A few days before this lecture, an unnamed friend gave Neville a letter recounting a vivid, symbolic dream, which Neville reads to his audience and interprets through scripture. In the dream the letter-writer is under fire in a war-torn European farmhouse, then finds his own squadron unexpectedly safe; the soldiers merge into a single figure identified as Neville himself, who leads him to the back of the house where the mined cliff has become a vast wheat field already being harvested.