Dreaming is an act of resistance.

I said, I want to write a story about a bird who wants to be human, for an audience who doesn’t yet know that they’re a bird.

I’ll respond to the space, I said, to the arched wrought iron window with curving green glass vines and small rectangles cut from an early winter lake.

I want to surprise people, I said. I want them to believe they’re one thing only to realise they’ve been something else all along.

So that in the end, no one — bird or human — can situate themselves in the body and circumstances into which they were born.

Dreaming is an act of resistance born of creativity and hope.

But as I sit down to write, the words … don’t … come.

I find myself scrolling through headlines and statistics in an obsessive wave of what I call ‘atrocity consumption’.

Bullets … bombings … blockades … starvation … fear … loss … death.

My heart, my hands feel heavy with the weight of the words.

But dreaming is an act of resistance that can hold and soothe and sustain us.

Still, all I can think about are images of rubble-filled streets and stones.

Stones that can put a child in prison for over a decade.

Stones blasted to sand, lining the crater made by a 2000-pound bomb.

I feel my mouth full of stones as it becomes accustomed to a new vocabulary:

Genocide … war-criminal … blast radius … kill zone … collateral damage …

These words become part of our daily lexicon.

My tongue pushes the stones around my mouth as I make space for a new reality.

Dreaming is an act of resistance, but instead of making art, I scour the internet for the number of Palestinian deaths linked to acts of aggression.

I imagine an installation — a small stone placed for each named child murdered in the past 20 months of this genocide.

I hold a stone in my hand. I try to picture the shape and scale of the space that I would need to hold 18,000 stones, for 18,000 dead children.

The pile grows when I count the mothers and grandmothers, sisters and daughters.

It grows again with the fathers and grandfathers, brothers and sons.

How much space do I need to hold 54,000 stones, for 54,000 named dead?

Would they fill a stage, a room, a building?

Would they press into the souls of our feet, stab at our elbows and arms or the small of our backs as we try to get comfortable in our chairs?

How much space do I need for those 54,000 – plus the unknown and unnamed still buried under the rubble?

And what do we do with the injured? 123,000 bits of broken rock lie tossed in a corner, forgotten…

Dreaming is an act of resistance.

But how do I write about birds and fantasy when the reality we live in has become more unbelievable than the fiction we read?

I don’t have answers. But I know right from wrong.

And the next time I see you, I hope to take you on a journey.

I’ll tell you a story that begins with a bird and an open window in Shoreditch Town Hall.

And in the end, you’ll be surprised to discover that you have been a bird all along…

And no one can situate themselves in the body and circumstances into which they were born.