Plot

On December 26, 1985, Whitley Strieber has a strange nightmare. In the following days, plagued by painful headaches, his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Later, under hypnosis, he realizes that his dream was not a dream at all.

A writer who has a family of three goes on holiday with friends to their very upscale cabin outside of town in mainland USA. As they all settle in for the night, an unexpected series of events unfolds. Lights that are so bright it's like the noonday sun at midnight blast through the windows waking everyone. The next morning, their friends are so unnerved, they persuade the writer's family to take them back to town immediately. After the experience with their friends in October, the writer's family goes back out to their vacation home for Christmas holidays and experience unusual lights during the night again. It's impossible to ascertain exactly what happened. The writer's family and friends make a great deal of endeavor trying to understand what they have all experienced. Is a group dream? Hallucination? Or real? Who are the little blue Dr's? Are they helping humanity in some way?—onelonedolphin-38389

In 1985, New York-based author Whitley Strieber (Christopher Walken) resides with his wife (Lindsay Crouse) and their son (Joel Carlson) in Manhattan and seems to be successful. However, he is awaken by paranoid dreams that someone else is inside the room. On an excursion to the family cabin in the woods, the intruder alarm is triggered and Strieber sees a face watching him from the doorway. Bright lights filled the cabin windows and wakes his son and two other family friends, but his wife remains asleep.

Disturbed by this, they all return to New York and life seemingly returns to normal, but Strieber finds that his work and personal life are becoming influenced by recurring nightmares and visions of strange alien beings including greys, blue doctors and bugs. This incident disturbs his son and puts a massive strain on his marriage. After an incident at their cabin in which Strieber is so convinced that there are alien beings inside the house that he pulls his gun and almost shoots his wife, worried that his son is beginning to have the same visions, he is eventually convinced to see a psychiatrist (Frances Sternhagen) specializing in hypnotic regression therapy.

The therapy confirms that he has possibly been abducted by unknown beings and experiments have been performed on him; however, he remains skeptical about this and attends a group therapy session of fellow abductees, not wanting to take some action. Eventually, he realizes he has to confront his visions, real or not, and returns to the cabin where most of the incidents seem to occur. He interacts with the alien beings and realizes he has been into contact with them his whole life and this was passed on from his father and he will, one after the other, pass this onto his son.

Making peace with his family, Strieber comes to accept the alien visitors as part of his life, and in the last scene, he remains seated into his office writing a book about his encounter with them and embraces the face of a grey alien.