A compass for the journey between home and the unknown.
The Dream State Compass is Justin McDermott’s creative and philosophical project exploring what happens when meaning becomes unusually powerful.
It grows from lived experience of voice-hearing, psychosis and recovery. Memoir, philosophy, art, music and reflective writing explore that experience alongside memory, spirituality, creativity and ordinary life.
Five connected books examine how meaning shapes the choices we can see, the responses available to us, and the lives we might go on to build.
It asks how we can remain open to extraordinary experience without surrendering to it, while staying connected to ourselves, others and shared reality.
Across the Compass runs the same tension: storm and stillness; certainty and doubt; the extraordinary and the everyday.
Learning how to carry meaning without being carried away by it.
The work also looks forward, asking how our relationships and circumstances can make new possibilities available to us.
The Dream State Compass
What becomes possible from here?
A Memoir of Meaning, Survival, and Ordinary Weather
Before it was called illness, it was weather.
The Storm Within follows my passage through voices, visions, fear, grief, spiritual intensity, hospitalisation, and the symbolic world that emerged when reality began to speak in storms, signs, and shadows.
It is also a story of survival and return, finding a way back without denying everything encountered along the way.
Complete manuscript.
Dream State - The Storm Within
When Meaning Becomes Sovereign
Meaning is one of the mind’s greatest powers. But meaning becomes dangerous when it becomes sovereign.
When Meaning Becomes Sovereign takes the territory of the memoir and asks what might be learned from it.
Drawing on lived experience, peer practice, philosophy, psychology, and phenomenology, it explores how meaning can move from possibility toward certainty, and from interpretation toward authority.
The Dream State framework offers a language for this movement through salience, clouded consciousness, sovereignty, reachability, creative containment, grounding without humiliation, and return.
Its purpose is not to eliminate meaning, but to keep meaning answerable to the body, relationship, reality, humility, and human connection.
How can we remain open to meaning without being ruled by it?
Find your bearings. Keep the future open.
A framework rather than a verdict.
The aim is not mastery. The aim is return.
Complete manuscript.
A Dream State Philosophy
Reader Reviews
"When Meaning Becomes Sovereign: A Philosophy of Meaning, Psychosis, Care and Return, by Justin McDermott, is a must-read for anyone interested in creative ways to navigate challenging times in life, including psychosis — clinicians and people with lived experience alike. Through metaphor, McDermott holds the reader's attention with a narrative that relocates complex experiences back into the domain of human experience rather than pathology. In doing so, he gives us a sense of talking about something universal — something that pertains to some degree to all of us. He also offers insight into how to emerge from these difficult experiences, which, however painful, are pregnant with meaning and can become sites of learning. Far from a self-help register, his is an invitation: to be inspired, and to develop your own creative process."
— Dr Luis Gustavo Vechi, PhD; Clin Psychologist
Dream State: The Storm Within is an eloquent and engaging account of Justin's profound psychological struggle to know himself. Written with honesty, originality and wisdom, Justin vividly conveys the magical "dream state" that is called psychosis. He extracts the gifts of this experience and shows how expanded states of awareness can be a powerful catalyst for human spiritual and personal growth.
— Louisa D Pearce, Social Worker and Author
Deeply compelling and awe-inspiring, Justin's story is one of resilience, courage, and hope. Each chapter offers powerful insights into navigating mental distress, homelessness, addiction, and profound loss, culminating in an inspiring story of survival, healing, and growth.
With remarkable honesty and vulnerability, Justin shares deeply personal reflections that invite the reader to walk beside him through changing weather and seasons of life. His words are infused with hope, reminding us that even in life's darkest moments, light can still be found.
Powerfully motivating and moving, this is more than a memoir; it is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, the search for meaning amid adversity, and strength through connection, community, and self-discovery.
— Rachael King, Lived Experience
‘A courageous memoir, brave and so very relatable in so many ways that I can only imagine touches all in unique ways. It tugs at your heart, and Justin writes with beautifully descriptive, emotive and poetic language, entrusting you with his inner and outer landscape and life journey.’
— Kirsty White, Psychiatric Nurse