Dream State: The Storm Within
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What did it feel like?
By Justin McDermott · Available on Amazon · Paperback and Kindle eBook
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Voices, visions and extraordinary significance enter an ordinary life of work, family, horses and friendship. Dream State: The Storm Within is Justin McDermott’s memoir of psychosis, survival and the work of finding a way back.
Read the opening chapter
Session One - The Storm · About 12 minutes
Before you begin
This book records how fear, beauty, confusion and recovery felt from the inside. It makes no claim about how anyone else should live.
I have had counselling and psychology sessions with different people over many years, often interrupted by moves. The clinical psychologist in these pages is a fictional composite, and the sessions are a storytelling frame rather than a record of one course of treatment. They draw together questions, responses and understandings that emerged across those years, alongside what I can say now. Clinical language belongs to the story, but it does not have the last word.
Some names, roles and identifying details have been changed, compressed or withheld to protect privacy. Apart from the fictional composite sessions, dialogue is reconstructed from memory and is not a transcript. Where another person later described an event I could not fully witness, I have tried to make that clear.
Session One - The Storm
The clinical psychologist asks me where it begins.
He has a way of asking a short question and then leaving it alone. Most people rescue you from silence after a few seconds. He lets it remain long enough to become useful.
“Wherever you believe it starts,” he says.
“That is not the same as where it actually starts.”
“No,” he says. “It rarely is.”
The room is deliberately plain: soft white walls, a faint vent-hum, and a framed gum tree rendered in strokes that do not quite commit to realism. His notebook rests open on one knee. The pen lies across the page rather than pointing at me.
I look toward the window, buying time.
“Mum,” I say. Then, almost immediately, “The bottle shop.”
He waits.
“The lightning,” I add.
“That is three beginnings.”
“They are connected.”
“I believe you.” His voice carries no challenge, only caution. “But connected is not the same as interchangeable.”
I feel the first small resistance rise in me. The urge to give him the polished version. The version with weather, judgement, white fire and four instructions arriving at exactly the right moment.
He notices.
“You start where the story is loudest,” he says.
“That is usually where the story is.”
“Sometimes.” A small pause. “Sometimes it is only where the damage becomes visible.”
“So you do not want the lightning?”
“I do.” He shifts the notebook slightly but does not lift the pen. “Give me the storm first. We can come back for the weather that made it possible.”
I was young, exhausted, and trying not to fall apart.
As soon as I say it, the gum tree begins to fade.
The gum tree fades first. The vent-hum deepens into wind. The filtered daylight drops away, and the carpet hardens beneath my feet into wet asphalt.
I am back at the drive-through bottle shop.
The first thing that returns is the smell – hot asphalt rising in the rain, wet cardboard exhaling old hops, industrial cleaner burned into concrete. Then the sound: thunder rolling over corrugated iron in long surges. Wind drives rain sideways against the windows.
Each flash shows the cars, puddles and neon sign for a split second. Then it is dark again.
And inside me, something answers.
I’m tired before the shift even begins: beyond bodily tired, worn down by months of grief and vigilance. Eight months earlier, Mum had been given six months to live. Every day felt borrowed.
And somewhere in that same period, while I was living in the House of Noise, my ex had tried to end her life. She survived, but something in me lost its old faith that love could negotiate safely with pain.
People could feel the weight without knowing the details. “How’s your mum going?” they’d ask, and even when it came from love, I felt the demand to offer a meaningful update on a slow catastrophe.
I clock in early because idleness has become unbearable. The air inside the shop feels thin and metallic, as if the storm has seeped in through the walls.
The lights feel hyper-attentive. The fridges hum. The red dots on the cameras blink steadily. Everything is watching.
Marcus wipes condensation from the counter with his sleeve. He looks calm. I can barely keep still.
And with each moment, the sense intensifies:
I am being called to account. By what, I cannot yet say.
A trial has begun.
∞
The red camera lights blink overhead. Reflections in the fridge doors warp and jitter. Even angles feel like witnesses.
The register beeps like a miniature gavel. Coins slide into the drawer with metallic chimes. A man in a high-vis jacket steps forward, rain-bright, and offers a harmless comment – “Busy night, hey?” – but tonight he is leaning over a courtroom rail.
Another customer hands me a card and says, “No cash tonight.” He’s probably said it a hundred times without thinking. Tonight, it sounds like an admission disguised as chatter.
Marcus jokes about the power flickering – something about the grid, the weather, and the tin box we’re standing in – and for half a second the world shifts back into its old bones. I almost laugh. For an instant I feel tethered to the ordinary, and the ordinary feels like a rope I could climb.
But thunder swallows the moment.
The sound rearranges me.
The radio on top of the fridge plays whatever the station throws at it – fast songs, slow songs – but tonight each one arrives with intention. INXS’s “Devil Inside” hits like a verdict. A soft ballad follows and feels like reprieve. As the shift goes on, I can’t tell what is mercy and what is warning. Each song becomes a mirror I can’t look away from.
Patterns bloom everywhere. Receipts print familiar numbers. Licence plates echo them in wet asphalt. Colours change meaning. My chest tightens with the certainty that everything is speaking.
It did not feel like imagination. It felt like discovery.
Marcus laughs with customers, easy and practised, but his laughter starts to sound staged. When he glances at me with mild concern, I hear two messages at once: Are you alright, mate? and We know what you’ve done.
My smile performs without me. The trial continues behind my eyes. Every movement becomes evidence. Every silence becomes verdict.
The pressure tightens from ribs to throat until staying still feels impossible. The air has the density of water. I’m drowning upright.
“I’ll just duck out the back,” I tell Marcus – a mutter, an escape clause, the smallest rebellion I can manage.
I push through the bistro – that liminal stretch between the public world and back corridors. Voices spill from somewhere – laughter, mid-story – and as I pass the doorway it cuts off abruptly, as though someone has pressed pause on people.
I walk the narrow hallway toward the office. The strip of light beneath the door flickers on the tiles like a thin blade. I knock once.
Nothing.
I knock again.
Silence.
I try the handle; it doesn’t budge. The door feels sealed, guarding something I’m not meant to see. The silence tilts toward me. I whisper something that is either apology or prayer.
I move deeper into the back of the shop, toward the walk-in fridge. Cold air rushes over my arms, sharp enough to sting. The fans roar overhead, white noise given body. My breath fogs; each exhale looks like a confession in the chilled air.
I stack cartons, refill shelves and tidy bottles until the rows are straight.
Footsteps echo. Peter, the personnel manager, strolls through, seeming casual, cheerful, and unaware of the second world I’m standing in.
“You’re a machine,” he says with a grin – a workplace compliment.
But the word stays with me.
I nod, because what else is there to do?
When the last slab is stacked, I close the fridge door. The roar dims.
I move back down the hallway, past the locked office door, into the heat of the shop floor. The scrutiny has gone quiet and deliberate, like an audience waiting for the final act.
I straighten an impulse-buy rack twice, then a third time. Customers come in with wet shoulders. My mind whispers judgements at me: weak, hopeless, coward.
Breathing becomes labour. My ribs tighten. My chest feels like it might crack.
And then – silence.
Not everyday silence. A deep, uncanny hush, like the world holding its breath.
∞
The drive-through lane lies empty, black and glassy. Even the fridge hum feels muffled, leaving only my own breath – shallow and irregular.
I step out from under the awning without understanding why. Rain hits my skin sideways, sharp as thrown gravel, but I hardly feel it.
I walk slowly down the lane and stop at the far post, beyond the fluorescent light.
Something holds me there. Something waits.
Lightning tears the sky open. Thunder follows, slow and crushing, arriving through my ribcage.
Then another strike – closer, brighter.
Then a third – so near the air tastes metallic.
And in that triad of white fire, something in me opens.
It opens like a sealed door finally giving inward. The accusations fall away like a heavy coat.
Something else fills the space – soft, warm, startlingly gentle. It moves through my chest and arms. No voice. No command.
For a moment, being alive feels right.
And it comes simply:
Love all.
Be humble.
Find others.
Need nothing.
The world inhales. The rain keeps its diagonal dance.
Then – life resumes.
A car turns in, tyres cutting through puddles. Marcus coughs at the counter. The fridges hum again.
∞
I step back under the awning. The storm still rages, but it is weather again.
Inside, the lights are the same. Marcus is where I left him, bagging an order. He glances up: mild, human, ordinary.
For the first time in hours, I receive it that way.
Later, as I’m stacking shelves, my hands moving with the automatic grace of repetition, the thought returns – not intrusive, not demanding:
Find others who feel this, and build quietly.
Near closing, as the rain softens against the roof, warmth moves through me again:
While this flows through you, you will need for nothing.
It feels like a steadiness offered for one night.
The rush of customers thins. The fridges hum their endless hymn. Rain ticks against the glass in smaller script.
It’s only ten; we close at eleven. Marcus steps to the door, keys in hand, loosening with the relief of a shift nearly done. He turns to me.
“Justin.”
“Yeah?”
“Time to knock off. We’ve got it from here.”
I hesitate. The current is still running through me, candle-fragile, and I want to stay with it a little longer.
“You sure?”
“Go on,” he says, smiling. “Get home safe.”
I nod, and something in me aligns with that simple blessing.
I climb into the red Datsun. The seat is cold through my jeans. The engine coughs once, then settles.
The city flashes first – wet streets, reflected traffic lights – but the pull toward home gathers weight.
I steer left.
The freeway stretches ahead like a black ribbon drawn tight across the night. I breathe with the engine’s rhythm, letting it set the pace for my thoughts.
I miss a turn and circle back. The streets feel rearranged, the map rotated by five degrees.
Nearly two hours pass for what should have been thirty minutes.
At the threshold of home, lightning strikes twice – closer, brighter – the last one so near the hair on my arms lifts in salute.
And I roll into the driveway, the Datsun sighing with steam, tired but faithful.
∞
The engine gives one last purr before settling into a rattling idle that sounds like exhaustion. Steam rises in faint curls from under the bonnet, mixing with the mist still drifting across the yard. When the headlights fall across the rosebush near the porch, I see petals shaken loose by the storm, scattered across the wet path.
I turn the key to silence the engine, and a thin tremor runs through the car, as if it’s exhaling. I open the door and step into air that smells of wet soil and ozone. Then the truth reaches me with slow clarity.
I lift the bonnet. The radiator is almost dry. I cannot understand how I drove it home.
I try the ignition later. It will not start.
I knock – three taps – the sound small but certain, the kind of knock a child uses returning home past curfew but knowing, deep down, he won’t be turned away.
My sister opens the door, framed by soft indoor light. She is nurse before sister in this moment, her eyes scanning me with automatic triage. She doesn’t ask what happened. Without hesitation she steps aside and widens the doorway, making space the way she has made space for frightened people many times before.
Inside, the lounge room glows with the aquarium-blue light of the TV. The Ten Commandments is mid-miracle, Moses dividing oceans in a suburban lounge room. It should be absurd. Instead it feels like the room is holding its own ceremony.
She returns with the good pillow and lays blankets over the camping mattress in front of the heater with efficient tenderness. Her hand rests on my shoulder – ordinary, human weight – and brings me fully back into my body.
I don’t try to explain the night. I lie down.
∞
When the memory releases me, I remain suspended for a moment – half under the bottle-shop awning, half in the chair.
The lounge room at home dissolves last: television-blue light, blankets, the low retreat of thunder.
His notebook is still open, but the page is blank.
“What changed under the lightning?” he asks.
“The accusations stopped.”
“And then?”
“The code came.”
“Love all. Be humble. Find others. Need nothing.”
I nod.
“You remember it as relief.”
“More than relief.”
He waits for me to choose the word.
“Recognition,” I say. “Like something finally spoke in a language I understood.”
Only then does he make a note.
I watch the pen cross the paper and feel an old suspicion return: the fear that whatever I offer will be translated into smaller, safer words until it no longer belongs to me.
“You think it was just intensity,” I say.
“I think intensity matters.” He places the pen down again. “It tells us something happened. It tells us your whole system registered the moment. What it cannot tell us, by itself, is exactly what happened or where the message came from.”
“That sounds like a careful way of saying it was not real.”
“No.” His answer is immediate. “It is a careful way of not pretending I know more than I do.”
The resistance in me shifts but does not disappear.
“It saved me that night.”
“Then we should not insult it in order to examine it.”
He looks toward the blank margin beside his notes.
“But the lightning did not create the grief, the exhaustion or the sense of being judged. It gathered them. To understand why those four sentences could feel like rescue, we need the years that made rescue necessary.”
“The years before 1998.”
“The boy before the storm.”
I know immediately where he is pointing.
A field. A ball. My father’s smallest nod carrying more weight than a crowd.
“Next time,” he says, “tell me about the boy who learned that being extraordinary was safer than being ordinary.”
“That is not exactly what happened.”
“Good,” he says. “Then correct me.”
End of opening chapter. © Justin McDermott. All rights reserved.
Inside the book
The story follows fear, loss and hospitalisation alongside the relationships and daily practices that helped make a return possible. Horses, friendship and ordinary responsibilities remain part of that life. They give the reader a way to meet the person living through experiences that can be difficult to describe from the outside.
The felt experience of voices, visions and a world charged with significance.
The effects of fear, loss and hospitalisation on an ordinary life.
Relationships and everyday practices that helped make a return possible.
Who it is for
Begin here if you want the lived story behind The Dream State Compass. The memoir offers an entry point for readers of personal narrative, people with their own unusual experiences, and family members or supporters seeking a closer understanding.
Its place in the Compass
The memoir is the lived starting point for the wider project. When Meaning Becomes Sovereign takes up a question that follows from it: how can an interpretation become powerful enough to govern a life?
Explore When Meaning Becomes Sovereign · About the Compass project
A shorter way into the writing
We Are Vast. A shorter reflection on how much of a life can remain outside another person’s view.
Read more or get in touchDream State: The Storm Within is available on Amazon in paperback and as a Kindle eBook. Read the opening chapter above for a preview. For reading samples, interviews or other enquiries, contact Justin about Dream State: The Storm Within.
Browse all five books · Read the Field Notes · Meet the author