I have to write this fast, for if I stop to think then I won’t write at all. Today, I wish I didn’t use my own life as a source for this column, for I am not turbocharged enough to peek around and comment on the world outside.

The reality is that, post the catharsis of writing about my attack, and dealing with its disturbing effects, my life has to settle down to ordinariness – and there’s a part of me that resists ordinariness, like death. Anything but fading back to being just another student, just another commuter in grey London. Specialness is a drug, and I’m withdrawing from it badly, even if it’s the perverse specialness of having a sympathy-inducing bruised face. More attention, please, more – like a child part of me wheedling his mother at the check-out in front of the sweets. Knowing he won’t get any doesn’t stop him whining. It’s something to do, a comforting cracked record. What’s the choice, give up trying for more chocolate, more attention? Never. Oops, I spilled the Smarties all over the shop floor. Bad boy. Bad boy. Got the attention, though, it’s all about me again. Thanks, I’ll have more of that. You can’t have any more, you’ll get sick. Oh, mum...

Last night, over a pint, I told my friend that I aimed today to reach a tone of deep irony for you, dear readers. Like a tin of paint. It would be a shade of purple, I think, a sort of mauvey-burgundy, the colour of red wine stains, that inky-black metallic undertone. My friend was telling me, a propos of our drinking, that he always gets horny when he has a hangover, and didn’t everyone? I wondered about that, and hadn’t remember registering that in myself – but, sure enough, this morning my lunatic is awake. Ain’t the power of suggestion something?

It’s hard to describe what it’s like in the grip of an erotic attack – because it doesn’t make any rational sense, and to try and trace its roots is futile, for sane, domestic common-or-garden logic gets mashed along the way; it’s part of the anarchic sexual function. It is thinking with one’s dick, and once in the grip of it, the sane brain doesn’t get a look-in. I used to see carnal cravings as a symptom of a bruised soul, desperate to escape from “normal” existence, in exactly the same way as smoking, drinking, drug-taking; anything can be symptomatic of a “fix” mentality. The key to whether it’s addiction or not is whether the more you have, the more you want – like pap to mother’s milk, the real stuff nourishes, the ersatz widens the gap inside.

But the whole point of an erotic attack is not only to have sex as soon as possible, in a primitive urge to distribute our genes, nor is it merely to escape the mundane, but to engage the fantasy function, to imagine an object of desire that symbolises something of our experience of our lives, and along the way, experienceing intense pleasure. The act of symbolism is creative – the brain enters an altered, magickal state. Bodies, in whole or in part, take on numinous projections, beamed out from our most stressed and challenging parts of our psyches – the bits that are calling for our attention, that need to be worked out, teased out, screened in the form of pictures, of actions, of sounds, of smells. Sexual imagery is raw and unfiltered and very politically incorrect. And it’s not about feelings for the object – it’s an internal, selfish, masturbatory frenzy, that bears little or no relation to the person or persons on the receiving end. Feelings are secondary to the imaginal creative act – even if the fantasy is something that is repetitive, the psychodrama of it is intensely personal, and says something fundamental about how we see ourselves in relation to others.

Far from addictive escape, these fantasies are clues to self-knowledge. If we treat them as sinful and shameful, we’ll never decipher the message, and we’ll stay stuck in a repetitive cycle – which is where the addiction comes in. But if we examine them without the prurience or disgust that a religion-based mentality often brings, we can appreciate the magical nature of how our soul copes with the mysteries of an often cruel and randomly unfair world. To respond to slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with pleasurable fantasy, to turn it around into symbolism, imagery, creativity; that’s no sin.

The clue I suppose to whether the message from your fantasies is worth listening to, is what happens when it’s all over, when the tissues are thrown away, and the feelings flood back in to the void, like seawater flooding a sandcastle’s moat. That’s when the psyche speaks to us loudest, that ache, those blues.