I was a guest on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor and was reading with him from a book that looked like a magazine. After I started to read, I kept losing my place and missing captions because thee book had been so badly and irregularly designed; it was nearly impossible for my eyes to follow the flow. Keillor kept pointing out what I was missing and didn’t seem to understand that the problem wasn’t in me, but in the book’s design. I came to a part that showed a half dozen coffins and other gruesome photos and mentioned World War II, with half-hidden captions in odd, hard-to-find places among the photos. I began to think the material was inappropriate for the program. I also knew I would never be asked to appear again.

Then I was in a room with a couple of sleeping children, presumably serving as their babysitter. A night lamp began to crackle and streak like a Jacob’s ladder. I looked out the window and saw a bright light moving around in the sky; in a few moments I could make out a figure in a space suit tethered to it. They looked unreal, like exceptionally well-drawn, 3D-style cartoons. I was concerned about the lamp starting a fire and concerned that one of the children, now awake, would touch it and told them not to, but at the same time I didn’t think I should unplug it, either. I thought, “I am really having a UFO experience” and kept closing my eyes against it. The experience seemed very real, but the ship and the figure did not.