The spangles overhead, I decided, were stars. There were too many of course, as if they had multiplied in order to lessen and eventually eradicate the intolerably awesome spaces that gape betwixt them. I had hoped to witness this but it was not to be, for stars are like cats, solitary and jealous, and the sun came up, driving its siblings away.

Previously, enclosed areas and monsters had oppressed me. Now I beheld a wide deserted market place, which I found equally relentless. Nor was I relieved to find, each time I blinked, the scene changing in some devastating manner. A road stretched straight into the distance, mocking its circumbendibus crematorium-serving predecessor, with tumbling columns running along its length. Atop each toppling tower was something horrendous; precisely what, I shall never know, for my eyelids descended, changing the outlook to a reconstruction of my student days: discussions in the early hours, focusing, on this occasion, on cloud formations: can they ever take on a recognisably human form? I heard no debate, for shut-eye curtailed this recollection.

I had to have rest, so I hid my face in my hands. It all became internal. I lost my way in the labyrinth of nightmare, time, vision, memory. A wizened wizard appeared on a vast plain, culled from the real world which I have inhabited—for these past forty odd years?

The wizened wizard manipulated clouds, painting with them, making fearful forms which glowered and leered at me, something more than mere condensed watery vapour. I sought asylum, but the level tract of ground on which the wizened wizard and I stood was unblemished and met the blue sky on all horizons. The wizard toyed with his cloud puppets, not only overhead but also in the distance, for great monsters lumbered at the periphery where earth met sky.

Other personages began to assemble before my eyes. It was like watching so many postmortems, speeded-up and in reverse. The ground sprouted pigments, trapped within vilely shaped miniscule shards—the work of an army of mad mosaicists, perchance—which, all of a sudden, were lit up in certain areas from underneath, sending up shafts of horridly hued light, an evil addition to the wizard’s already formidable putrid paintbox and one which he made full use of, creating colour clouds of noxious intensity.

Crowds welled up from nowhere, looking most at home in the dreamscape—or whatever it was—leaving me as the only incongruity, with mounting trepidation. But such phrases cannot begin to convey how I felt. I never thought that I would find myself relating to Nat’s “doom-laden” feelings, but even his ultra-way-out artworks, with all the benefit of having studied the masters of the macabre and fantastic (Bosch, Goya, Fuseli, Dore and that weird art brut phenomenon that so obsessed him), could not begin to prepare one for this assault; how could it? Creativity, however pessimistic it appears, is quintessentially optimistic, proven by the fact of its actual existence.