“The cornish mincers are attacking the foundations of being,” blared propaganda from the microwave.

It had been passed down in the Cordell family for generations. His family would gather around it just as his father’s family did before that. At least, that was what Vincent remembered. But something wasn't right, microwaves were not radios.

Yet despite that fact, he did not find himself too surprised to hear voices emanating from its timer instead of a buzzer. When he checked the digital display, instead of reading “00:00” it read “SLEEP”.

Sighing to himself, he left the kitchen and headed up the steps. When he touched the railing, he found his hand stuck to the metal as though it were magnetized. No matter how much he pulled, it would not give way. His sister, Kris, stood at the top of the steps, watching with a vacant expression on her face.

“Kris, help me,” he said. At that moment, his hand slipped free from the railing's grasp. “Never mind.”

“I'm going to go to supper.” she said.

In the blink of an eye, Vincent found himself trapped on his bed, cocooned in a mess of thick blankets. The unneeded insulation made him feel unbearably hot. He tried to move his arms so that he could escape, but they refused to obey. Like the railing, the blanket seemed to cling to his skin. Overwhelmed with sudden claustrophobia, he threw himself onto the ground. Why the hell was it so hot? He looked at the thermostat on the wall. It said “sleep”. After reading it, his eyes closed and the warmth enveloped his body.

The ocean was nearby; he was no longer trapped in his bed and he could hear the waves as he walked through the woods. But he could not find the path leading to the beach, though he longed to get there. He tried to cut through the woods, but the trees were too densely populated. His arms kept getting tangled in the branches. He asked an elderly man for directions to the ocean. The man stared at him as though he were crazy and pointed to the seafood aisle.

The trees and forest ceased to exist, Vincent found himself standing in the midst of a grocery store. Displayed along the back wall was a poorly rendered picture of the ocean he had heard. It was a lie, it had to be! He ran up to a young lady who worked at one of the cash registers and demanded that she show him the exit. She pointed toward the big red letters above the door.

He ran through the sliding doors where customers were coming in, only to find himself back inside the store. Or rather, it was another part of the store. Panicking, he looked around until he saw daylight shining through the windows. He tried to run towards them, but hundreds of customers happened to move in front of him, obstructing his passage.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” he yelled.

The back of his hand clung to a mother who was pushing a stroller. Her jacket imitated both the railing and the blanket, adhering to his skin like static. Vincent began to hit her with his free arm and shouted a stream of obscenities. The P.A. system clicked on and the manager spoke: “Sleep.” He slumped over.

He was in his bedroom again. Something in his mind recognized the familiarity of the situation. It recognized just enough to notice the inconsistencies. The bed tilted at an impossible angle so that it balanced precariously on one foot.

Embedded inside of the wall in place of the thermostat was the television. SMPTE color bars blared across the screen. Scrolling across their pillars was the word “sleep”. Seeing it made him feel drowsy, but he resisted its spell. Vincent, lucid enough to know something wasn't right, walked over to the window to perform a simple test. He pressed his palm against the glass and pushed. It yielded softly to his touch, bending, but not breaking. He pushed until his hand submerged to his wrist. It felt like placing it in a bucket of water, only he could feel air past the surface. That confirmed it. He was dreaming.

“So, you turned into a television,” he said wearily, looking back at the TV in the wall.

He felt it emitting some sort of sentience, but it stayed completely still and pretended to be nothing more than an out-of-place television. The word “sleep” scrolled across it once more.

“I'm already asleep,” he said, expecting the text to change.

When it didn't, he picked up a newspaper off the floor and read it. The words made no sense to him. They were scrambled and some of the characters were not even real letters. The clock on the ceiling lost all of its numbers and the hands pointed outward from the face as though they yearned to free themselves from their mechanical labor.

Along the bookshelf was a myriad of books. Their titles were scrambled and incoherent, the pictures irrelevant and unfamiliar. Yet despite all of the disorder, the word “sleep” remained clearer than ever. Why? Why was it the only word in this madness that remained constant?

“Okay...” Vincent inspected the TV. “Usually, I can open you. Don't know why. Dreams...they're weird.”

There were no buttons to press, no channel rockers or power switch. But that was okay, he knew the television could not be opened that way. So he dragged his finger across the wall and pressed, knowing that a button hid just below the surface of the drywall. The television screen swung open like a microwave door, exposing the signal to open air. He grabbed the word “sleep”.

As soon as his hands touched the black lettering, he knew by instinct that they did not belong in this world. He was under attack. By what means or by whom, he did not know. But he did know that the word “sleep” was more than just a word: it was a suggestion, a command.

The black characters that scrolled across the screen were aberrations. They were somebody else's idea, somebody else's will. he reached toward the word and grabbed onto the black lettering, halting it in its tracks. He knew immediately that he had screwed up because his legs gave way, he toppled to the ground, and sank through the floor into darkness, into deeper slumber.

Snow blanketed the evergreens, scattered by the occasional gust of wind. Vincent's car was in the same spot that it had been in when he had crashed. He unbuckled his seatbelt and looked down at his chest, where a bloody hole stared back at him.

Sighing, he leaned back in the driver's seat and turned it around. The cab had a lot more space than he had remembered, for when he turned the seat around, he found himself facing an office. Next to the office was a luxurious shower stall. It had mood lights on the ceiling and massage jets in the wall.

The next moment, he found himself using the shower with his clothes still on. Specks of green mold began to mottle the walls, but the water knocked them loose like flakes of dandruff. When he had finished, he took a seat in the office and powered up the computer.

When he tried to type in his password, the keys kept inputting the wrong letters. No matter what key combination he pressed, he ended up typing the word “sleep” and felt its power trying to sedate him. Somebody...somebody was fighting him.

“Son of a bitch!” he shouted.

But he recognized the frustration of trying to type in a dream. The keyboards were often incomplete and they never typed what he wanted. He walked over to the car window to perform another test on the glass.

After confirming a second time he was in fact, lucid dreaming, he was able to recall what happened when he tried extracting the command from his TV. More by intuition than by calculated thought, he called out to Dave.

“A syntax error,” Dave's voice replied.

A gruff drill sergeant with outrageous proportions appeared in front of the desk, staring at the computer, whose apple logo floated precariously. Vincent could not see the man's face nor could he focus on any details of his physical appearance.

“Damn apple computers, they piss me off!” Dave picked up a baseball bat and used it to smash the computer to pieces. “You know what I do with apples?! I eat them and shit them out!”

All that was left of the computer was the word “sleep”, floating where the screen used to be, as though it had been glitched into the air itself. Dave stared at it, his temples pulsing.

“Oh HELL NO!” he said, "oh fuck no! This is bullshit! You are full of it, asshole, you and your mother!”

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Although Vincent could not see the command doing anything, he knew by intuition that it was trying to put Dave to sleep. Instead, the phantom only became more infuriated by the attempt. There was a one-sided, yet heated exchange between him and the disembodied piece of vocabulary. But it very quickly came to some sort of climax, when Dave screamed at the top of his lungs, demanding for the “others” to attack.

The office/car dissolved from existence, leaving behind a nondescript world filled with white fog. Floating in the middle of the fog like a blight was the word “sleep” in black lettering. The mist recoiled from the command in disgust, triggering a thousand angry screams.

A normal person would have fled in terror from such a confusing scene, but Vincent knew what it was. The conspiracies, the delusions, every entity that ever whispered into his ear, they were screaming at this intrusion. Because they all knew what he knew, it did not belong.

In a moment of rare unison, they attacked the command. The fog obstructed their shapes, so he could not see what entities came to his aid, but he could tell it was a vicious attack. There was a loud crack, followed by the retreating mist.

When it cleared, it revealed a fissure in reality itself. It had torn the command in half, as though it had been printed on a piece of paper. The tear revealed thousands of pulsing fibers, each of them frantically trying to repair the damage.

Vincent stepped through the fissure and left the command behind. The tear closed behind him and the command blared once more in harsh black lettering. But it could not find him, it did not “realize” he was beyond its reach, sneaking into its inner workings.

He had traveled beyond his dream, now he was finding the source of the invasion. He did not know how he was doing this, but he was letting intuition guide him. The fibers were bundled together like cables inside a computer, transmitting the command like a digital signal. Hundreds of threads illuminated with dazzling white lights.

Several of them branched off and disappeared into the mist. Vincent did not bother following those. Instead, he focused on figuring out where they all came from. There was a concentrated gathering of light ahead from which the fibers radiated. They emanated like beams from a star, pulsing with the invasive command: “Sleep, sleep, sleep...”

As he approached the light, he began hearing a woman's voice. It sounded familiar, as though he had heard it somewhere before. She muttered an incomprehensible incantation too fast for him to understand. Her voice sounded labored, as though she had just finished running a marathon.

As he got closer, the light grew in ambiance. Soon, he saw that it was constructed of millions of thin fibers, all pulsing with ethereal energies. But the ones she controlled were used solely to carry out the command.

“I...I did,” she said in abrupt English. Her voice echoed from all directions. “It...fights back. I do not understand this lore. Yes, he sleeps...but he fights in his sleep! How is this possible?!”

“Hey!” Vincent shouted, his voice echoing.

He could not see the voice's owner, but he hoped she could hear him. His voice cut a path through the fog, revealing the source of the light. It was just a silhouette, but he could see the speaker. He could make out wings and a tail, but her face remained hidden. Her hands were extended in front of her, as though she had them placed on an invisible pedestal. Though her features were hidden, Vincent could feel her gaze shift in his direction.

“H-How?!?” she flinched.

A series of new fibers appeared to radiate from her form, growing towards him. They latched onto his being before he could react, pulsing with the renewed command: sleep. “He evades my bindings!” she shouted. The sudden renewed lethargy distorted her words and twisted their meaning. She became a guard at a lunatic asylum, a woman with a generic face and blond hair, wearing a sterile uniform.

“He is out of control,” she said, wielding a syringe in her hand.

Unseen observers voiced their agreement; he belonged in captivity, quarantined from society. The needle went in, he did not feel any pain, but he could feel the simulated pinprick. He lost control of his motor functions and began to delve into a deeper level of slumber.

“Fuck you.”

Anger threw off the sedative and washed away the darkness. The syringe no longer existed. It was replaced with the pulsing fibers. They radiated from the asylum guard, who was currently staring at him with disbelief.

Her image wavered, becoming momentarily transparent and revealing the winged figure he saw before. Only now, he could see her face. Her eyes reflected an unseen source of gray light.

“W-what are you?!” she asked, her voice quaking.

She sent more commands his way but this time, he grasped the fibers and squeezed. His olive skin transformed before his very eyes at the point of contact, into blue scales and his fingernails grew into claws.

“Abomination!!!” she screamed, becoming the asylum guard once more.

She reached for another hypodermic needle and asked for back-up from her fellow orderlies. But before she could attack, Vincent lunged forward and knocked her over. He grappled her wrist and smashed it against the ground over and over until the syringe shattered.

The image flickered between asylum guard and dragonoid with each strike. The syringe transformed into broken fibers, light scattered from their ends like dust.

“Get out!” he shouted, rage boiling at his chest as he clasped his hands around her throat.

It did not matter that she was a woman, she was still a guard dog. She was part of a system whose sole purpose was to round up all the defects and keep them in a cage. That is where they wanted him to be: in a cage, under constant observation, without any possibility of escape. To her, he had no rights, he didn't even have a right to his own dreams. It was violation and he would not stand for it. He dug his claws into her neck, drawing beads of red blood.

She grabbed his wrists and repelled them with a strength that defied her appearance. Phantom whispers noted that he was in the process of losing, that she was about to put him away for good. Her gaze darted back and forth, as though she could hear the phantoms too.

“Who?!”she cried out.

Her grip wavered enough to allow him to break free. He drew a fist back and punched her in the face. The impact staggered the realm and it seemed to list under his strike. The fibers pulsed with his vehemence. He pulled back for a second strike, but before he could land it, she disappeared from underneath him.

He was standing in the living room of his house, wondering where she had disappeared to. In one moment to the next, his home was an asylum and he saw his attacker running toward the fire exit, hoping to escape after her invasion. He could not catch up to her, so he shouted.

“Dave!! Stop her!” he shouted.

The door slammed shut and blocked her escape. The distance instantly closed between them and she looked around for more options. When she saw there was no possibility of fighting back, she slouched along the wall and began to sob. It was a pitiful sound that despite the circumstances mitigated Vincent's fury to an extent.

“You made her cry,” somebody whispered into his ear. Her eyes darted to the speaker's location and saw nothing.

“She hears us,” another observed unseen from the ceiling.

More phantoms began to utter conspiracies and incoherent ramblings. Their voices surrounded the asylum guard until she was forced to cover her ears and curl into a fetal position. She had been defeated and she knew it. The knowledge of victory allowed Vincent to calm down. The voices dissipated to a distant murmuring, accompanied by a hint of static.

“I-I feel,” she spoke between breaths, “something on my mouth...is it blood?”

“Who the hell are you?” Vincent demanded, not seeing any blood on her mouth.

“A-and my eyes?” she asked, “he has...he has trapped me, I cannot see.”

“Hey! I'm talking to you!” he shouted, but she seemed to be ignoring him. Instead, he appeared to be hearing a one-sided conversation.

“T-then...write down what I t-tell you.” He could tell she was using all of her strength to speak instead of breaking down.

She was hyperventilating and there were sobs in her voice. But in the end, he was being ignored. She had the audacity to break into his mind, drug him, steal his thoughts and treat him like an animal. And, even when it was obvious she had been defeated, she refused him the decency of answering for her actions. As if she sensed his anger, she began to speak rapidly.

“He is mad, he tapped into the reticulum! Do not try to bind him! He is not one of us, he isn't Falian, he is alie–”

With a strength he had lacked before, he grabbed her neck and squeezed, jamming his thumbs into her throat. He squeezed until he felt her spine break like a celery stick. The hallway shattered into thousands of pieces, along with the asylum guard.

Vincent found himself standing face to face with the female reptilian, one that belonged to Xalix's race. Like earlier, she had her hands extended forward and placed on an invisible pedestal. Blue liquid flowed from her eyes and nostrils, as though she were weeping.

In his hand he held onto a bundle of glowing fibers. They radiated from her chest, as though they grew from within her form. They locked eyes for a moment, and then he twisted the cords until they snapped in his palm. Her face went slack and her eyes rolled back in their sockets. She fell backwards into the fog and as soon as her hands left the pedestal, Vincent was able to open his eyes.

The fire pit still radiated heat, though it held within it a smoldering pile of coals. A cushion had been rolled up and tucked under his head while he had slept. A chorus of vague whispers observed his awakening. A groan escaped his mouth as he sat up, aching from the exertions, his arms and legs throbbed dully.

But the lingering lethargy associated with getting up from a nap was not present. Vincent stared at the fire pit, watching the embers glow dimly under the coating of ash and soot.

“What the...” he thought, shaking his head free of the vivid dream.

Neither Xalix nor the two children were present. Vincent assumed they had gone to sleep, but he didn't bother to verify that assumption. Nor did he want to. It was possible that the creature had him drugged. The chorus nodded its approval of this particular deduction.

But the very next moment, that assumption seemed illogical. Why would Xalix drug him? He watched the remains of the fire burn out as he pondered this question.

He simply shrugged his shoulders and got to his feet, not before grabbing a piece of charred wood from the fire. After carefully shambling his way down the hallway toward his room, he closed the curtain behind him. He walked over to the wall and using the charred wood, he wrote a message on its surface: Press Xalix. Find out how you got here.

“You won't remember that,” Dave whispered.

“That's exactly why I wrote it,” Vincent retorted, “it's a reminder.”

He dropped the charred wood onto the floor and crawled into the bed. He closed his eyes and tried to fall back to sleep. He tried fruitlessly to forget his situation, to pretend he was back on Earth, his body, human once more. But he could feel it, he could feel the desecration in the curves, in the wings, in the tail. The horns that grew from the back of his skull pressed against his elongated ears. “Abomination.” The woman in the dream was right. They had always been right, he was an abomination. Unpredictable, unknowable, disconnected, crazy.