Dr Garrick Willis, the protagonist of my novel In Dreams, is a recently divorced neurologist who suffers premonitory dreams and intrusive violent fantasies. Willis loses his girlfriend Jade to a drug dealing pimp and comes to be wrongly accused of her murder, a crime that has plagued his waking fantasies and haunted his dreams. At the start of the novel, Garrick’s first patient for the afternoon is Nick Myshkin, with whom he has just shared a seat on the train from Meadowbrook to Princess Alexandra Hospital. Nick is a bass player in the grunge band Return of the Evil Youth for Christ, who deals amphetamines in Fortitude Valley nightclubs and pimps mysterious women on the streets. Garrick is not aware that his discomfort with Nick’s utterance of the name ‘Jade’, during complex partial seizures, is based in their common interest in the same woman, or that he and Nick were born to the same mother. Jade progressively unravels towards a violent end. Her attachment and investment moves from protagonist to antagonist, as her nursing colleague Rachel takes her place in Garrick’s heart. Garrick struggles to contain the expression of his passionate and violent emotions in poetry, to translate his destructive impulses into clinical research and expressions of love. His poems, integrated into the text, serve as vehicles for twists in its structure. He fails to heed his premonitory dreams, and his vacillations cost him dearly. He does too little, and always arrives just too late.