

Dinah, mistaking a wig for a scalp, screams and awakes Brian and nine other passengers: teacher Laurel Stevenson, English diplomat Nick Hopewell, writer Bob Jenkins, violinist Albert Kaussner, and recovering addict Bethany Simms, businessman Rudy Warwick, mechanic Don Gaffney, bank manager Craig Toomy and an unknown heavily intoxicated passenger. Dinah Bellman, a young blind girl with psychic abilities, also falls asleep, and awakes to find that her aunt and several other passengers have disappeared. Brian falls asleep during takeoff, having been awake throughout his previous flight. A flight attendant speaks of an unusual phenomenon over the Mojave Desert that resembles an aurora.

Pilot Brian Engle, immediately after a difficult flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles, learns that his ex-wife Anne has died in an accident in Boston, and he boards a red-eye flight to Boston as a passenger. Wikiquote has quotations related to Four Past Midnight.
