Taken on board a spaceship by . . . leprechauns?

In my November 13 post "William Alizio's links to other stories" (which you should read now before proceeding if you haven't already), I mentioned discovering the 2011 novel Green by Laura Peyton Roberts. As you will recall, a dream about a green book had made me search Amazon for books titled simply Green, and this one caught my eye because it has a picture of a key on the cover, like the Whitley Strieber book The Key, which had also been in the sync-stream. Those were the only factors in my initial interest; everything else is serendipity.

From reading Amazon reviews, I discovered that Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns, just as William Alizio is taken away by "little men." Today I started reading the book itself, having tracked down a copy online. The parallels are unreal.

Tim and Patrick, the blue-robed aliens who kidnap William Alizio, have been identified with the two blue-robed Wise Men from the Joseph story -- two Wise Men, not the three of Christian tradition. Lily Green is kidnapped by three leprechauns who, instead of having good Irish names like Pat, Mike, and Mustard, are for some reason named Caspar, Maxwell, and Balthazar. The traditional names for the three Wise Men are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar -- so two of the leprechauns are named after them. Two Wise Men, not three.

Patrick eats all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" -- the brand name of a sugary breakfast cereal. The leprechauns, too, have a hidden treasure -- a hidden cave full of gold -- and their reason for kidnapping Lily is so that she can serve as the keeper of this treasure. Early on in Lily's interaction with the leprechauns, this hidden treasure is juxtaposed with the brand name of a sugary breakfast cereal:

"Don't be ignorant, girl. Everyone wants to catch a leprechaun."

"Right," I said. "For your Lucky Charms."

Balthazar's eyes narrowed, not a hint of humor about them. "For our gold."

Now the weirdest one. When Tim and Patrick kidnap William Alizio, they take him to their spaceship. You know, because they're aliens. When the leprechauns kidnap Lily -- leprechauns -- they also take her to a spaceship!

"To the rocket ship! The rocket ship!" Balthazar cried.

By then it wouldn't have shocked me if they were space aliens too, but when they jogged around the back of the park's maintenance hut, I saw what they were talking about.

A huge play rocket ship lay on its side, its disassembled metal legs rusting in a heap. The leprechauns charged in through the rocket's open base, carrying me headfirst. . . .

"This'll do," Balthazar panted. "Heave ho, laddies."

Three pairs of hands thrust upward at once. For a moment, I was airborne. Then I hit the curved floor of the fake rocket like a sack of bowling balls.

This is extremely bizarre and contributes nothing to the plot. Lily loses consciousness inside the fake rocket ship, and when she wakes up she is being transported on a dog cart. The leprechauns have been carrying Lily but are getting tired and need some place to stow her -- because whatever a leprechaun carries is invisible, but she will become visible again if they set her down -- and the hiding place the author decided on was a fake rocket ship. Why?

Where do stories come from? Laura Peyton Roberts had a mental image of little men taking a girl into a spaceship -- but because she had decided the men were leprechauns, she had to find some way of making sense of an image that just doesn't belong in a leprechaun story. Maybe they hid her in -- a giant fake rocket ship in a park! Yeah, that's it.

I think a lot of novelists do work that way -- starting with a handful of vivid mental images and building the story from that. I remember Orson Scott Card said he wrote Ender's Game that way. Tolkien, too. The "Black Rider" scene began with a mental image which he first interpreted as being Gandalf. Where do the mental images come from?