The Work
The books behind the Compass.
What shapes a life, and what makes another response possible? The Dream State Compass follows that question from the inside of one life into philosophy, research, relationships and human possibility.
Each work stands on its own. Together, they move from what happened to what we can make possible for one another. Begin with the question that brings you here.
Dream State: The Storm Within
What did it feel like?
The memoir is the lived ground of the Compass: voices, storms, fear and extraordinary significance alongside kitchens, work, horses, humour, family and ordinary attachment. It follows survival and return without requiring everything encountered along the way to be denied.
The life comes first. The later books return to it with different questions.
Literary memoir · Complete manuscript · Approximately 41,000 words
When Meaning Becomes Sovereign
When does meaning start making the rules?
An interpretation can hold truth, grief or spiritual value and still govern more of a life than it can responsibly hold. This book asks how meaning comes to act like law over perception, identity, relationships and action, and what remains able to question it.
The inquiry extends beyond psychosis into families, institutions, beliefs and the frameworks we use to understand one another.
Crossover philosophy · Complete manuscript · Approximately 21,000 words
Threshold Crossing
What room remains to question, delay or choose?
Vividness is not the same as authority. Conviction is not the same as obedience. Threshold Crossing turns these distinctions into a research-facing model of how unusual experience may acquire felt power, and how available action can narrow or reopen.
Its sequence is Conditions → Crossing → Form → Perceived Authority → Agency. The proposed distinctions remain open to criticism and testing.
Research-facing model · Complete manuscript · Approximately 30,800 words. Independent scholarly and reference review is required before academic publication.
The Needs We Carry
How can help leave someone more able to choose?
Help carries power when it shapes access to treatment, housing, money, safety or the conditions of another person’s choices. This book examines how need, power and responsibility should be negotiated in relationships, families and services.
Support must answer to the person living its effects. Any authority it requires should be proportionate, transparent, reviewable and directed toward becoming less necessary.
Ethics and practice · Complete manuscript · Approximately 22,300 words
The Humans We Become
Where do new possibilities come from?
Freedom depends partly on the responses we can imagine and actually access under pressure. Bodies, habits, histories and circumstances shape that range; relationships, stories, practice and institutions can widen it.
Another person may help us see a possibility we could not imagine alone. This book asks what we make easier or harder for one another to become.
Human philosophy · Complete manuscript · Approximately 38,800 words
Where to begin
Begin with the memoir for the lived story, or Sovereign for the philosophical questions it raises. Threshold develops a model for investigation, while Needs brings the inquiry into relationships and practice. Humans considers the futures we make available to one another.
The manuscripts can have different publishing lives. They do not need to appear together or be read in a prescribed order.
Learning how to carry meaning without being carried away by it.