Primordial Sea

bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards to warm pellucid depths where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving back into his emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes centred on the lagoon, each of which seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels, those archaic regions of the central nervous system which controlled the forgotten zones of his mind. The landscape of the drowned world was the landscape of his own unconscious. He had come to it as inevitably as a traveller who has circled the globe returns to his starting point.

The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard