While Neville was away, a friend left a letter in his mailbox recounting a trip she had made east to Pittsburgh, where she taught the secret of mental revision to a family raised among deaf relatives. She described using the technique to help resolve a young man's sudden, recurring ear pain, framing the outcome as evidence the method had worked even though the matter was never discussed again afterward.

A friend of Neville's, Jan, left a letter in his box last Saturday while he was away, telling how in April 1966 she went to Pittsburgh and taught revision to her friend Betty and Betty's deaf husband Matt; Betty heard nightly for a year and a half the words 'Betty, I can hear', and after an attack of ear pain and a doctor's drops Matt woke hearing and came home early saying exactly those words.

A third letter, from his friend Bill, arrived the day of the lecture, recounting a dream in which Bill stood on a hilltop and pulled a huge fish from a pool with his right hand while an uninterested friend went down the hill and could catch nothing; Neville interprets it.

Title states 16 December 1967, derived from the lecture's old catalogue-backfill delivery date (1967-12-18, now possible). The lecture's currently preferred delivery claim (chrome dateline, 1967-12-11, probable) instead places 'last Saturday night' on 1967-12-09; flagged for the title to be reconciled.

A lady wrote to him — the letter arrived the day before the lecture — describing a dream in which she found her ragged lover in a barn, fed him, walked hand in hand past the many houses she had lived in, and saw a poisoned five-year-old boy become an infant while she herself became a woman just out of her teens.

On the night Neville closed his lecture series (December 15), he stopped back to wish a lady in the audience a Merry Christmas; she confided that she had already had the first three of the four experiences he taught from the platform -- the resurrection and birth from above, discovering her own fatherhood, and the serpentine ascent through the severed veil of her body -- and was now awaiting only the fourth, the descent of the dove. Neville asked her to write and describe them for his records, as two other students, Bob and Benny, had done in their own hand, but a month later she still had not written, though she was a schoolteacher with no excuse not to.

Neville reads out a letter he had waited for since 15 December, from a woman living in a rustic canyon, recounting three visions: the infant in swaddling clothes placed in her arms by her long-unseen brothers and her landlord at 3:30 a.m.; five months later the blond, blue-eyed youth David walking out of the canyons toward the sea; and four months after that, at 3:30 a.m., an earthquake and bomb splitting her being from top to bottom - she now awaits the descent of the dove.

Neville reads from a letter that arrived that day from a woman friend who dreamed she attended one of his lectures held outdoors by a river, attended by priests, ministers and rabbis, one rabbi saying he came because Neville teaches the truth; she then dreamed of turning over a jar with a sleeping bug in it and woke.