Neville describes a strange experience that began when he was a little boy, well before he turned eleven, and recurred once a month for several years: he could feel it building in him all through the day and would try to stay awake to avoid it, but from sheer exhaustion would fall asleep in the crowded dormitory he shared with his eight brothers and would become both the vast ocean and a single wave at once — tossing himself terrifyingly skyward as the wave, then catching and embracing himself as the calm, all-encompassing ocean. He says he could not understand the experience as a child, only later coming to read it as an early, unexplained encounter with the truth that there is only God, only one's own being.