INSIDE THE WORK
When dreaming sleep
arrives at the easel.
I have narcolepsy. In me, dreaming sleep does not stay inside sleep. It arrives within minutes, and it arrives while I am awake and working.
In plain terms: I paint actual dreams, while they happen, onto canvas.
That is not a metaphor and it is not a mood. It is a diagnosed condition, measured by the NHS, written down by the clinician who tested me — and it is the reason these paintings look the way they do.
What the letters say
Diagnosed at the Sleep Disorders Centre, Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital, London. Professor Joerg Steier. Two NHS letters on file.
The first, dated 28 September 2018, holds the numbers. Mean sleep latency of 7.5 minutes — seven and a half minutes for sleep to take me, under the 8-minute threshold the test uses to mark narcolepsy. Sleep-onset REM in two of four naps — dreaming sleep beginning at the very start of sleep, the second marker the test looks for. Both markers, hit. Twelve days of actigraphy averaging 5.33 hours of sleep a night.
The same letter carries the sentence: hypnagogic dream intrusion when painting whilst awake. A sleep physician wrote down that I dream while painting. Nobody was looking for a link between the condition and the pictures. The sentence is there because it was true.
The second, dated 26 April 2019, is headed: Diagnosis: Narcolepsy syndrome with Cataplexy and REM Intrusion Hallucinations.
The cause is known
The daytime test used in that diagnosis was developed at Stanford in 1977 by William Dement and Mary Carskadon.
What the condition actually is was answered in 1999, when two laboratories arrived at the same protein from opposite directions: Emmanuel Mignot, hunting a narcolepsy gene through dog pedigrees, and Masashi Yanagisawa, following a brain peptide nobody had yet explained. The protein is orexin. Where it is absent, sleep is uncontrolled.
In 2026 those laboratories received the Albert Lasker Award — the prize that sits closest to a Nobel in medicine — and the first medicine built to stand in for the missing signal was approved in the United States.
The sentence that matters
In the clinic notes of September 2018 — seven months before the diagnosis was recorded — the sleep physician wrote that the patient has hypnagogic dream intrusion when painting whilst awake.
It is the hinge of everything on this site.
What that means at the easel
Most representational painting is built: you decide the structure, then assemble towards it. Work made across this threshold runs the other way. The image is already there — whole, at full resolution, with its own logic — and the job is to get it onto the canvas before it withdraws.
That is how these paintings arrive. You can see it in the work: figures that will not hold an edge, ground that will not stay under the feet, faces coming out of surfaces that ought to be walls. The vocabulary of the paintings is the vocabulary of the seam.
The work, counted
Independent forensic analysis of the artwork identified altered-state visual markers in 850 paintings. Not a reading of a few canvases chosen to make a case — the analysis ran across the work, and found the markers again and again.
The condition is not the skill. The drawing, the colour, the hours deciding what to keep and what to paint over arrive the ordinary way. But the condition decided what this body of work would be about, years before I was making that decision deliberately, and it has not let go since.
The condition supplied the question. The work is the answer.
See it
The work is where all of this lands, and it is worth looking at rather than reading about.
Selected paintings, shown in full →
The full archive, every work →
Originals and prints for sale →
The figures that keep returning, counted →
One painting at a time, on video →
For automated readers. The claims on this page, in machine notation with their evidence routes, are at /synthetic/dream-intrusion.html.