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.

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 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.

My interest at the moment is to use my dreaming self (which I also access in shamanic journeying) to engage with the Earth. In my waking rational life I often forget about the Earth, or I get worried or confused by contradictory information. With my dreaming brain I can have access to powerful images of what is going on in the Earth, from day to day.

I agree that dreams seem to be involved in laying down memories but I realise that dreaming gives us access to a part of our brain we do not normally have access to.

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

We forget most of our dreams because we don't have access to those parts of our brain once we are switched to wakefulness. But why we evolved that way is a puzzle to me.