Jonathan Hallstrom, member of the one-man Icelandic directing collective TOOL, appears to be losing his grip on reality. Will he descend into mental illness? Will this improve his reel?

6am
I wake up with sweat all over my face. I start to wonder if my suspicions are true: was I just screaming at the top of my voice for 30 seconds? I turn round to my dog Billy, who looks like he has just licked a 40,000-kilowatt electric fence, and realise from his whimpering expression that it’s not a figment of my imagination. There is a loud, angry knocking from the flat upstairs. Just to put the icing on the humiliation cake.

6.01am
Things start to become clear. I was having a horrible dream that I was giving birth. It all comes flooding back… I am lying in a hospital bed. The experience is excrutiatingly painful, lasting for what feels like hours. The pain increases, building up to a zenith of agony, followed by a powerful feeling of relief: after a monumental squeeze my offspring finally pops out.

The nurse hands me a pile of swaddling, and as I look down, rubbing the sweat from my brow, I have tears in my eyes. A feeling of joy spreads across my being.

A beautiful, rosy-cheeked Digibeta cassette looks up at me from close to my chest. It has a cute little nose and even a tiny tuft of hair, near the spine.

My wife grabs my hand and squeezes it. The nurse smiles, the doctor even loses his professional Gordon Brown-style blank expression for a split second and squeezes out a kind of grin.

The nurse is ecstatic. “He looks just like you. He’s the perfect little child, I can’t believe you really made this tiny new life, on a budget of 25 grand!”

The dream is getting stranger and stranger. Why is the midwife using a light meter?

What a beautiful child. Look at his little cheeks. I want to watch him again. I’ve never felt so happy. It all makes sense now, this is why I struggled so long for all those years, all that effort, all those wasted treatments.

Wait a minute, aren’t I getting a little confused? I hear the sound of loud footsteps in the corridor, approaching fast. Something’s not right. I know the sound of those heels. It’s the manager of that awful band. She strides into the room, grabs the little Digibeta from my hands and we are locked in a tug of war.

She starts to wail and scream about how I am not the real father, how the baby doesn’t belong to me. What’s she going on about? “Hand it over. We’ll take it from here. It’s not finished. We still need more shots of the bassist!!” Has she gone mad?

I don’t understand what she’s saying. How can you take a child away from its parents? What’s all this stuff about painting out pimples? Leave my baby alone!

My baby is gone. My wife and the hospital staff have deserted me. I have been strapped down and cannot move. Things could not possibly get worse, I think. And then I realise my hands are disappearing. Somehow I finally break out of the industrial-strength leather straps. I limp, delirious, into the hospital corridor.

I enter the adjacent ward. It’s a dark room and everyone is wearing black.There is an editor seated in front of an avid and a group of people in expensive clothes are looking back at me with blank stares.

I peer down at the avid monitor, my facial expression not dissimilar to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby…

I look on with horror and scream with all my might as I see the most hideously wobbly tracking shots of a gangly, incompetent bass player strumming grotesquely. What have you doooonnneee toooo my baaayyybbeeee!!!

6.06am
Suddenly I sit bolt upright. I slowly regain consciousness.That was the most horrible nightmare I’ve had since… my last video shoot.

6.07am
Sweeping up the broken wine glasses, caused by my 200-decibel screams, I start apologising to my dog Billy for mentally damaging him.

He seems genuinely concerned. He starts to ask me whether this really is the right career path for me.

He suggests that my job is really no good for my health:. He lists a whole range of other jobs which don’t induce regular panic attacks. I keep telling him, it’s only a bad dream, don’t take it so seriously. The next video will be a walk in the park.

9.50am
Billy leaves for work (he is the creative director of an advertising agency), and it suddenly dawns on me – I really do need help. This is not the first time I’ve had this dream. Maybe it’s time to work through these issues.

10am
I swiftly make an appointment with a psychiatrist, and luckily he has a slot free in the afternoon.

4pm
Having spent the day writing a treatment, I decide not to submit it. I’m really proud of it, and don’t want to waste it on another rubbish emo band. I decide to pop it in the drawer and save it for a rainy day.

4.15pm
I finally lie back in the psychiatrist’s chair and he puts me under hypnosis. Initially I’m quite apprehensive about returning to that horrible dream. But I realise that reliving the nightmare is an important stage in recovery.

I start to feel relaxed, and having a chance to talk through my problems seems to be really helping. I’ve heard hypnotherapy is really effective for this kind of thing.

Strangely, as I fall into a trance, the analyst seems to be taking a real interest in the current state of the music-video industry. He asks me which bands I’m currently treating on. Perhaps his son wants to get into directing? The sound of his pencil rapidly scribbling down my thoughts slowly puts me to sleep…

Three weeks later
The nightmares seem to have gone completely. Thank God the insomnia is now a thing of the past (although this might actually be down to the fact that I haven’t done a job in three weeks).

Everything is going swimmingly, until I turn on MTV and to my horror a treatment I wrote three weeks ago is up there on the screen, reconstructed with eerily perfect precision, down to the last detail. I am horrified.I can’t understand this, who could have seen my treatment? I never showed it to a soul.

After the video they show the “making-of” documentary, and I notice a very weird thing. Standing by the First AD, stroking his white beard, is my psychiatrist, wearing a Hoxton-style cap and shouting over to the manager, cockily.. “OK one more shot of the bassist and we’re done”…

Ben Ib is a video director represented by Colonel Blimp