In 1958 the Belgian cartoonist George Remi was plagued by unbearable depression. This manifested as nightmares of unending white, and he poured this into his work, writing Tintin in Tibet, some say the best Tintin volume. The further into the story, the more snow fills the frames, with the middle of the story practically a whiteout. As he brought the story to a successful rescue, the white, little by little, disappeared from the pages, and from the dreams. Hergé’s dreams were exorcised.

This is barely relevant to my situation, but I love to tell the story. My persistent dream for the first half of last year was of returning to university, not for the academia, but for the small brick student halls where I lived. Again and again I dreamed I moved back to that home I loved, though it was small and basic and - my parents thought - like a prison - because it was such s time of making friends and feeling free of obligations - freer than at any other part of my life. I was unhappy at school and at home, but in Swithen - the name of the housing block - I found my people and my peace. I found confidence so quickly I was really arrogant - more than you might imagine - but I was on a campus full of actors, writers and music theatre practitioners, so arrogance was inevitable.

My recurring dreams take me back there for another year of delight. I hate nostalgia, so on one level these dreams are retrogressive, a retreat. And the dreams can’t come true, in any case, as the housing blocks have been utterly destroyed, reduced to rubble, and now even the rubble has gone.

Hergé put his recurring dreams into art and so did I, and made my most personal ever project, and maybe my best. I decided to make a game about dreaming of a lost home, and living in your dreams, with joy at the the glimpses of history, but a twinge of sadness knowing it’s all gone in reality - that this is a wake or a memorial.

I envisaged it as an art piece. Somehow the game ended up as a colourful comedy in which you play Sheepy, one of the first sheep to go to a human university. You get to take or ignore classes, sniff bins and lollop around campus making friends. It’s not what I’d imagined the game to be. It was better. Sheepy is delightful company, and their friends change and develop, and some fall out or fall away, and there’s plenty to regret. It’s a game about discrimination and mourning and having things taken away, but also about friendship, transition and finding yourself. Plus it has a minigame about finding battenberg cakes for a horse.

It’s a free game, but confusingly is called ‘Buy Hyacinths’, which is taken from a poem carved on the real-world campus.

If thou of fortune be bereft, and of thine earthly store have left two loaves, sell one and with the dole, buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

That’s terrible advice, but maybe good to ponder. The game was three months of intense work in every spare hour - harder and more sustained than anything else I’ve done, as it was to a deadline. And Sheepy was beloved, and my recurring dreams went away. Now if I want to spend time in the home I once loved, I could do it as Sheepy

If your dreams come around again and again use them, paint them, externalise them. Whether the dream is good or bad, you can make it into something real, and that’s a lot better than making one come true.

And if you despair, but have two bread, eat them, or feed the birds instead, and if you spend too long asleep, wake up, make art and be a sheep!