My uncles had started a business. Because in my head the Royal Free was a private hospital. I don’t know why I thought that. So they were raising money with this business to pay for my care. And they were building an extension for the Royal Free, because they were [full] to capacity, and I was in the Great British Bake Off tent outside. [laughing] So they were building this cover over to make it warmer. So that was a bit weird.

But the hallucinations – I dreamt, or I hallucinated, that of a night, when everyone had gone home and it was lights out sort of time, about 10 o’clock, midnight, it would turn into an animal rescue centre. So the first night there was dogs, and one dog got in bed with me, and it was at the end of my bed. He was really cold, so the nurse covered him with a sheet, to keep him warm. And then the next night was cats. And – they filled the beds with ice. And then they got out frozen fish from the freezer. And it wasn’t just frozen fish, it was boil-in-the-bag fish. So I thought it was really mean that they were throwing this fish in for it to defrost, but then once it defrosts, the cats had to get through the plastic – they weren’t cutting it out. And there was a cat called Baby Cat, and they were all wandering around waiting for this um fish to melt down.

It was only after about a week or two weeks on the actual ward that I realised I was still hallucinating in the ward. I thought I was perfectly fine and perfectly normal, and then I realised, ‘Oh actually, all of that was hallucination.’ And when I got more with it, that’s when I made the distinction – that was hallucinations, that was nightmares – and the more I told people about them – the nightmares were terrifying, so scary – but I think because I could distinguish they were nightmares and didn’t happen, I could put it out of my head.

The hallucinations were worse because they were things you actually saw happening, you weren’t asleep. But, luckily, I found my hallucinations hilarious and so did everybody else. I think if I’d told other people and they’d gone ‘Ooh, oh, OK, that sounds scary,’ it would have made it worse, but the fact that everybody was laughing at them…. Other people probably looked and thought ‘Why are they laughing at that?’ But it made it so much better, because then I could laugh about them and then they weren’t serious.

As I got more with it I tried to find out where they came from. And every hallucination, bar 1 or 2 with cats and dogs in them – I can’t work out where that came from – every other one had a basis that happened, or something was said and then my mind took it somewhere else.