A man in his audience, hearing that story, applied it to bamboo trees that his next-door neighbour had planted and that blocked his view of the city from the dining table; after a week of imagining the unobstructed view, his wife met him to say the neighbour had removed all the bamboos.

A friend who lives under an active volcano on St. Vincent stayed a month as his guest in New York and, terrified by a 3 a.m. thunderstorm, leapt out of the guest room she shared with his daughter into his wife's bed.

He reads a second letter, received the same day, from a woman who woke to a clear dictating voice saying a prophet sees and an apostle is sent and experiences, got up as though shaken awake, wrote it all down, and closed her letter with 'Hallelujah'.

In Los Angeles that spring a woman who lives on the beach at Malibu told him that while walking on the sand something or someone turned her off, so that she and the ocean and the people were nothing, and then turned her on again — giving him the negative counterpart of his own experience.

The same man, feeling he did not do enough for his eight-year-old daughter Lynn, imagined taking her on her first jet flight; six weeks later, driving down the San Diego freeway on the day he had set aside for her, an irresistible feeling took him to the airport and to the San Diego Zoo, and only near the end of the day did he realise it was the fulfilment of his imaginal act.

A woman present in the audience told him how she cured her son Dusty of wanting a mini-bike by making him work out where he would keep and ride it — the neighbours, the police and the May Company all ruled it out — until he decided he did not want one at all, and she found she used the same test on her own desires.