The night his awakening began, Neville dreamed of a glorious city of low buildings and wide sidewalks filled with playing boys and girls and grand pianos; he rose from a piano bench for an artist whose music formed coloured geometrical patterns, arrested the imaginal activity so the music froze into a swelling sustained note, and awoke to find himself not in his bed but inside his own skull, the holy sepulcher, from which he knew how to get out - the whole scriptural pattern then taking three and a half years to unfold.