This is very much a personal one. Buckle up, reader, it’s a long one.

I woke this morning from one of those ‘dreeeeeeams are my reality’ kinda dream. I was in a hospital, also somehow a hotel, and I had been there for several days. I knew there was something VERY wrong with me. My face was burning hot, I felt confused and lucid at the same time, I could not quite control myself, and the more I tried to explain that I was unwell, the less people seemed to believe me. At some point they had confused me with another, fugitive, woman. I could hear nursing tut-tuting ‘she’s making it all up’. I was trying to tell them, no, this is happening, I know something is wrong, and the terror of the dream was not simply that I was deeply unwell, but that I was trapped inside an experience I could not seem to communicate and seeing my sense of agency and authority over my own experience eroding in ‘real’ time.

There were – because, dreams –  all sorts of other insanity-checking stuff going on. I was trying leave the hospital on a tiny dog horse covered in layers of dresses while failing to pack my mountainous belongings in non-existent boxes. There were presents because, birthday (I’m a September gurl, through and through). Of course, there also were kittens under the bed, because, me. There were pretty manicured gardens and hidden up and down tower passages as different routes back to my room. Familiar faces appeared and went, logical or not. Mini bottles of gin. Dioramas. Normal Katherine busy brain stuff, in short. 

But when I woke up, it was in utter terror, not at the surreal, but at the absurd completeness of the ‘REAL’ feeling. I did not dream about fear, vulnerability, confusion and not being believed. For these few moments, I was them.

Rather shell-shocked and discombobulated (yes I will use any chance of using this brilliant word), I knew how well constructed the dream had been from material, thoughts, events around me. Mortality talk is big around here recently, with oldies in hospital in different stages of incapacity, so ageing, vulnerability, people losing control over their bodies, people wondering whether they can trust their own minds, people having to rely on other people to tell them what is happening is definitely a thing. I could easily take the dream apart piece by piece and find the origin of every fragment. Even the heat had a wonderfully boring explanation: it’s very simply hot in our top of the house bedroom. My brain had hoovered everything available, sensations, conversations, anxieties, memories, empathy, birthday debris, heat, exhaustion, and fed it through some internal nutribullet and regurgitated it as an entire temporary world for me to ‘play’ in. Which of course is what dreams are supposed to do, but did it have to be so goddamn vivid?? Nothing new in the head of that karuski, and yet it bears taking notice as my brain was definitely having the last laugh on me. 

Only a couple of hours earlier, in a bout of inconvenient nighttime wakefulness, I had been trying to capture via voice note the way I experience the world, especially the way I process the world and people experiences. Was that an expression of autistic monotropism, my not so sleepy mind wondered, but it felt like more than that. Something a lot more immersive, this strange porousness between receiving something intellectually and taking it in bodily. What happens when information is not simply information, but becomes suffused, felt, more sensation, feeling, image, association, atmosphere. And then I went back to sleep and my brain apparently decided that theory was insufficient and produced a full-on demo version, a very literal expression of corporeal immersion. Not empathy in the rather tidy sense of imagining how somebody else might feel, but something messier and much less voluntary: receiving fragments of other people’s experience alongside my own sensory and emotional material, processing the whole lot somewhere below conscious thought, and then finding myself temporarily inside the thing I had been trying to understand. The dream was a fever dream without an actual fever, an inflation of the very real heat into a personal mini hell, an internal simulation assembled out of everything I had been carrying lately. And it was terrifying.

I often describe myself as a connector, a translator: I take things in. I notice, absorb, connect, process. Sometimes that happens in thought, sometimes in conversation, sometimes in writing, and sometimes, apparently, my brain builds an entire hospital and puts me inside it.

And this happens with enough regularity that I feel the need to take notice.

Take RuPaul’s Drag Race: we’ve been going through episodes as if going out of fashion (ohoh) with my daughter recently, a proper TV binge fest (this might not seem like the most obvious route into a theory of consciousness but there we are). The next day as I cycle to yoga (yes I am that person now), I started picturing every passer by in their own drag version, and getting so excited about it. 

We could all do with a bit of drag in our life, I thought, a chance to see ourselves as sublimated, exaggerated versions of ourselves, taking that diamond nugget at our deepest core and giving it life on the outside in armfuls of fabulous silks and artful paints and sashays and lipsync battles. Drag is not disguise. It’s revealing yourself through artifice. Something that might ordinarily remain dispersed, private, contradictory or difficult to explain becomes concentrated enough to see and celebrate.

So I wished every passers by this gift, to feel sublimated and celebrated for all the beauty they keep inside for fear of being seen and judged, when we could all do with a lot more loving appreciation. Be good, be bad, just be. If you don’t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?

This is no longer TV watching, this is the Ru lens affixing itself firmly on my reality and sublimating THAT. And it’s not just ‘too much TV’ that does that brain trick. A James Ellroy bender sent me in paranoid fits walking the streets, convinced the next black dahlia killer was near. A bit too much Secret Lives of Mormon Wives will get me bringing up a lot of talk on accountability, character and speaking my truth in my coaching sessions (drat, that’s TV again). 

You get the point. Things go in, deep. Sensory information, somebody’s facial expression, a sentence I read twenty years ago, a conversation from yesterday, the particular quality of somebody’s silence, a song, a colour, a political idea, a client describing something they cannot quite name, something I noticed on Drag Race, something somebody said about their mother, the shape of a room. They all get whizzed together, and eventually something comes back out: a connection, an image, an explanation, a piece of writing, a question I ask somebody, sometimes an understanding of something I did not consciously know I was trying to understand.

This is probably why being a connector feels so foundational to me. I am almost compulsively lining things up. This resembles this. That thing you have just told me belongs next to something you said three months ago. This experience that looks like one thing from the outside may make much more sense if we put it beside this apparently unrelated experience. Sometimes I can almost feel the lines appearing between things. They are not always useful, of course. A Nutribullet is capable of producing both soup and sludge. But the underlying movement feels extremely consistent: receive, process, connect, redistribute.

For a long time I think I interpreted this largely as intellectual curiosity, but I now wonder more if that description misses the most important part, which is how bodily the whole operation is.

I don’t only absorb things. I seem, sometimes, to enter them.

Music is another obvious example. I have self-medicated through gigs ever since, age 13, I saw Annie Lennow belting Thorn In My Side in her red bra and leather pants. Live music can alter my lived experience so comprehensively that describing it as ‘liking music’ is pretty insulting. 

Music hits my chest, my feet, my mind all at once. Singing along at the front, while dancing and swishing my hair is one of my absolute life treasures. Because in that moment, I am not at a gig, I AM the gig. 

Stories can do this too. People can do it. An idea can do it. I can become so absorbed in somebody else’s way of seeing that for a period of time I am not simply considering their perspective but trying it on from the inside. It is one of the reasons conversation can feel intoxicating to me when it is good, because I am not exchanging information in neat parcels. Something much stranger is happening. Your world comes towards me; I allow it in; it collides with whatever is already there; both things change slightly in the collision.

Sometimes this produces joy. Sometimes it produces understanding. Sometimes it produces extraordinarily intense attachments because the desire to understand another person can become almost cannibalistic: let me in, let me see all of it, let me understand how this organism works. There is something in that which I now recognise as potentially dangerous as well as beautiful, because immersion is not the same thing as connection, and losing the edge of yourself is not necessarily evidence that you have reached osmosis, but that you have gone too far. Sometimes we want to lose our own selves, because we’re not that happy with what we have (cue, back to RuPaul and love yourself…).

I have had periods of my life when this capacity for immersion has meant that another person, another place or another version of myself could become almost totalising. I could move into an environment and absorb it very quickly, including its rhythms and language and possibilities, and for a while that world would feel like the whole world. Australia did that to me. Relationships have done it. Work has done it. Ideas certainly do it. There is a kind of exuberance in being able to enter something so completely, but there can also be a peculiar instability in it: if I can inhabit so many things, what remains mine?

I think perhaps this is why rootedness has become more interesting to me as I have got older. Not rootedness as restriction, because restriction makes me immediately want to chew through the fence, but having enough of a stable environment that I can plunder it. Somewhere to return to. Enough continuity around me that I can go fully into something without needing to become it permanently.

I felt something related to this recently at the end of a movement class, lying in shavasana in a room full of people who had spent the previous hour moving individually but together. There was no requirement to perform intimacy with each other. Nobody was talking. And yet I could almost perceive the room as having acquired a shared substance, a sort of blanket of connected energy, like the tiny particles you can sometimes see moving through a shaft of sunlight. Philip Pullman’s Dust came to mind, this visible field of something produced between conscious beings. Call it woo, I say so what, I’m here for it. Something happens when bodies occupy a space together, respond to one another, settle together, breathe together. The fact that it can be described physiologically does not make the experience less extraordinary.

This may also be why coaching makes so much sense to me, and why I struggle sometimes to describe what I actually do. From the outside it can look as though two people are sitting in a room having a conversation, but internally I am receiving enormous amounts of information at once. Words, certainly, but also tempo, contradiction, repetition, energy, what somebody moves quickly across and where they suddenly slow down, the thing they laugh at immediately after saying something painful, the phrase they have used three times without appearing to notice it. I am not consciously cataloguing all of this. Most of the time I could not tell you how I got from A to B. Something goes into the machine and a connection comes out, and I offer it back: is this anything? Does this belong here? Does this explain something?

The good version of that process is not me deciding what somebody else means. Quite the opposite. It is using whatever this strange receiving apparatus is to create another possible route into their own experience, and then handing authority straight back. I can inhabit something alongside somebody without claiming ownership of it. Perhaps this is one of the things I have had to learn: immersion does not have to mean annexation.

And inevitably I wonder how much of this belongs with neurodivergence.

I am cautious about making one of those enormous claims in which every interesting human quality is suddenly ‘because autism’ or ‘because ADHD’. Human beings notice patterns. Human beings become absorbed. Human beings have empathy and imagination and dreams and bodies. But there are aspects of autistic and ADHD experience that seem extremely relevant to the particular configuration I am describing: differences in sensory processing, the amount of information that may arrive without being efficiently filtered into foreground and background, intense interests, associative thought, pattern recognition, hyperfocus, emotional and bodily intensity, the difficulty sometimes of knowing which signals are internal and which have been picked up from the environment.

Perhaps the thing I have tended to think of as ‘too much’ is partly an abundance problem. Too much comes in, and therefore a great deal has to happen to it.

Which brings me back to the dream.

My brain had spent weeks receiving fragments of other people’s vulnerability, alongside my own thoughts about ageing and mortality and illness, and then spent the middle of the night thinking explicitly about immersion and the way I turn information into experience. I went back to sleep in a hot room and, without consulting me, it staged the argument.

It took abstract knowledge about vulnerability and made me vulnerable. It took accounts of people worrying that they were confused or not being listened to and made me feel the terror of knowing what was happening while nobody believed me. It took actual heat on my face and turned it into evidence that something catastrophic was happening to my body. It took birthday presents, anxiety, family, hospitals, gardens, kittens and God knows what else and built a coherent emotional world from completely incoherent material.

That seems important to me, because I think I have spent a lot of my life valuing the output of this process while misunderstanding the machinery. I have liked the connections, the insight, the writing, the ability to sit with somebody and suddenly see a pattern. I have been rather less appreciative of the fact that the same system that creates those things also has to process everything it receives, including material I may not consciously think has affected me very much.

Perhaps there is no clean way to separate the gift from the cost. The permeability that lets me enter music or ideas or another person’s experience so completely is also the permeability that sometimes leaves too much inside. The mind that connects apparently unrelated things while I am awake carries on connecting them when I am asleep. The body participates whether I invite it to or not.

I don’t think the answer is to become less permeable. I don’t particularly want to stand at a safe intellectual distance from everything. There is far too much pleasure in immersion, too much curiosity, too much of the way I love and work and think contained in it.

But perhaps the task is to become better at knowing when I am inside something, what belongs to me, what I have picked up, and where the exits are.

To retain the ability to disappear into an experience without losing the route home.

Preferably not on a tiny dog horse.