After some small talk, our neighbors went home. I was not pleased with my own behavior, and found it hard to understand because it seemed so nonvolitional, almost as if I had been talking against my will.

My wife reports that my personality deteriorated dramatically over the following weeks. I became hypersensitive, easily confused, and, worst of all, short with my son. We have always been a happy family, and there was no change in our life condition or relationship to account for this personality shift.

The realization that the owl memory was not true created troubling problems for me. I was aware that something had somehow gone wrong with me. The trouble was I could not understand what it was. There simply wasn't anything in my life to explain it. I started to worry about toxins in our food or water, but as nobody else in the family was affected, and we hadn't tried any food that might have caused some bizarre allergy, that seemed unlikely.

I did not know that the owl and the light were screen memories that concealed a traumatic experience. As described by Freud, the screen memory is a method that the mind uses to shield itself from things too upsetting to recall.

I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal. By December 28 I was so depressed and in such a state of inner conflict that I sat down and wrote a short story in an effort to explore my emotions. It reflected not only my emotional state but probably also some of the realities hidden behind it.

I called it "Pain." It was to be the last sustained writing I would do for seven weeks, and is the last thing I wrote before these enormous hidden truths began emerging from my unconscious.

At the time I had no idea that I was suffering from emotional trauma, or that dozens of other people had been through very similar ordeals after being taken by the visitors.

Previous to the twenty-sixth I had made good progress on a huge two-volume novel based on the relationship between Russia and America at the outset of the Russian Revolution. Now I could hardly read my own work, let alone continue working on this complicated project.

Since I wrote "Pain" as an expression of the emotional state that overlay the memories I was then suppressing, I will recount it briefly. It is about a man who encounters an enigmatic woman named Janet, who proves to be some sort of superhuman being, perhaps an angel or a demon. She draws this man into a strange experience of capture and incarceration in a tiny, magical cabinet. From the agony that ensues, he gains immense insight and new spiritual strength.