Enter the Dream.
A journey through art, memory, meaning, and return.
Dream State - The Storm Within
A Memoir of Meaning, Survival, and Ordinary Weather
Before it was called illness, it was weather.
Dream State: The Storm Within follows one man’s passage through voices, visions, fear, grief, spiritual intensity, hospitalisation, suicide attempts, and the strange symbolic world that opened around him when reality began to speak in storms, signs, and shadows.
But this is not only a story of breakdown.
It is a story of meaning-making - of trying to understand what happens when perception, memory, fear, beauty, and belief begin to gather too much force.
Written with raw honesty, poetic insight, and lived-experience depth, Justin McDermott invites readers into the inner landscape of psychosis without reducing it to symptoms alone. The book asks what can be heard inside suffering, what can be rebuilt after collapse, and how a life once overwhelmed by darkness can still move toward love, purpose, and light.
At its heart, The Storm Within is a memoir of survival and return: from rupture to reflection, from isolation to connection, from inner weather to ordinary life.
For readers drawn to memoir, mental health, spirituality, creativity, and lived experience, this is a deeply personal account of surviving the mind’s most difficult weather - and learning how to live again.
Available on Amazon from 30 June 2026.
The Dreamstate Philosophy
Dreamstate is where art, story, and philosophy meet - a quiet rebellion against noise, haste, and forgetting.
It begins with a simple conviction: meaning matters, but meaning must remain grounded.
The inner world is powerful. It gathers weather: memory, grief, beauty, fear, faith, voices, symbols, longing, and light. At times, that weather opens us to wonder. At others, it can overwhelm the very ground beneath us.
Dreamstate is the practice of standing within that weather without surrendering to it.
Creativity is not decoration. It is revelation, orientation, and return. It is how the hidden life of the mind becomes visible. It is how chaos becomes colour, pain becomes language, and memory becomes light.
Through painting, poetry, memoir, music, and reflection, Dreamstate does not deny the storm. It listens to it. It learns its shape. Then it asks what can be carried back into love, humility, connection, and ordinary life.
Its ethos is simple:
Art heals when it tells the truth.
But truth is not intensity alone. Truth is also patience. Truth is relationship. Truth is the courage to remain open without becoming lost, and grounded without becoming closed.
Dreamstate honours the unseen life of consciousness - its visions, wounds, symbols, patterns, and sacred questions - without romanticising suffering or mistaking every storm for revelation.
This is a space for emotional honesty, imperfect beauty, spiritual searching, and the slow unfolding of meaning. A place where the inner world is neither hidden nor obeyed blindly, but met with care, discernment, and imagination.
Dreamstate is where consciousness becomes art, and art becomes a way back to life.
Enter the Dream - not to escape the world, but to return to it with deeper eyes.
A companion volume to Dream State: The Storm Within is coming soon:
Dream State Philosophy - The Art of Weathering the Mind.
