storage room phase

[Eway]

From Seven Lies by James Lasdun (referring to a boy's experience of being x-rayed at hospital):

"I felt as if I had gone back underground, back to the place of obligatory yet never fully explicable rituals that I had submerged myself in during my storage room phase, repetition once again endowing each stage with a gloomy ceremoniousness. After the X-ray, the forty-minute wait in the passage outside the changing cubicles."

Gone back underground? Obligatory yet never fully explicable rituals? Storage room phase? Gloomy ceremoniousness?
What's he talking about?

[Anglika]

I haven't read the book, but the narrator seems to be referring to retreating into a store room to hide when he was younger and to having repetitious behaviours. There is a psychological condition where a person cannot do anything unless he or she has carried out a sequence of movements over and over again.

It could also be a reference to his need to hide his past.