The car was from the more reserved and elegant era of American automotive design, before the dominance of fins and chrome. It wasn’t new, and far from pristine. Rust speckled the chrome bumpers, poorly repaired crash damage had wrinkled the offside front wing and the driver’s window was jammed half down and discoloured milky-white. Next to the Buick a picnic was laid out on a red blanket, a bottle of wine in a cooler, a folding chair. Beyond the car, about a half-mile away, I could see, sitting quite by itself on the unceasing carpet of green a Morpheleum, a temple to the god Morpheus. Old, abandoned, but looking incongruous, yet somehow safe.

I could make an intelligent guess as to how these two dream scenarios had been created in my mind. First of a woman whom I’d met and liked and mixed with her paintings and my holidays in the Gower, and secondly, the dream I had been told about, mixed with the inescapable omniscience of Don Hector and HiberTech. I already had the broad parameters; my mind had filled in the rest like so much builder’s plaster. It was quite a feat – no wonder dreams burned energy.

I was about to step from the boulders when I stopped. Birgitta, Moody and Porter Lloyd had all warned me: stay on the rocks.

Intrigued, I stepped down to one of the lower stones and prodded the soil with an inquisitive toe. Almost immediately a hand shot out of the ground and closed around my ankle with a vice-like grip. I cried out in horror, swayed and almost fell off the rocks, then recovered and pulled back as hard as I could, my fingernails splitting and cracking where I grasped the stone. And then, after we had tussled for a few seconds the hand abruptly let go and swiftly sank from view while I retreated to the highest point of the rock-pile. Notwithstanding the fact that I knew that none of this was real, I sat shaking, breathing in short gasps. I then noticed that there were more hands – dozens if not hundreds – and watched with an increasing sense of horror as they moved slowly around the tree, as attackers might circle a hopeless last defence. Occasionally they would halt to fuss with a tussock of grass, sniff the air and occasionally squabble before carrying on with their patrol. I knew now what Moody had meant when he spoke in horrified tones of the hands.

No, wait, back up a moment. Upon reflection, I couldn’t have known what Moody had been frightened of. He’d only made mention of ‘hands out to get him’. I must have simply invented the scenario to fit in with the trees and the rocks. The outline was the same, the dream was different.