Night. I wake in bed hearing a "Chug-chug-chug" like a distant steam train. But there are none in our town--and it's coming from above our house.

I get up and pad barefoot into the living room. Out the back window, see a darkness crawling across the midnight sky. Hard to discern, just a blocky silhouette puffing black coal-smoke. No running lights. Not a plane, not a chopper, not a flying saucer. But a massive UFO burning... coal?

The hulking sky-engine slants a beam of dark down into our yard. A beam of light, but light that makes all darker. An alien slides down that mystery beam. Wears a broad black hat and black swirling cloak. Skulks around the yard, slips into the house. It's not that big, but fast. Looks a bit like the black bird-spy in Sergio Aragones' cartoon Spy Versus Spy, in Mad Magazine. Taller than me, a birdlike beak, but face mostly hidden under that wide-brim hat. Just a faint gleam of eyes in the shadow.

I follow the alien as it snoops around our home. It startles--was I heard? Scented? It hides behind our drapes. I hide behind drapes too, heart pounding. Will it pounce?

Should I pounce?

62 YEARS LATER

• Pounce: If I'd been a more experienced dreamworker, yep, I'd have pounced! And squeezed some answers out of our avian alien. But I was just a scared kid, convinced in the dream that I'd been wakened in the night by a real burglar with sharp claws. (Stylish, though, I had to admit.)
• Trains: I loved trains as a kid--wanted clear rails always guiding me so I needn't make hard decisions. Still, coal-fired engines, even in the sky, seemed retro...
• That huge hat and cape retro too. And didn't Victorian villains in such black cloaks tie maidens to train tracks? Though I never understood why.
• Avian alien spy: at the time, I saw it resembled the bird in a black hat and trenchcoat in Sergio Aragones's Spy Vs. Spy--I'd seen him in Mad magazine. Today I wonder. Hieronymus Bosch's paintings, like The Temptation of St. Anthony, have bird-demons rather like this.
• Chugging UFO: decades later, I read of a similar chugging, non-saucer UFO seen and heard by multiple witnesses in full daylight over 19th-century Paris.
• Carl Jung felt flying saucer sightings expressed modern (well, Cold War) fears for where technology was leading us (like nuclear missiles) and about the immensity of space decentralizing Earth and humanity. But then... what about nonmodern, nonsaucer UFOs? Steampunk UFOs beaming down caped bird-spies? Sorry, I don't think Jung explains... this.

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