Last night I dreamed of a UFO. I wish I could remember the part of the dream that preceded the spaceship because it was far more portentous. In fact, when the UFO slipped into the dark sky it seemed merely a cover image, an intentional distraction that now blocks my memory of the bigger dream.

The ship was kind of gold-yellow, and it moved as though it was going to cross the arras and disappear like a meteor. Then it suddenly changed course and flew right at me. I dismissed this blitz within the dream. It was so obviously a hoax, like a disk dangled from an undetectable string.

Then my dream car began shaking as during an earthquake and I understood that, though chintzy and far too yellow, this saucer was the real thing. As it circled again and zoomed in on me, it demonstrated beyond a doubt that I was of interest to an alien intelligence and that it could search me out even within my own dream on a faraway obscure world.
I wanted to get out of its sight. I began to get scared.

There was actually a word on craft’s outside, curving along its contour. I tried to read it, but the letters, though surprisingly my own alphabet, were upside-down. I remember catching a few of them at each pass, but never the word itself. It began “pla…,” but it wasn’t “planet” or “plane”; in fact I gradually felt that it wasn’t really “p,” but a letter that didn’t go with “l,” like “x” or “r.” It was trying to call itself “planet” so that I wouldn’t know what it really was, so that I couldn’t get back to the rest of the dream—except now I see a great boat, for a millisecond, and already it is gone, but I know that the boat is the real dream and carries the true word. The letters are alien, and their transliteration is bogus but the best that can be done.
The UFO emerged out of the extraterrestrial boat in a change of scenery to delude me with a tinny alien-ness and hide the import of the dhow, or whatever it was—forbidden tidings within a dream.