Over a period of years as a teenager I’d had a dream, like something out of a Hitchcock thriller, all black and white with heavy, dramatic music. Think darkened bedrooms in a period mansion, all heavy drapes and candlelit interiors throwing dark shadows on the panelled walls. I wake up in the middle of the night and the curtains are billowing slightly in a breeze, suggesting the windows are open – but they shouldn’t be, it’s night-time, is there someone behind them? I look down to the floor and can see a pair of boots poking out beneath the curtains, a chill grips my chest and I wake up. This recurring dream came over a period of a few years, not very often but enough to register in my awareness until, again in the dream, at the climax when I would normally wake up, I shouted angrily “I’ve had enough of this”, and wrenched the curtains apart to face whatever unseen horrors awaited. Of course, there was nothing there, and the spell of this unknown fear was broken and hasn’t returned in over fifty years – shades of Oz perhaps. The concept that I was facing an inner fear didn’t occur to me at the time, but the recollection of the dramatic dream stayed in my memory. Ever the creative, inventive playwright, my inner dramatist came up with a new script in 1999, as I prepared to reinvent myself as a freelance photographer. Less than two years before, I’d become corporate photographer at a business where I’d been employed as a chartered Quantity Surveyor for seven years, my career of over twenty years, a major change in itself. I was proposing to abandon full-time employment for the precarious existence of a freelance. Maybe I’d not been paying attention to how I felt about this momentous challenge, because the dream that came put me on the short jib of a tower crane, trembling (the jib, and probably me too, filling me with dread) and threatening to float away, forcing me to my hands and knees to make my way to the relative safety of the long jib of a nearby crane, where I could walk upright, confidently. At the time I was negotiating to continue some photography commissions on a freelance basis, I was anxious that a short contract would be insufficient to start up, whereas the longer contract I was confident of success. By this time I was regularly recording my dreams in a diary and able to work with them, which was a lifeline when I found myself paralysed with fear on a ladder half way up a tower crane in December 2000. Seeing the connection between fear, the dream of the tower crane, the reality of the fearful experience on the building site and using channelling to deal with it took time to fully register.