I am being considered by aliens. They lip the edges of my mind as I lip the edges of sleep. They appear as figures with their roots in the human. They have faces that might be those of our own, but even in the penumbra of our dreams you can sense they are from somewhere else. The faces they carry with them in the dark shift. They are not fixed like hours. Sometimes they are an impossible array of shapes, geometric twists, fractality. I meant 'ours', not 'hours', of course. What does it mean for an hour to be fixed?

I don't know what they want. The border between us is difficult to navigate. It billows like a curtain in the breeze. On their side of the screen, human desires and motivations are not so obviously at work. Maybe it's what we would call 'curiosity', an organism's inherent need to wander, to spread itself out, but is that true of all life? Is that true of any life? In their world, if they belong to such a thing, is curiosity even a force? Was curiosity a force of their past, a simple urge now subsumed by more sophisticated drives and desires? I think about how simple our urges are, how unguessable the urges of those figures in the far dark. This sounds frightening. It is and it isn't.

I can imagine many alien abductions happen while people are in bed. I imagine people being removed and replaced, their bodies remaining perfectly still. They wake having lipped the stars. They leave their beds and tell an unbelieving world about where they've been, without fully knowing themselves. The figures in the far dark continue to watch them closely, if 'watching' is even the right word.

Aliens might not have a stable home. Perhaps they originated from distant worlds but, in order to survive, have evolved to drift in the vacuum between celestial bodies. Perhaps they exist solely in people's minds. They feed off of neurochemicals. Neurochemicals as intergalactic fuel. They survive in the circuits of the brain, like insects inside electrical wires. They leap from head to head, no longer having physical forms themselves, free and vulnerable as fleas. When we think of them, we keep them alive. They multiply and thrive in the borders of our dreams. Sometimes, they are our dreams. Consciousness and the unconscious are the twin mediums in which they grow and breathe. We feed them with our thought. They are our thought. Every time we think, they are with us. They're in the far and nearest dark. They are already here. They're nowhere to be seen.