The last dream, the one that takes place before you wake and in some ways is the most vivid, thrusts you back into that first adult classroom, surrounded by easels and paint pots and huge tubes (that remind you of oversized toothpaste), by colours like Ivory Black and Cadmium Yellow Light. Sunshine falls from the window, one broad diagonal stroke, yet your space in the corner of the room is dark. Hidden. You are holding the paintbrush, unsure what might happen next, or indeed, how to make anything happen at all. You are looking at the canvas as though it might give a sign, or else extract the vision you have inside your head, that beautiful construction of light, angles and imagery, that formless thing that so very much wants to take shape. One look around the classroom rewards you with what you have long feared, even while at home, lying in bed, lost in your high. During the twenty-minute pod journey to the institute, looking out of the window at the incessant city beyond. Alone in the institute’s dining area, eating tuna and cucumber on brown. The feeling. Despite being with others, you are alone.

In the classroom, people are already dipping the thin fibres of their brush into mixtures of paints and water, working on their own interior images, painting, no less. People hunched in concentration, people glaring at the cracked ceiling in thought, people smiling to themselves, people flicking the brush against the canvas while the tutor, a stout, robust man in a blue shirt and brown slacks, walks between the flimsy maze of easels, nodding, stopping to speak with a student, moving on. And you? Well, the more the vision dances the more difficult it becomes to move the muscles of your arm, to daub paint onto the blank surface. And the more difficult it becomes, the more you wish the colours inside your head would communicate with the tubes beside your seat. Before you know it you’re reminded of the mouse who became a magician, the buckets and mops he commanded that sprang to life, that distant childhood memory. The paints begin to twitch and rise, swaying from pinched corner to corner, and the music starts, faint at first though growing louder, and you look to see who has noticed but everyone is gone; the tutor, the students, no one is there.

When you turn, there are dancing paint tubes moving in complete synchronisation, first single file and then side by side, coming closer. Their caps fly into the air every so often, land perfectly. They dance with more abandon, joined by the brushes, who swing stiff, glistening legs and waddle towards you, and the scratch of their feet against the wooden desk begins to tear at your nerves, and you back away, arms raised in front of your face, crying out in terror.