Neville recounts a dream from years earlier in which he found himself swimming and, realizing he was dreaming, prolonged the experience by looking toward a primitive, uninhabited island -- unlike the well-cultivated island of his own Barbados birthplace -- where decaying cement pilings, once part of a jetty, rose from the water. Sensing that if he took hold of one of the pilings without waking he could make the scene real, he uses the dream to illustrate how holding onto what one touches in imagination, without waking from that conviction, is the mechanism by which an imagined state becomes actual.