Again it took an absolute concentration of will, a centering of my attention and the application of the most careful effort to the muscles of my face, but I did manage to smile.

Instantly everything changed. They dashed away with a whoosh and I was plunged almost at once back into sleep. Now I did dream — qualitatively a very different experience from what had just transpired. Frankly, I'm quite certain that the beings I saw were not a dream, and probably not a hallucination. What they were was an enigma.

Interestingly, my dream was an unfrightening repeat of one of the few really terrifying nightmares I have ever had. This was of being chased through a stark stone palace by a robot with beady pop eyes. This time, however, I didn't run and the robot finally sat down and contented itself with staring at me.

The next thing I knew, morning came. I opened my eves, feeling absolutely drained.

Anne said, "Well, it was a quiet night," and proceeded to make a beautiful breakfast while I sat and stared.

Everybody was happy and well around the breakfast table. The Times was as thick as ever and the coffee and waffles were delicious. I was back in my world again, with my own familiar family. When I told Anne about what had happened, she laughed merrily at the idea of the painted suit of aged design. and reset the clock on the stove. which had lost five minutes during the night.

I found that one of the other people I have met has also had an experience involving visitors in archaic quits. This suggests that the visitors are not too interested in our clothing, or confused about its significance... or perhaps that their thought processes have not gotten very far vet in regard to clothing. It may be that, if we ever meet them openly, they will not be quite as naked as the creature who emerged in Close Encounters. Perhaps they will be wearing double-breasted suits circa 195Y, complete with pocket handkerchiefs.

What happened the night of March 15 was fundamentally different, and more open, than any other contact I have had. The visitors almost irrefutably announced themselves to toe.

They allowed the m see them while in full possession of all my other memories of them —albeit in a more or less completely restrained physical condition. And they preceded their appearance to me by the witness of the uninvolved child, the one person there that night who had absolutely no relationship to this at all.

Who had come to see me during the night? Did they really drop down from the sky, or have then come from some other cosmos, a place where dreams are real and reality a dream, where shadows and those who cast them are one and the same?

Weeks after writing the material preceding in this chapter I met a woman who said she thought of her visitor as a man, and proceeded to describe a small being, very geode, with round eves like shiny black buttons arid a tiny, almost nonexistent mouth.