A woman friend of Neville's told him about the four-year-old boy who moved in next door last year, who says he has always known her, measured the years by the leaves on a blooming bush, and told her a dream that everything is nothing.

A woman whose maid vanished with all her furniture while she was in Paris exhausted the New York police and private detectives; after Neville told her to sit quietly among her furniture in imagination, she took a wrong turn off Madison Avenue, recognised her maid's ankles on the pavement, and was taken straight to the furniture.

A stranger came to Neville to find a missing friend; he simply sat and heard her tell him she had found her, and after a fruitless trip to New Haven and Boston she ran into the friend outside a department store on 14th Street in New York.

A woman wrote to Neville describing how, doing the attention exercise from his book The Power of Awareness, she ended on the stained carpet in her hall, imagined it new and clean, said thank you and forgot it - and days later a stranger phoned soliciting rug-cleaning business on the downstairs phone she could only just hear, cleaned it, and the rug looked new.

A little girl, whose father is in the audience, closed her eyes, communed with herself and gave thanks for taking her friend with her to San Diego - and her mother had a change of heart and said yes; Neville says it worked three times in a row.

Neville refers in passing to a friend of his who did something with a rock, as an example of how simple the practice is; the story itself is not retold here.

Mrs. Archibald Roosevelt, daughter-in-law of Theodore Roosevelt, came to Neville monthly for years; unable to rent her New York town home, she followed his instruction to sleep in imagination in her Long Island house, and the next day a tenant took the apartment with immediate occupancy and paid the whole summer in advance.

Neville reports watching on television that evening as Mike Quinn cursed the judge who jailed him, was taken to jail by the sheriff, and suffered a heart attack within two hours.

His practical, unsuperstitious businessman brother treats the thirteenth as his lucky day because his father's blow, his own new business, his marriage and his building purchase all fell on the 13th of the month.

The artist's first dream, told to Neville: in a dim light she saw a slender beautiful lady and, looking closer, found she was looking at herself.

The artist's second vision, told to Neville: standing in a grove of smooth straight trees she heard a divine voice chanting 'Impollinate, impollinate, impollinate the child yourself' — a word she did not know.

The artist's third experience, told to Neville: waking with her head filled with golden light she saw a bird chirping between her window glass and screen; it circled and then passed straight through the intact screen, which she then examined and found unbroken.

The artist's fourth experience, a week after the third: the same light and the same bird between screen and window, chirping urgently from the top before passing straight through the screen again.

A woman who heard him — a seamstress and designer in New York — imagined pouring out and counting the contents of a bag holding more than twice her usual weekly pay until it felt real, and within two days was hired by someone she had never heard of at exactly that sum.