Kind
Story
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Experiential narrative
Psychological interpretation

Neville's fullest account of fourfold vision, and the only time he says he was frightened by it. Lying on his right side in his home on El Camino in Beverly Hills, eyes closed and fully awake, he found himself seeing the interior of a building instead of the objects he knew were on the wall. Consciousness followed vision and he stepped into it, came back to the bed horizontal, stepped in again vertical, a dozen times - and then decided to explore regardless of consequences. The room closed around him and shrank from thirty by twenty to ten by seven; it was a dressing room. Beyond it lay an unoccupied suite prepared for occupancy, solid to the touch, his hands unable to pass through anything. In the public hallway he met two ladies and told them: ladies, this is a dream. They took him for a madman and edged along the wall to get past. Overhead he saw a cluster of thin copper leaves like one he had seen months before in a friend's house in the Hollywood hills, hung on an almost invisible thread - and recognising it as a memory image confirmed to him that he was dreaming, though everything was solidly real. He took hold of a leaf and commanded himself to wake, and woke standing there, more awake than in this world. Then the fear: he closed and opened his eyelids a dozen times and the hallway stayed. He was locked out. His daughter was still in school and his wife unprovided for, so he would not end it this way - they would find the body in Beverly Hills in the morning and cut it up for the insurance. So he used the one thing that had brought him in: he stood still and imagined a pillow under his head, with the same intensity. He felt it; found himself horizontal; and then cataleptic, unable to open an eye or move a finger. Thirty or forty seconds later the little finger moved, then the elbow, and he pushed his hand across the double bed until he felt his wife's warmth and knew he was back. A child of the Western Gate motif, which states the law of touch; this is the occasion on which he used it in reverse, to get home.

Collections
Lectures
Own wordings
Ladies, this is a dream
I imagined a pillow under my head
I’m completely cataleptic

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I said to them, “Ladies, this is a dream.” Well, they were just as startled as you would be if you met me, a total stranger, say, at a hotel, the Ambassador.
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Standing there, completely shut out in this other world, I simply imagined with the same intensity that brought me into that world, I imagined a pillow under my head.
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