When I dream, it is because the human half of me is asleep. In those moments, my demon part is awake and, usually, I feel something beyond any human emotion—something far beyond human rage, beyond human hunger—but, since my human body is paralyzed by sleep, my demon half can’t act on its feelings. Instead, it dictates my dreams. In my dream last night, Kora Studios was on fire; I couldn’t see it but I knew that the rest of the world was on fire too. Trees were sticks of charcoal, jutting out of the ground. They crumbled when they were poked. Ben had come to my studio, which was dark and cool, his skin bright red from the heat, his mouth wide open in agony. I took his hands, and his body slumped into mine, and he whispered a few times, “I’m so hungry, I’m so hungry, I’m so hungry.” And, then, I ate him.

I’m lying awake on the floor of my studio. I start my internship at the OTA, a gallery in Battersea, this afternoon. The gallery’s nickname is the Otter; OTA actually stands for Osmund, Toth, and Akagi, the three founders—three experimental artists from the 1960s who were associated with the Fluxus Group. Tomoe Akagi is known in artistic circles for having beat Nam June Paik to be the first person to perform a work of art inside a whale. Though, I don’t think Paik actually wanted to create work inside a whale. His work, Creep into the Vagina of a Live Whale, was about creating an impossible piece of performance art, one that wasn’t to be attempted, and could exist only in the minds of the audience. As readers of that instruction, we inevitably imagine ourselves parting the soft flesh of a whale without her noticing, a corridor opening up, stepping inside, breaking through her hymen, creeping into her uterus. I couldn’t work out how I felt about this work when I read it for the first time; I remember thinking, Ugh, of course he has chosen a female animal, and of course he has us enter her without her realizing. I couldn’t tell what the point of the work was. It seemed to only exist to be shocking. Akagi had sewn himself into the stomach of a deceased beached whale somewhere in Scandinavia, where whale meat is eaten, and, after that, he was known as the artist who beat Nam June Paik. Unlike that of the other Fluxus artists, Akagi’s work wasn’t completely nihilistic; he wrote a long letter to the whale, apologizing for his generation’s mistreatment of the environment, and sewed it into the whale’s stomach with himself.