Sometimes your eldritch girlfriend puts you in time out by banishing your consciousness into The Ocean, and sometimes you have to walk into the waves and undergo the experience of dying before your consciousness is able to return to the waking world.
Rafael has always had a lot of trouble with anxiety, and developed paranoid thoughts as he grew into adulthood. He manages it very well, all things considered--but ever since meeting Cortes, he will occasionally have dreams where he is stuck on a beach, under a starless sky, with a cliff wall to his back that extends far into the darkness, and an endless expanse of ocean before him. And it's quiet, save for the wind and the waves. There is no life on the beach nor in the water.
Just him.
Sometimes, the waves are gentle like this, other times, they are large and crashing. That's usually when it is quite bad. "It" being the state of mind he was in before he fell asleep.
Cortes, more often than not, is able to put a dampening blanket on his anxieties and disordered thoughts effectively enough without putting him to sleep. But sometimes, it's not quite enough. Sometimes she decides he needs a good nap to reset himself with. She's never wrong in her decision.
Raf and Magritte have dubbed this Cortes-induced dream "Anxiety Beach". And in the worst moments, the waves are so tall and white and thunderous, that all Raf can think of doing in order to stop the deafening noise is to walk into them. Swallowed whole by the abyss, he sees--for a brief second--the world from Cortes' perspective. Indescribable. Terrifying. But when he wakes up, it is with with the comforting understanding of his place in life; that he is only a very small part of something much, much greater than himself.
And that he is going to be alright.