I think both science and art are impelled by curiosity: What's really happening? How do things really function? How can I really engage with the world around me? These are questions that artists and scientists both ask.

Stories that are real, that create you, rather than be created by you, are powerful.

I think the neural pathways in our brains affect what happens in our bodies, and so can alter our health.

I am sure that there is a lot more going on in the objective real world than we can monitor with our five senses. I think dreams allow us to engage with the real world and monitor the way it is acting on us.

I think that when you go on a shamanic journey, you're allowing yourself to have much more access to your unconscious or your sense of connection within the universe, whatever you want to call that. You've accessed places in your brain that you don't normally. You're still there - it's your brain. But you have access in a way that you normally don't. For me, doing that felt like being in a new environment.

I try to see what the dream might be referring to - because the information in the world is being interpreted by my brain which only has the concepts derived from our five senses. So I think of the sequences in my dream as my brain doing its very best to process information in a way it knows I can deal with.

I know I have different priorities when I am close to dreaming and coming out of dreaming. I notice I am connected to people in a different way, and connected to the earth. For me, I have exactly the same emotional responses when I go through into shamanic trance.