A girl at a party told me to stock up on iodine pills. She said that in the event of nuclear fallout, it’s important to protect your thyroid. On the street, I overheard someone on the phone saying, “Yeah, maybe I am trad, but you guys are living in Sodom and Gomorrah”. Members of a culty church are always hanging out in my neighbourhood, giving out flyers that say things like, “Trouble sleeping? Sense of impending doom? Free help available”. Then, of course, there was the recent eclipse. It’s a weird thing to watch the sky darken like that, to see the light suddenly change. It was a touch menacing. It reminds you that you’re a fleck, that the reality you inhabit, and believe to be solid, is as flimsy as a cobweb, and at any moment could be brushed aside, and everything could be utterly changed. These things seem to be everywhere now: little signs that something is coming, even if nobody quite knows what. Apocalyptic thinking has become ambient.I was thinking about the William Blake exhibition that was on a while ago at the National Gallery. Walking around it, I had this very strong sensation that we have come full circle.Blake was living through a moment when the world was being radically reorganised. The industrial revolution was changing the landscape and the way people lived. Science was changing how people understood nature and their own place in it. Revolutions were happening in America and France. Machines were appearing, cities were expanding. There was this enormous faith in reason and progress, but also enormous anxiety about what all this progress was doing to human beings.And Blake, in a sense, went in the other direction. He turned inward.He made his own cosmology. Angels, demons, prophets, monsters, visions. He distrusted the idea that reason alone could explain human experience. As the world around him became more technological and more convinced of its own rationality, his work became more visionary. He paid closer attention to his dreams.Look at what we have achieved. We have been to space. We can see images sent back from planets millions of kilometres away. We have mapped the human genome. We carry machines in our pockets that give us access to almost the entirety of recorded human knowledge. Artificial intelligence can generate images, write language, recognise patterns, simulate voices. Science has explained things that would have seemed supernatural even a few generations ago. The rational world has become almost fantastical in its capabilities.It seems to me that at the very moment when AI and technology are advancing at this extraordinary speed, people are turning inward again. Astrology. Tarot. Conspiracy theories. Manifestation. Alternative realities. Prophecies. Dreams. Online, people spend hours constructing elaborate explanations for world events because the official narrative doesn’t seem to add up. [ Was William Blake, one of England’s greatest poets, actually Irish?Opens in new window ]We live in a glut of information, but somehow it feels like information of the wrong kind: endless facts, data, images, explanations, and still the sense that something essential is missing. The things most worth knowing can’t always be arrived at through reason. There is another kind of knowledge that comes through vision, feeling, intuition, dreams – through sensing something before you can explain it. The more information we have, the more we seem to hunger for these other ways of knowing.It’s easy to dismiss all of this conspiracy as stupidity or irrationality, and people do, but I think that’s a pretty prosaic world view. Surely nobody is entirely devoid of a spiritual impulse, a yearning for a coherent and satisfying way of explaining the world. Everything has become so complicated, so abstract, so difficult for any individual person to comprehend, and sometimes the facts just don’t cut it.[ Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI is a striking manifesto of Christian humanismOpens in new window ]Freud thought dreams were messages from the unconscious, but messages that had to arrive in disguise, because the conscious mind censored what it didn’t want to know. Even on waking, we begin to forget or rationalise them. I love that idea: that some part of us is trying to tell us something, while another part is working just as hard not to hear it. Maybe that is what interests me about Blake, and about this return to the irrational now. The more sophisticated our instruments for measuring the external world become, the more intensely we search the internal one for signs. Sometimes we register something before we can explain it. Dreams do that; art can do it too. It can give form to an anxiety or a change in the atmosphere before there is language, evidence, even conscious understanding. I’m open to hearing what the rational mind filters out.