The New Spiritual Literacy Practices of A Now Only Somewhat Atheist Adjunct Professor After An Alien Appeared by His Bed

I woke up in the middle of the night in the summer of 2026 to a gray alien standing by my bed. This presented a few problems for me upon reflection, the first being that I’m an adjunct professor of English composition across two institutions and an adjunct professor of business and IT at another, and at all of them, I pretend to have myself together for fifty minutes to one hour and fifteen minutes during courses spanning 2-3 recurring days of the week, Monday through Friday. Not being able to talk about this experience with anyone at work and with no family of my own, I did what any self-respecting person would do in 2026: I made a YouTube channel where I discussed the experience, the changes to routines that it has inspired, and other experiences that occurred afterward.

I assumed from that morning on that I would eventually write about the image of the alien, because no self-respecting writer would see an alien by their bed and not write about it. I teach writing because I love writing, and I want others to love it someday, too. I’d be lying if I left out that I worried about students finding my YouTube channel and getting me sent to the Dean’s office, but I also recognized an opportunity to work on my own multimodal compositions, for both my benefit and the students’. I spend a great deal of time thinking about how writing has changed over time, and I put in a lot of effort in my composition courses to teach multimodal writing, though I never have quite figured out YouTube for myself. I already spend a great deal of my cognitive load semester-to-semester hoping my students will write something more than once, always hoping to convince them that the writing process is continuous, recursive, ongoing, milking their brains for the thoughts in them onto the pages they submit. A part of me thought seeing the alien was just my psyche trying to convince me to afford my students some of the weirder assignment possibilities, like a video essay for one of my three usual papers. Even if all I’m doing is posting videos documenting my mental demise, perhaps brought on by the stress of working in academia, maybe I can better understand the struggles of the modern composing process myself along with my students by attempting something I’m not great at yet either.

Multimodalities

I posted the first video on August 1st, 2026 to my new YouTube channel named Eric Shay Howard’s Weird Spiritual Channel, because I get paid very little as an adjunct professor and ultimately decided after much reflection after the alien visitation that if they stopped offering me courses to teach because I was talking about aliens, then I would just find another job, perhaps in healthcare, or at a law firm, or maybe try to find a husband and learn to get stains out of laundry more sufficiently and cook better dinners. In my video, I describe what I perceived to be the experience of seeing the alien by my bed that summer night (PRIMARY DATA CITATION NEEDED). I had to record the video twice, because during the first recording, I was constantly interrupted by phone calls during a remote work-from-home job I had started a few months prior, back when I was going to quit my adjunct teaching career due to almost being homeless twice, not only because of the low pay itself but the inconsistent pay schedules across my three institutions.

My editing process of the first video posted was very quick; I did not make any cuts from the video; I only increased the volume of the video in Final Cut Pro (PRIMARY DATA NEEDED OF FINAL CUT PRO EDITOR SCREENSHOT OF TIMELINE). I also spent some time putting together a thumbnail image with descriptive text on it to aid in the discovery of the video in YouTube’s algorithm, such as “psychic,” “tarot,” “ufo,” and “spiritual,” (PRIMARY DATA CITATION NEEDED) and discussed some events pertaining to those subjects in the video as well that happened over those summer months (PRIMARY DATA CITATION NEEDED). I just wanted to get the video up and the YouTube channel started.

At the time of beginning this autoethnography in September, the channel had eight subscribers. I wondered quite often over the first three weeks of the semester if any of them were my students. Just from viewing the video again, it’s clear that I was worried about this during the recording; I addressed this directly by telling students not to watch or subscribe to the channel, that the content would “not help them in any academic way” (PRIMARY CITATION NEEDED).

I have many students of a variety of faiths across all three institutions where I teach. My previous attitude on this alien situation would have been that believing an alien came to see me at night is just as crazy as believing in guardian angels and saints, as in Catholic doctrine. (SOURCE NEEDED, BIBLE OR CATHOLIC DOCTRINE). Now I say believing in the possibility that I saw an alien by my bed is no crazier than believing that we all have guardian angels assigned to us at birth by God (SOURCE NEEDED, BIBLE OR CATHOLIC DOCTRINE). Despite this change, I continued to directly tell students to not watch my videos or subscribe to the channel in multiple videos since the channel launched (PRIMARY CITATION NEEDED; PRIMARY CITATION NEEDED; PRIMARY CITATION NEEDED).

I’m very inexperienced with maintaining a YouTube channel successfully, despite previous attempts. My video composition process needs attention and practice. I would compare it to many of my former students’ academic writing when they enter an English 101 course; I know enough to get through, but I have yet to put out any bangers.

Faculty Professional Development

On September 5th, I received a completion letter from the assistant director of composition for a 4-week mini course on antiracism pedagogy, a course for composition faculty at the University of Louisville. I was surprised to receive this, because I did not feel that I did a good job on the assignments. The course took place at the end of the previous spring semester. A few weeks into the course, I emailed the professor, a PhD candidate, and explained that I would not be able to finish the course; I had taken a full-time job at a healthcare company due to financial reasons and had to finish teaching an IT course at a mortuary college as well. She offered to give me an extension, which I accepted, but I didn’t complete the readings to even my own standards, and my discussion board posts were short and surface level.

The healthcare job came from my ex, who worked in the Human Resources department at the healthcare company. My job was a work-from-home remote customer service rep. I would have still been able to teach at Spalding University and at Pierce Mortuary College, but I was going to have to let the University of Louisville contract go. I tried to email the director a few times, but couldn’t bring myself to start the email.

My initial training at the healthcare company was nearly the entire month of May. Teaching future funeral directors and morticians in my online IT course at Pierce continued through June as I observed and practiced taking calls from hospice patients and their families, coordinating medical equipment setups and removals with vendors, and consoling the spouses and siblings who called to declare their loved one had just passed. Statements like, “no, you don’t have to call 911,” were of my most frequently relayed. By mid-June, I was on my own. I ignored the first email about the UofL contract the composition director emailed me, which included my course assignments for the upcoming fall semester. They matched my preference sheet sent to the coordinator the previous semester.

In my notebook, on a page dated June 19th, I wrote notes on a tarot card spread the morning after waking up and seeing the growling but otherwise silent alien by my bed. I numbered each card pulled for the past, present, future spread. The cards were drawn from the Wild Wood Tarot deck, the one I’d found in the blue bin when I was planning to move from my expensive apartment before I got the healthcare job. The cards were the Ace of Bows, the Nine of Stones, and the Nine of Bows. My notes said these cards indicated some “journey or partnership,” “finally starting to allow spiritual aspects in life or process,” “mutual understanding,” and a quick note about noticing thighs in the artwork of the Nine of Bows (Tarot Journal).

I spent the next several weeks thinking about how to compose my email to the composition director. Throughout the rest of June and through July, I also received numerous emails from the Dean at the mortuary college about incomplete security training, a faculty wide email sent out about how final grades not being posted on time causes student scheduling issues, warnings sent to a few adjuncts about attendance not being posted on time twice per week, and at-risk logs not being emailed to academic affairs on time on Wednesdays. I was guilty of all three.

A second incident with a night-time visiting entity, about which I cannot find any recorded Tarot card spreads, occurred around this time. I seemingly woke up in the middle of the night in my bedroom and could not move or speak, similar to the gray alien visitation. In my head, I asked “what do you want, what do you want, what do you want” to a large white round light that floated into my bedroom. It waited inside near the door then turned around—if a light can do that—and then left. This light seemed to be made up of individual people, twisted and contorted, though all glowing white, making up the figure’s overall glowing ball shape.

I thought about the light, the alien, souls, God, reincarnation, and I remembered a dream about Granny ten years after she passed, having cried into my pillow upon waking up; I thought about the potential for us to incarnate on other planets, to know one another as souls—not faces—for days, weeks, months.

When the composition director sent a reminder about my contract still needing to be signed, I gave my notice to the healthcare job soon after and resigned my UofL contract.

Classroom Management

By September, my students at the University of Louisville and Spalding University were completing an autoethnography assignment, based in part on the autoethnography assignment in Writing About Writing by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs (243-246). My goals were to introduce them to the idea of gathering and using primary data to create more original work and scholarship. Unlike other semesters, I chose to assign this as the first paper in my English 101 courses. Students had read work like “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” (Perl), “Writing One’s Way Into Reading” (Zamel), and “Revision Strategies of Inexperienced Student Writers Vs. Experienced Adult Writers” (Sommers). I also assigned some articles about reading (Horowitch), and encouraged students to begin to think about their reading processes the same way they think about their writing processes. They were encouraged to consider gathering primary data about their reading processes and to write about that if they wished. Needless to say, I had not mentioned the alien in class. Not until I uploaded a portion of the rough draft of this essay to Blackboard as examples of a rough draft, citing primary data, and an illustration that we don’t always have to know what we want to say until after we have said or written it (Elbow 14-16).

This inclusion brought to my attention another concern related to separating my own practices from the classroom when I started practicing automatic writing, as it’s a form of channeling and has a lot of similarities in cognitive procedure to freewriting, popularized by Elbow. Freewriting has been used in my writing curriculums both in and outside of the class activities for the past three years. In some of my videos, I recite the automatic writings led through the veil by an apparent entity named Raphael (PRIMARY DATA CITATION NEEDED). I didn’t record the automatic writing sessions, but I recited them on video soon afterwards.

After beginning this as an intended daily practice for the fall, with the many similarities automatic writing has to freewriting, at least in how the physical procedure may appear to a department director, potential observer, or in a student recording of a class, I have had a difficult time bringing up freewriting or including freewriting activities in my classrooms. I used to freewrite along with my students in these freewriting sessions as well, but I’ve since been worried that it may be a distraction for those students who have seen my videos or read the portion of my essay, leaving them to wonder, is he channeling?, misconstrue my pedagogical intentions, and get me sent to the dean’s office. This fear continued to hinder my inclusion of in-class freewriting writing activities through the first paper of the semester.

Recursive Process

Every morning since seeing the alien by my bed, I have recorded any dreams I remember upon waking up into a Traveler’s Notebook, my Apple Notes app or into a voice memo with my Apple Watch. In many of my videos, I tell my channel’s audience of my dreams and invite debate on their relevance to jungian archetypes, subconscious meaning-making, and any spiritual interpretations or astral travel happenings. Once my notes primarily took the digital form, I started to keep lists of tarot card and oracle card pulls along with most of my daily notes for work and my personal reminders on the same page each day. I always drew bubbles around each item and highlighted them in specific colors, like blue for daily notes, yellow for card pulls, and hot pink for the automatic writing sessions. This essay started on the Notes app and was highlighted in a faded orange before I went to bed (PRIMARY DATA CITATION). Instead of handwriting it further the next day, I started typing it into Google Docs while allowing myself the freedom to change things as I went. I posted an admittedly very rough draft on Canvas and Blackboard for my four English courses across institutions.

In my last class the next day, many students still had not gathered much primary data on their composing process, a requirement for their autoethnography assignments. After discussing process pedagogy, informing students that pedagogy was just a fancy word for how we teach, and asking students to think about how the arrows on the charts on their K-12 walls may have changed over the years, some going only one way, some going multiple, I pulled up the draft of my alien paper and displayed it on the projector.

“I know I haven’t done a great job this semester of giving you student examples, because I’ve only assigned the autoethnography paper first in an English 101 course one time. So, I’m writing right along with you this semester,” I said.

Though the draft was available for viewing if they wished the evening before, most students seemed to have no reaction to the draft. I pointed out its issues, or at least the ones I saw over the past few days of writing it. “The reason I’m pushing you to gather your own primary data is so that you can write something that is more than just a regurgitation of reading material, to move further from simply proving to your professor that you read the assigned material. I want your writing to be more original and useful.” My fingers went back over to the horrible drawing of a chart on the white board, demonstrating a version of the recursive writing process, under the word “research.”

“Gathering data is a part of the writing process, too.”

Some students stared at the chart; some stared at the title of my piece on the projector. After scrolling down the pages of my work, I pointed out another quality of the rough draft: my only half-attempted primary data citations. “Remember, this is a rough draft. It doesn’t have to be good. And don’t worry about citations for now. If you want to include them, you can simply poo-poo your citations like this.”

Some students looked at their laptops and phones. After a few moments, I interrupted their shuffling of their tools.

“And if I had to make sure we understood one thing, it’s that in nonfiction, you can’t write about seeing the alien by your bed unless you’ve at least perceived an alien by your bed.”

Silence.

“You have to gather your data first to write about your data. You can’t wait to gather your data for this assignment.”

Student Feedback and Grading

Over Labor Day weekend, I wrote my first draft of a statement of interest for PhD applications, answered some technical questions from my composition students about Microsoft Teams video transcripts for their primary data citations, and began reading my students’ rough drafts of their autoethnographies. Many students weren’t mentioning their primary data in their drafts at all, not even poo-pooing their descriptions of it into the parentheticals. I had to remind myself many times over the weekend that this was very normal, that it was only English 101, that I’m pushing them to do something cognitively different, hard. And even I struggle when I’m writing a different genre for the first time.

The further I got into the rough draft submissions for one of my courses, the more I began to wonder if the sharing of my draft threw them off, either through sheer intimidation or the essay’s claims. I began to wonder if I shouldn’t have shared the draft with my students. Have I unintentionally invited my students to “invent” the “university” (Bartholomae)? Though I cannot speak for all undergraduate creative writing students, I was assigned Paul Griner’s Hurry, Please, I Want To Know, a short fiction collection, as an undergrad in an advanced fiction course. Though Griner wasn’t the professor, he was my then professor’s colleague at the University of Louisville at the time. Any time I took a creative writing class, I often read my professor’s work if it was accessible to me with what little money or resources I had.

Upon searching for academic articles about professors sharing their own work with their students in the past at the various libraries I had access to, I came up short. Later in the revision process of this essay, I used AI to help me where I came up short (“In this essay, page 8, I say I come up short on searching for”). The tool helped me find articles against (Bishop) and articles for (Wess, NCTE Commission on Composition). As these all seemed dated, I quickly forgot about my concerns and continued my new writing practices at home between reading rough drafts of my students’ autoethnographies.

My own automatic writing practice had its unique characteristics by this time; I was always conscious when I did it, not in a trance state. Some might argue it was more “inspired” writing, but for the purposes of the YouTube algorithm, I kept the word automatic in my video readings of my sessions and all videos since up to the time of this writing.

A habit that continued to surprise me each time I did it was the lighting of a candle. This began with cheap paraffin wax tea light candles inside of a repurposed tomato can lid that I’d bent with pliers into a star over the summer; by the fall I was using more expensive and larger candles of various colors and scents purchased from the mall. The one I used for the automatic writing session that holiday weekend was a pinkish off-white Black Cherry Merlot in a light purple container, purchased from Bath and Body Works inside the mall on the first date I’d gone on in over a year and half.

Sitting at my kitchen island, after breathing deeply and imagining roots growing from my feet and into the ground, past the crust, down through the underground labs where the working grays and reptilians already know to dodge my flora, all the way through to the center of Earth, I used my iPad to hand write into a still half-opened circle “What does my spirit team want me to know today?”

I didn’t wait. I wrote. “Your article is coming along nicely. We understand your focus. Do you have any questions?” From what I can tell, this is the R-team’s way of indicating they are finished with what has come through so far and are waiting for a question. Usually, the beginning of the channeling session is much longer, and around this time I had preferred to avoid too many direct questions.

This time, due to the session’s brevity, I asked about my struggles with consistently posting on my YouTube channel and about my concerns with what work may think if they see it.

“We think you’re doing well with what you have so far. You’re giving into fear now, which is what you often do. Don’t give up on it. These things take time. You’re not neglecting it as much as you are afraid of it. Lean into it. Your article is proving its relevance. Do you have any other questions?”

After a few seconds of thought, in which I somehow manage to remember the details of my nighttime visit: the deep growling from the figure standing more than five-feet tall between my bed and doorway, gray with root-like bumps on his jaw and chin, his big black eyes; my inability to move, my speech trapped inside myself, my voice slightly deeper than I was used to hearing it; you’re not supposed to be here, why are you here, what do you want; and his five thin clawed fingers on each hand, the closest of which quickly touched my left inner thigh, I finally wrote “What can you tell me about the alien by my bed?”

“…You do not need to be afraid. This is someone that you know and have worked with before. They do not want to harm you. They have not revealed themselves to you in that way much since because they noticed your fear and do not wish to upset you. If you want to see them again, you can just ask. Do you have any other questions?”

I wrote, “No, thank you.”

I ended the session by blowing out the one remaining flame of the three-wicked candle and spent the rest of that Sunday reading my students’ rough drafts, offering comments about their struggles with learning to read and write and some notes on what kind of data would corroborate their findings of their composing processes.

Rhetoric

goodnight house…plants…cat…R-team…I had a good day…liked writing my essay…wanna remember my dreams when I wake up…wanna see the alien…wanna see the light being…don’t wanna be afraid…please don’t make it too scary…gotta be a way to make it less scary…don’t wanna be stuck in my head…in my body…why my leg…what it means…have to growl like that…not growling…breathing…family…past…met before…what are we working…please wanna remember…will keep teaching…will keep trying…will not quit again…afraid to be homeless…R-team helped me not be homeless…again and again…trust…will write whatever you want…will try not to care what people think…would rather read tarot cards on the street corner but will keep teaching…afraid…am afraid but its okay…please want to see the alien…want to talk to them…do they want…to remember when…afraid…want to wake up…to remember…hi granny…when hospice came….made me leave…mom…big dog…please want to remember the gray…she wouldn’t let me see…sorry granny but want to talk to the alien…wanna remember…falling asleep now granny…big dog in the bed…please want to remember…plase don’t leave when I’m scared…wanna remember my dreams.