In his worst dreams Warren Fellows is on a sun-kissed beach, joking with friends while the setting sun sinks slowly over the horizon. As light changes with nightfall, a heavy-set guard with a bunch of clanking keys marches towards him. The friends have gone. 'Get back to your cell,' barks the guard.
At this point Fellows wakes up in a lather of nervous sweat, remembering all too vividly the horrors of Thailand's Bang Kwang prison. 'I don't think I'll ever get over it,' he says from Sydney, where he lives with his mother.
Looking back 20 years, Fellows can scarcely recognise the person he was - a happy young newlywed with a toddler son and a wide circle of friends. He didn't know anything about drugs then; his only vice was an over-exuberant habit of betting at the racetrack.
When his bets went bad and he got into debt, a friend of a friend tempted him with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - a heroin-smuggling trip from Thailand to Sydney. He made several excursions, netting more than A$200,000 (about HK$1.09 million).
'I was not thinking at that time about the damage the drugs could do,' he says. 'I didn't understand how they break up families - my job was just to get them in.' Then he was caught. Fellows learned a lot about heroin in prison. He became an addict himself. 'You see all these horrific things and after a while you give in to it and say: 'I have to have something.' It was an escape from reality.' While he was behind bars, his father died and his brother was killed in a car crash. His wife divorced him soon after his jailing.
Today, seven-and-a-half years since hearing the jangle of keys in Bang Kwang for the last time, he has kicked his habit, though he still avoids reality.