Before taking his little trip across the galaxy to fool around with blue alien kitty cat people, Jake Sully knocked up my mother, Emma Finch.

It all seemed kind of noble, going on a space mission to improve life on planet earth and all that, especially with the sympathy points of him being wheelchair bound, but the fact of the matter remains that he left her pregnant with no one but her and her folks providing financial support.

Somehow I survived, graduated high school, got into the wonderful realm of telephone collections, all without Jake Sully's help.

Some people spend their lives seeking out their family, trying to reconnect. Me, I couldn't have cared less.

The thing is, like it or not, it kept finding ways to reconnect with me.

I didn't know it at the time, but the sleepwalking thing was only the beginning.

I've always had the problem, even as a small child. But now, as I neared my twenty fourth birthday, it kept getting worse.

After the events of yesterday, I pretty much got one hour of actual rest, with a short, relatively normal dream about being late for school and not being able to find the building. My alarm clock interrupted me before I could find a way out of the train yard.

I rolled out of bed feeling dead tired. A shower snapped me out of it a little, but I still felt rough.

I went through my normal morning routine, drove off to work.

I parked my sedan in the deserted parking lot, folded the seat down, and tried to squeeze in a cat nap before my shift. A heavy rain beat a monotonous rhythm on the roof, doing its tapdance on my windows. From time to time, gusts of wind periodically slapped extra rain against the glass, whistling thin notes through the seals and cracks in the door frames. On my rearview, my name badge danced a slight jig to the music of the purring engine.

I closed my eyes a few minutes, sat up and checked the dashboard clock. Only eight minutes had passed, and I felt no more rested than before.

As I rolled back to a reclining position, I thought I saw a figure in a black suit crossing the pavement, but when I turned my head, I could see nothing but a wide empty stretch of pavement leading to a solitary yellow car.

I decided the figure had been a product of my sleep problem, since I had only managed four hours of sleep, actually less with the bathroom break in the middle. I would have liked to alleviate the problem, but I couldn't sleep too good in that uncomfortable car seat. I shut my eyes anyway.

Hearing an engine, I sat back up, but saw nobody. Someone had only driven past the lot.

I closed my eyes a few minutes, sat up and checked the dashboard clock. Only eight minutes had passed, and I was no more rested than before.

I had a mini-dream about mom and dad being blue cat people. We celebrated Thanksgiving in a jungle.

An old blue skinned female creature dressed in skins stabbed me with a shard of bone, cackling as she wiggled it around until blood poured out of it like a small fountain.

I fought her away and tried to run, but she kept coming after me with the bone, laughing hysterically. My parents didn't try to stop her. Instead they just told me to stop being mean to grandma Mo'at.

When you're sleep deprived, your mind plays tricks on you.

I figured that's probably why my dashboard appeared to be made out of leathery multicolored animal skin, and blue figures pointed spears through the openings that used to be my windows.

I blinked, and found myself sprawled in the back seat of my car, staring at the dome.

Noting how everything seemed slanted, I sat up and found myself parked halfway up a grass and concrete island. Thank God my unconscious mind knew how to put it in park!

I pulled the car back into a normal spot, and, against my better judgment, attempted to nap again. It wasn't like I had anything else to do for twenty minutes.

I dreamed I had been imprisoned in a wooden cage. The bars had been thickly lashed together and too narrow for me to squeeze through. Outside, I could see a bunch of blue people, Big Bertha, her kids, the male so-called `friend'. A shaman, recognized as such by his skull headdress, robes and bone necklace, danced around a fire, singing and waving a staff in front of me.

A whole hour of nothing but the guy chanting, dancing and a lot of worried tribespeople staring at me. It was a pretty crappy dream.

I awoke, shivering and damp, on the tar and gravel tiles, ice cold droplets pelting my naked skin.

No shirt. No pants. My white cotton briefs felt like a sodden washcloth.

I leaned over a wall and saw that I had somehow made it onto the roof of my office. In the distance, through the sheets of pounding water moisture, I could see the familiar shape of other offices, the empty weed choked field beyond the parking lot, the freeway, and, in the far distance, the rolling Kansas hillsides with a dilapidated old barn.

How did I get up here? I thought. And how would I get down?

Not only that, how would I get down without getting fired or arrested?

Then I remembered the ladder.

Inside, near the entrance of our warehouse-like call center, there stood a white metal ladder going into the ceiling. I always heard it went to the roof, but I never had an excuse to go up there.

Problem: It had a padlock on its lid.

I didn't let this deter me, for it was either the ladder or jumping off the side. I doubted the fall would be pleasant.

A few feet from an air conditioner unit, I found the ladder rungs, climbing down.

As expected, I encountered a lid, but for some strange reason it came open when I pulled on the handle, and I could enter my office's dry interior.

In my underwear.

I figured I would set off an alarm, maybe end up on some TV show about funny burglaries caught on tape.

I had been sleepwalking again, my unconscious body playing Indians in the buff.

When I reached the foot of the ladder, dripping water on the dirty, faded old carpet, I discovered I wasn't alone.

A man in a two piece black suit stood behind me. A humorless square jawed face with meticulously cropped blonde hair and ice blue eyes.

I'd never seen this stranger before in my life. I figured he came from Sprint's corporate headquarters. "It's very cold, Mr. Finch. You'll catch pneumonia."

Before I could ask him how he knew my name, or who he was, he raised his hand, and suddenly I wake up in the passenger seat of my car, dampening the seat with my dripping half naked body. Somehow, the rest of my clothes had materialized into the seat next to me.

I had no towels, because you don't normally plan for things like this to happen, so I had no choice but to make my clothes soggy by putting them back on. My heater could only do so much.

Did I dream the whole thing about being on the roof and the man in the office? If so, why did I have scratches on my body, and something that looked like brick dust under my fingernails?

But then again, how did I get back in the car, if it was real?

I napped for a moment.

5:42. To my sleep deprived eyes, even the building seemed to be the wrong color.

I sat up, assessing the night's damage in the mirror. Red hair plastered to my head, bloodshot blue eyes surrounded by freckled bags, waterlogged clothes. Yeah, I'm ready for work, I thought.

I slung my ID badge over my toothpaste splattered green polo.

The rain wouldn't make me look any worse. I locked up, marching into the storm.

No lightning. The sky above the gray cinder block of an office looked like a Hollywood matte painting, unnaturally bright and colorful in contrast to its shadowy surroundings.

I marched up to the entrance, swiping my name badge across the security scanner.

I pulled the door handle, but it didn't open. With my shirt a damp rag and my hair matted down over my eyes, I scanned my badge and tried it again, and my shift as about to start.

It seemed the manager hadn't arrived to unlock the building yet...or had forgotten to do so.

I gave the door another tug, frowned at the downpour blowing through the parking lot.

I got back in my car, waited about ten minutes, tried the door again. The sensor light failed to turn green.

A familiar rusty gray pickup sped past, parking a few spaces down from me.

The lights on the truck went dark and a man with white hair and a button down shirt stepped out, marching up to the door. Harry, I thought. Not the manager.

"Door won't open?" he yelled.

I shrugged, peering in the nearby windows.

Nobody occupied the visible desks, and venetian blinds and cubicles hid the other areas.

I pressed my face against the glass for a few minutes. As the rain poured down on my head, I saw the man in a black two piece suit stepping behind the row of desks nearest the window. Was I dreaming again?

I frowned, wondering if it were worth it to tap on the glass.

For some strange reason, the man waved around an alarm clock like he were using it to check for radiation.

"Is anybody in there?" I heard Harry say over my shoulder.

"I don't know. Some weird guy with a clock." I didn't bother telling him about my sleepwalking escapade.

Harry peered through the window. "I don't see anything."

I frowned as I watched the suited figure hold the clock against the various computer monitors. "He's doing something to the computers."

"Maybe he's using the clock to gauge my computer's speed?"

"I...don't think that's it somehow."

"I hope he's fixing mine. The dang thing's always so slow, and it keeps freezing up!"

The man disappeared into a manager's tall cubicle.

"I think you're looking at a chair. It's hard to see anything in this rain."

"A moving chair?"

"Maybe I'm not looking at the right desk. Try knocking and see if he opens the door."

I hesitated, wondering what I actually saw.

Harry knocked on the glass. "Hello!"

The suited man came back out, sticking something on a phone.

A moment later, a fat bearded figure in a Star Trek shirt stepped out of the bathroom. Tom the IT guy/call control monitor.

Tom sometimes opens the door for us. Sometimes. I watched him anxiously as he waddled down a row of desks, oblivious to my presence as usual.

I gasped in shock as I saw him walk right through the suited man like he wasn't there. I rubbed my eyes, trying to rationalize what I saw.

"Something the matter?" Harry asked.

"N-no," I stammered. "It's just the IT guy."

Harry smirked. "What's the matter, never seen a plus sized Deep Space Nine shirt before?"

Harry rapped on the glass again.

The man in the suit vanished like he'd never been there. I kept staring at the empty spot with my mouth hanging open, wondering if my insanity wasn't limited to merely seeing blue people and sleepwalking.

"I know it's unusual," Harry said. "But you don't have to keep gawking at his shirt. Have you heard of the internet?"

A sudden flash of lightning illuminated the ground in front of me, and I spotted a bloody rabbit carcass in the grass.

Upon closer examination, I found that it had been half eaten...and the teeth marks looked disturbingly...human.

It was then that I remembered the bloodstains on my car seats.

I'd just eaten a wild rabbit...raw.