Neville names friends — Bob, Christine and Benny — in whom the same drama has unfolded, and says he would compile their accounts with his own the way Luke compiled his narrative.

Neville reads a letter from a woman friend who, aching and unable to meditate, told herself to leave the body behind, fell asleep, and dreamt of a train journey ending on a mountain top where an old uniformed conductor told her she must go back because scripture must be fulfilled.

Neville reads a second letter, from a lady with five children who, sitting at table talking with her husband and her oldest child Leslie, suddenly became aware she was within her skull looking through her eyes and not with them, and asked whether scripture or Blake mentioned it.

A man brought Neville a dream in which a happy singing man swinging a white stick walked onto a brilliantly lit stage and was shut behind a clanging iron gate while a voice cried that his deception was at an end; the dreamer thought the man resembled Neville.

A man reported that after imagining a personal scene fulfilled he became a small ball of light at the top of his head above an infinite abyss, was both ball and abyss, and felt them contract into his skull until he opened his eyes to stop it.

The same man told Neville how he taught his son revision at age five after a bad bleeding accident, so the boy now revises every injury, and how his wife revised a severe tennis ankle break that healed with only a rubber support.

Neville addresses a friend who wrote him a letter describing a vision, urging that person not to turn back now.

A woman sent Neville a vision in which he lectured on the law, left his lifeless garment on the stage, struggled back into it, rushed through the most profound things he had to say knowing the signs had come and this was his very last lecture, then departed never to return.

A man wrote Neville a series of questions, asking him to take the fourth first: he has a project he cannot give up but which involves other men who he suspects would not want to be involved, and asks whether he should go on imagining it; Neville answers to take the objective alone and let the partners be drawn in.

The same correspondent told Neville of a dream in which he opened a letter containing his son's report card showing four subjects, including algebra, that must improve; he began revising it, then grew tired of the responsibility of the power and decided to let his son, who knows the law, do it himself. Neville answers that the dream was not really about the boy and that he must not give up that responsibility.

Neville's daughter was baptized in the same old Fifth Avenue church in New York City where Sam was married, his children baptized, and where Sam ushers during the three-hour Good Friday service.

Neville says he knows from his own experience down south that many people who have no brothers have nonetheless had witnesses to the birth of the child.

Neville, who says he was born and raised among Negroes, tells of asking Benny Gould — the blackest man he knows, living in Los Angeles, who had the identical experience — to describe David honestly, and Benny painted a word picture of the same blond, blue-eyed lad.

Neville had shared with the letter-writer the story of a friend, present in the audience that night, who taught his seven-year-old son how to revise so that when he is hurt he goes to the end as it ought to be.

Neville speaks of a woman who was given immortal eyes and who brings back what she sees in the eternal worlds and hands it over to him to interpret for her.

He speaks of listeners, married women among them, who wrote to him describing an ecstatic union with him experienced as a sexual act, of which he says he himself was entirely unaware; he reads it as their complete acceptance of his story.

A friend recently told Neville that at about nine he was given a Ouija board, asked it "Who am I?", was answered "Christ", believed he was Jesus reincarnated, and was educated out of it by his high-church Episcopal minister as "neurotic sin"; praying for absolution, he received a vision of an altar.

A lady recently showed Neville an enormous diamond ring she had paid $75,000 for and was so proud of, though she had children and grandchildren.

Neville's father refused to attend church and disliked the minister; when the minister said he was one of the chosen, his father replied that he would not have chosen him.

When the same minister refused to baptize Neville's sixth brother because the two sea captains standing as godfathers were a Presbyterian and a Methodist, his father took the child, sprinkled water on him himself and named him Fred - which remains his name, Fred Goddard.