The night before the lecture, wondering what to speak about, Neville dreamed at about 1:30 in the morning that he was serving Barbados yams at dinner to three friends (two of whose funerals he had arranged years earlier in New York City) when two jackals or silver foxes leapt on the table and the father jackal tore a hunk from his son's back and nailed him to a board shaped as a cross; on waking he consulted Bayley's The Lost Language of Symbolism and found the jackal is the pathfinder of the desert, equated with Osiris.