The walls of the hospital room disappear in this dream-like image of a sleeping man, his head heavy on a pillow, transposed to a seaside landscape disrupted by three construction workers digging an ominous hole in the earth. Is the hole a grave reflecting the patient’s fear of death? Or is the dig symbolic of the surgeon’s knife, the biopsies and cuts used in unravelling the mysteries of a cancer hidden inside the body? Robert creates a fantastic effect by not showing a window or a room, making no distinction between the interior of the hospital and exterior of the city. All signals and impressions blur together. The idea may have occurred to Robert from construction noises spilling inside a hospital room. In art school, Robert drew construction cranes sweeping over the citadel in Halifax, signs of change in the city.