The crew's imaginings become real on the station.
Strange visitors start appearing on the station, including the fairy-tale figure Rumpelstiltskin from a story O'Brien reads to Molly, the 21st-century baseball player Buck Bokai from Jake's holosuite program, and a flirtatious version of Dax imagined by Bashir. Snow falls on the Promenade and other impossible events spread.
A dangerous rupture seems to appear in the Denorios Belt, but it turns out to be another product of the crew's imaginations. The visitors are aliens who took these forms to explore how humans think, and they leave once the crew catches on.