Dream: Goldfish in the cistern in my parents’ downstairs loo, which turned transparent for the occasion. They were complaining politely because the water was low and would I mind bleeding the radiator? They were going blue, as if they were swimming in a lustrous royal blue paint. I said, sure. I twisted the knob and the water filled back up and they turned gold again.

Real life: A 22-year old from Beckenham has a fetish of putting on latex gloves and scooping up fish and eating them. Would I talk to him about it? Get him going? Describe in detail how would I do it? Please, just talk about it, a little bit, please... He didn’t know why it turns him on. It just does.

Nightmare: I can’t get the Danish entry out of my head. Poor bloody Estonia. Oh, shit. That’s reality.

Real life: A waiter from Israel has an image of his sexuality like a tailor’s scissors. Sharp, dangerous. He’s very lonely. But as long as sex doesn’t come into the equation, he’s very sweet. Nothing to be frightened of. Butter wouldn’t melt in his sweet succulent mouth.

Nightmare: Someone I love goes mad and I resist following him, with all my might. But I’ve looked into his eyes. Madness is infectious, it’s a relational thing. The world is no longer safe. It never was. Safety is an illusion. As is fear.

Someone once said that all fear is fear of death.

Fact: A 33-year old psychiatric nurse is into satanism, glorifying and ritualising perverse sexual acts such as coprophilia and being whipped, with props of upside-down crucifixes and skulls. His patient is a broken smiling man who feels that his calling is to kiss children – any children, all children, for they need all the love they can get, he says. The outraged parents, naturally enough, beg to differ, and so he gets locked up. He knows no pain at the moment; he is “managed” into acceptable sociable behaviour with powerful drugs, and wanders around with the bruised nobility of a five-year-old itinerant child fiercely playing the mouth-organ in the rain to fund his mother’s drinking.

His nurse knows no such comfort. The frisson of shock he felt when the Virgin Mary was blasphemed, in his ritualistic encounter with his dark side, shook him to his core: he never thought the roots of his Catholicism ran so deep in his psyche. But when he came, it was the most intense orgasm of his life.

Picture this: snapshots of lunatic and keeper. Who is who? Your guess is as good as mine.

Fact: A nice police officer from Scotland Yard thanks me for letting him know that a child pornographer is blatantly selling his wares on a chatline. But he’s doing it right now, I insist, why don’t you call the number and listen to the fucker proclaim “London, likes ‘em young and smooth, videos for sale”? What can be done? “Thank you sir, I’ve taken a note of that”, he stonewalls. Nail the fucker, I say. Do it like the telly and get him in a sting operation and find out where he lives and raid his flat and find his address book and get them all, those blank-faced destroyers of innocence bestowing the blight of self-hatred to the next generation. “Leave it to us, sir. Thanks for your call”. He hangs up. If I ruled the world… I slip effortlessly into narcissistic grandiosity, as we say in the trade. Or I just get mad.

Dreamfact: A man tells me of his two-year relationship with a university professor, to whom he was devoted as a slave. Prof would come home and give orders, slave would obey. Housekeeping, menial tasks, futile tasks, sexual acts; all on his master’s whim. Resistance met with punishment. Adrenaline kept him alert and obsessed 24 hours a day, in ecstatic frenzy. After a year, slave doesn’t feel he has a right to ask when his master starts coming home late at night, or not at all. Eventually, the worm turns, and betrayed slave ends the relationship. Bitter and lonely, he’s puzzled why his master fell out of love with him and treated him so badly, and mournfully searches for a repeat of the feeling of safety he found, when every detail of his life was moulded around the wishes of another man. “Well, he certainly humiliated you. Isn’t that what a slave craves?” “Not that much”, he said, wistfully. And now? “I want to be dominated, and told what to do.” Like flies to shit, we return to the dismal safety of what we know, of what we have always known. How can we imagine a different reality?

Fantasy: I write a beautiful book on depression, a personal exploration of how our soul-connectedness goes AWOL for no reason at all, and for all the reasons in the world.

Fact: It’s been done, by Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon. An achingly beautiful testament to life and love, written from the perspective of someone who has lost his contact with both. What better viewpoint is there?