I moved to Margate a year ago. Living right where sea meets land is something that I've never really done before. I have a body that's quite responsive the world, especially to seasons. My winters are long and black, and my summers are high energy. And then there's everything in between. Since moving here, I now have tidal rhythms in my life. I can't quite explain that so well because it's new but it feels as though I am synced up to the tides, like, I'm taking a break and its low tide, or I’m full of thoughts and its high tide.

This town is where Londoners would historically come to take in the sea and get well. There's lots of hospitals, wellness centers, baths, around here. And people would just come and spend months at a time, sea bathing, and letting the salt do its job.

I take my dream life quite seriously. I am interested in the link between madness and everyday life, and especially the ways dreams serve as a bridging experience, allowing madness to visit you in everyday clothing. The fascinating and generative thing about dreams, for me, is that they exist in this place that the world I've grown up in tells me is fantasy. And they are. But as soon as they're integrated into the world, they lead to the most grounded, earthly experiences. Dreams are of this world. And they have led me directly to the most grounded thing possible, which is environmental philosophy, or the material study of the earth. There's no logical way I could have made that link. But that is my experience of dreams: they're of this world in a particular, important way.

Do you have those dreams that you just know are important? During the pandemic, I dreamt that I was walking through this corridor in an empty house that I've never been in before. I notice on the wall there's a picture frame and its head height. It was just an empty frame, nothing inside it. My first thought when I see this picture frame is, “Oh, that's there for me”, because it is perfectly at my eye level. I'm staring at this frame. And then I hear a deep masculine voice that says, “Make a portrait of Pluto. He's got something to say.” And that was it.

I wrote it down that night, but it took a few weeks or a month or two to be able to read back and go, “Oh, I sort of see what this might have been about.” The meaning of dreams doesn’t come straight away. And with this dream, it took even longer to understand.

There was several months separating that dream and the long, dark nights that followed. In that time, I began to, I don’t know, gather things. I didn’t know it then, but I can see now I was clearly preparing for something. I began to write things down, to organise my life as though I was about to go on some big trip. Like, my essentials: What ideas do I need to bring with me? Who do I need to bring with me?

In that period of time, the dream world also started to bleed out into my life in a particular way. Like I started having dreams that I thought I woke up from but was still dreaming. There were very unclear boundaries between waking, sleeping, mad, saying alive, not alive.

Then, at a certain point, I went back to the Pluto dream and I read the instruction in a way that I hadn't before. I had been looking at it through this very Jungian kind of symbolic [lens]. “What could this be referring to? What part of me is this talking to?” And then all of a sudden, I went, “Oh no, it's telling me to do something. It's saying make a portrait.” But what do I do with that? I don't draw or paint. There wasn't anything immediately obvious in this, but what I had been doing for a long time was writing.

I realized I had this task, which was essentially to notice—in the same way that a painter might make a portrait and just study the sitter—whatever was there, what I was experiencing, which, in this case, was the underworld. I was in the realm of Pluto, and my job was to feel what was here. And in doing that, suddenly I came alive to the world in a particular way. Suddenly the world was speaking to me. I know that that sounds like…I’ve got this psychoanalytic language hanging over me, but when I say the world is speaking to me, the only language I have for this is psychosis. But there are thousands of years of people being in dialogue with the world that doesn't involve that.

So, I’d just sort of fallen into this space and the more I noticed, the more I saw, the more I heard, the more there was to see. And the more I understood, the longer the conversations would be and, suddenly, my life became similar to dream spaces in the sense that we can be alive to the world in dreams. You can touch a wall in a dream, and it can respond.

Much of the feeling of that period of time was a sense of annihilation. It’s similar, for me anyway, to the feeling of being out in the deep ocean: a sense of total annihilation. But being on the land that's proximate to the sea is somehow restorative. It's always there, the deep, the vast sort of deepness is right there, but I don't have to walk into it. I can wave from the shore.

There was a moment where I was in the equivalent of the deep ocean and on the cusp of annihilation and, yes, it was too much. And in that period of time, I sat in the bath in the dark, for about three weeks. Really, all I did for that period of time was eat the occasional fish finger sandwich and go from the bath into bed. That time was full of intense hallucinations and really difficult things. The boundary between dream and reality, well, there just was no boundary at all. I couldn't even really look at the daylight. I lived in the basement on my own and four other people lived on the two floors above me. And for whatever reason, whether it was me sort of pushing them away or their choice not to find me, they didn't notice. My body was kind of frozen in a particular way. I stopped feeling, I couldn't really move. I couldn't talk. It was a rigor mortis.

What I was doing in that period of time, I sort of understand now, was waiting to die. I was like a sick dog crawling under a bush. And it was almost like there was nothing I needed to do. It was just inevitable. You just have to sit and wait. But for whatever reason it didn't happen.

I spent a week in Devon at this apprenticeship for contemporary animists. It was led by this amazing guy, Colin. He overlaps a long history of Indigenous knowledge with Jungian thought. We did various ceremonies. We talked a lot about origin stories and talked about stories themselves as being alive. And within that week I fell silent. I just sort of couldn't really talk to anybody or say anything, but I kept showing up to sit around the fire and listen. And in that week, I don’t what happened exactly, but it stopped being too much.

With recurring dreams sometimes there’s this sense of needing acknowledgment – this thing really needs acknowledging and it's going keep coming back, louder and louder until it's been fully acknowledged. And somehow in that week, amongst all those conversations—and being around Colin in particular, who's one of those people who, I don't have the words for what he is, but he definitely was a big part of, of me being able to sit inside of that in a way that where I could finally say to the world, “Okay, I believe you. Let's do this,”— suddenly I stopped being an alien in the world, and we sort of joined on a level.

This experience has given me this real sense of our cultural lack for holding these sorts of experiences. Our only structures are psychiatric. And that feels like it's missing something. We have no means of engaging with the experience, seeing it as a way of being part of the world, of this world. I’m not an alien, and neither was my experience. And maybe dreams can be a kind of gateway to this other world, an accessible gateway. It's in your own language. It's made up of your own people, your own places. I couldn't think of a more accessible medium for engaging with our everyday “madness.”

I don't come from a culture that values dreams or has any kind of infrastructure to hold someone going through what I was going through. I happened to have started this process of Jungian therapy about nine months before this happened. So there was—luckily—an intuitive preparation for what was coming. In fact, my life was full of these sorts of strange premonition experiences around that time.

One example of this was a play I was writing in 2019. I'd been working on it for about a year. It was called The Smell, and it was set in a small town where, overnight, a smell appears and nobody knows what it is or where it's come from. Immediately there's a sense that it's dangerous, a sense that it's malevolent in some way, but it's also intangible, invisible. It seems to be everywhere. No-one can quite get away from it. That's the first 10 minutes of the play. And then the rest is set in quarantine, where everybody has gone inside, just locked themselves inside for an indefinite period of time while the smell happens out there. That play was due to be performed in March 2020. And it was canceled because everybody locked themselves inside.