‘Search me,’ she said, ‘and on the face of it this is all batshit crazy, but this is my take: the parts of the dream you were told about are easy to explain, simple auto-suggestion. They mentioned it, you dreamt it. You saw stuff, knew about Zsazsa, it was included. The rest of the dream was you just filling in the gaps.’

‘I agree,’ I said, ‘but what about the rabbit’s-foot key ring and the car being precisely the same? I dreamt those and later I’m finding they have a basis in reality.’

‘I’m going out on a limb here, but all I can suggest is that the recall of your dream is still in a state of delayed suggestion. Memory remains plastic after waking, and it’s possible everything you think was in the dream might not actually have been in the dream at all.’

‘You mean,’ I said slowly, ‘the details of my dream have been joggled in retrospectively? The rabbit’s foot and the detail on the Buick weren’t in the dream?’

‘The mind needs to remap on waking,’ she said, ‘and reinforce the millions of neural pathways. Slumber is pretty well understood from a physiological point of view; it’s how personality and memory recover from the doldrums of synaptic tick-over that is hibernation’s greatest mystery. So what I’m thinking is that it’s possible for more recent memories to fill the place of absent, older ones. A fair description would be a severe case of déjà vu. Not just a feeling that something has happened before, but a certainty that it has – and in that certainty, doubt, confusion, fear, paranoia.’

‘So even dreaming myself as Don Hector might not have happened? I only created that in my head when I knew the car was his?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, it’s a plausible explanation.’

‘Ah,’ I said, mulling it over.

ShamBob entered the lounge and put down a large plate of chips in front of Zsazsa, then moved towards us with two coffees.

It was real coffee and I inhaled the mellow fragrance gratefully.

‘It wasn’t all déjà vu,’ I said, still with questions. ‘The blue Buick, for one. What was that doing in the garage?’

Aurora had to consider this carefully.

‘The car could have been there for years. Suzy Watson might have chanced upon the Buick and she constructs a nightmare around it during her Dreamstate. She tells everyone including Moody, they relate the dream to you – bingo.’

‘But that precise model?’

‘You only heard it was blue and a Buick from Suzy,’ said Aurora, ‘the reality was—’

‘—added when I actually saw it. Okay, I get it now.’