at 17,500 miles per hour, you saw this green glow

when you were in the Southern Hemisphere.

And in the Northern Hemisphere

you would see these purple and yellow

and blue lights just popping from the particles

hitting the atmosphere.

Every orbit the sun rises and sets every 45 minutes

so as you go around the planet and you see this setting

and then another 45 minutes later the rising of the sun.

On my first mission I was told

that cosmic rays would come through

the vehicle and hit your optical nerve.

It would make you think you were seeing

flashes of light even though that's not

really happening.

The flashes were like a sunburst

of different colors.

You would see this streaks of color

popping in your eyes and in your head.

Sleeping in space is pretty incredible

because you're floating inside your sleeping bag,

but then you had this whole den

of pumps and motors and things whizzing

around you and so it's almost like

you're in a factory, in a mechanical kind

of sounding automation going on.

My dreams were so vivid from all the stimulus

from the day.

I saw blues, greens, whites whether they came

from the ocean, whether it came from the sun,

whether it came from flashes in my head

from these high energy particles.

The colors were intertwined into my dream state

and I saw, sometimes, alien forms.

The green aurora australis is moving

and dancing so, you know, you think

of little green men on Mars.

There was one point in the mission

where I started dreaming about an inside-out cheeseburger

with the most grease and just chomping

into this hamburger.

It's something that we cannot have in space

and also big slice of pizzas.

I think because I've had these experiences

and I've seen these incredible things

in the universe, all of it's now incorporated

into my dreams now so I constantly

dream about lights flashing

and colors and velvet pitch-black night sky

and these little white lights coming through.

My name is Leland Melvin.

I'm an astronaut and a great big storyteller.