I’M LIVING A “LUCID LIFE” WHERE THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN DREAMS AND WAKING CREATIVITY BLUR.

I’ve often wondered who’s really in charge when I write.

It took me until the later stages of my life to realise that the subconscious part of me is the smart Dave Cripps—I’m his dumber brother. He’s the one who builds the stories, twists the rules of reality, and leaves me scrambling to catch up.

I think this exists in all of us. The subconscious is incredibly powerful.

For me, it first manifested as lucid dreaming. At 8 or 9, I’d fall asleep imagining myself as a superhero, then wake up mid-adventure, fully aware, fully in control. For years, I thought everyone does this. Turns out, they don’t.

In my teens, I started waking up with entire worlds—vast, layered, and alive. Around the same time, music took over my life, and I began dreaming songs, waking up with melodies I hadn’t consciously written. When it became obvious I wasn’t going to be a global rock star, the stories came back. And this time, they never left.

For over twenty years, I’ve been dreaming of a world I call Baobab. I didn’t invent it—I just listened.

Polyphrenia is the first novel to arrive from that dream universe (as a joke, I call it the CrippsVerse) with the short story Lucid-X as my first published work.

So, I write the stories my subconscious hands me. I don’t always understand them at first, but I follow where they lead.

I live in West Sussex, on the south coast of England. You’ll often find me at a café, on a beach, or on my commute, transcribing last night’s dreams onto my reMarkable tablet, still trying to figure out what they mean.

Dave