The Time I Was Attacked by an Alien Parasite during a Dead People Party near the Garden of Eden

  Last night I dreamt that I lived on a small, rocky island in the middle of a blue, blue sea. An old beige Eurovan flew down and landed in my side yard. Inside were three aliens who looked like people and spoke with English accents—a plump, white woman with long, light brown hair; a thin white man with a brown beard and long brown hair; and their eleven-year-old daughter.
  The aliens tried to pretend that they represented a very wealthy planet, but their spaceship/camper van was old. Inside the van were little crumbs, worn upholstery, and a sour milk smell. To prove to me that they really could teach me something about my own planet (which may or may not have been Earth), they took me up in the Eurovan and flew above a little barnacle-covered rock that I could see from the shore of my island. Two ugly mermaids perpetually sat on top of the white rock holding apples, and the rock itself was infested by electric blue sea snakes and neon green regular snakes. The sun was high and made the blue water glitter.
  "See," the alien woman told me, "this is where Adam and Eve came down from my planet." (Apparently my dream consciousness is Scientologist.)
  Then we went back to my house, where I invited the family in for dinner. I got the impression that they were running from their home planet, not representing it. There was something about how they disliked being out in the open and avoided questions about home.
  After dinner, we sat in my small living room (my house was more like a beach cottage) to chat. The man started singing "Libera Me Domine" in a deep baritone, and two older men with gray faces who were dressed in white suits and ties appeared beside him and started singing with him.
  "Who are they?" I asked the woman.
  "Those are men who are dead. My people can call up the dead whenever we want."
  All I could think was that they looked like Jacob Marley without the chains. The dead men smelled a little strange too—perhaps the sour milk smell from the van. Still, it was kind of nice because the men just looked like the really old men who serve in the temple—harmless.
  Then the woman did something and a lot more gray-faced people appeared in the room. Some of them weren't even human. One especially looked like Watto—Anakin's owner in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I did have to look that up.) He snarled rabidly. I asked the woman if all of these dead people/aliens were safe, and she assured me that they were. I figured that was because spirits, as I understand them, cannot actually touch a body.
  The Watto-like character ran up to me and scratched my palm with his sharp tusk. The mark turned red and bled a little. So much for intangibility!
  "Oh, no!" the alien woman ran to me and looked at my hand. The Watto snarled. "He's injected you with a deadly parasite."
  Whether from the parasite or from the news, I started to feel very weak and shaky. I fell to my knees on the carpet. The woman asked my dad (who was suddenly there) for a pair of tweezers. He took forever getting them as I felt sicker and sicker. Finally he returned with a pair of pin-nosed tweezers. The woman started digging into the flesh of my palm with them. The pain was excruciating. Finally she came upon something small, round, and yellow that looked like one of those antimicrobial microbeads that float in some hand soaps. Down in my hand, it also looked like a pocket of pus.
  "Just as I thought!" the woman cried.
  "Get it out! Get it out! Please, just get it out!" I screamed back. The dead guests had crowded around me, looking down at me on the floor, intensely curious.
  She applied pressure with the tweezers, and the thing popped out. She held it up with the tweezers to show me—it had a head and little legs, like a shiny yellow tick. Several seconds passed, and she was still staring at it on the end of the tweezers.
  "Kill it," I said.
  "We have to use something special—"
  "Squish it with the tweezers!" The thing was squirming free.
  She shook her head, "No, you have to get something from ___________." She said the name of the Watto who had started all of this, but I forget what it was.
  I got up to confront my attacker when everyone in the room yelped simultaneously. I turned around to see the yellow parasite leap from the tweezers to the floor and scurry under an armchair, and then I woke up.