the sky, I saw that the stars were more brilliant than perhaps I had ever seen. Even more strange, the area around me wasn't dark. Hmmm...brilliant stars without the requisite blackness normally required for such a thing. I felt I should have been more bothered by this, but I was so warm and comfortable lying there, I was finding it difficult to get worked up about anything. Nothing could possibly be wrong when I felt this wonderful.
Unfortunately, my contentment was short-lived. Some sort of ruckus was occurring in the beach house behind me up the hill. I tried unsuccessfully to ignore it, I was relaxing dammit, how dare anyone disturb my peace and quiet. The screams continued to grow in volume though, and eventually I gave up trying to find my Zen. My eyes snapped open in annoyance and I clumsily found my feet, brushing sand off my clothes. I'm not sure why I bothered, I'm pretty sure all of the sand from my clothes just ended up in my shoes.
"Now," I thought to myself, "let's go see what all this fuss is about." I began to trudge up the dune towards the disturbance, passing something green, and tentacle-y, and floaty on my way. My mind acknowledged the bizarre creature, but it didn't bother me. Is that normal? In no time at all, I found myself entering the front door of the cottage and walking up the stairs to the bedroom, observing more of the bizarre creatures and people running away from them in apparent terror. I decided it must be some sort of alien and it was that presence that my fellow earthlings were finding so off-putting.
I shrugged. Why does everyone need to be so hysterical? These aliens aren't even hurting anyone, I don't think anyway. Now that I could see that my peace had been disturbed for nothing, I was anxious to return to it. I flopped into a corner chair and for the first time noticed I was not alone in the room. In the corner opposite, was another of the *ahem* 'visitors.' For the first time, my interest was piqued. Everyone else may be terrified for no reason, but I was curious. Who were these visitors? Why were they here? I could see no evidence of any sort of harm or destruction on their part, so what did they want?