Time and the world rush-suck back into place as I hurry over to the skip, where the woman is standing and brushing herself off like an action hero. She hoists herself over the rim and onto the ledge where I’m standing, and for an extended moment she’s on hands and knees in front of me and I’m standing over her, thinking about power for a minute too long before squatting down to help her up.

‘Thank you,’ she says, her hand strong and warm in mine, not flinching from the touch. For God’s sake, you never touch the actors. It’s the unwritten rule of immersive theatre – otherwise where is the line between art and fantasy and wish-fulfilment and desire and consummation? It would not be safe to blur that line. ‘Come with me, Rose. I have something to show you.’ And I recognise the voice. It’s her – the woman who’s been living in my braincore for the last seven months.

She doesn’t really look like I imagined her, and that’s something of a disappointment, but at the same time I realise that this woman could look like anyone. She’s wearing a jet-black wig, and her beautiful, bland face could be painted in any imaginable way. She’s a canvas, this woman; a screen for my projections.

But her hand is warm, and I follow her back inside. I forgot about the cold when she fell, but it’s a relief to be back in the building again. It’s also disturbing, because the space is no longer the supermarket delivery bay I just walked through. The pallets of groceries and the staff and the concrete walls and floors are gone – writing this now, I still don’t know how they did that – but I’m in a night-lit desert camp, sensuous dunes undulating me towards a cluster of tents richly lit with golden light from within.

I can see the stars rippling in the sky above, feel the warm, dry air wafting up from the sand, which shifts and slips and scrunches under my boots. There’s the smell of sumac and garlic and saffron; also of the goats and camels that rest serene in a wood-fenced pen, a small bleat or a tinkle as a beast flicks its head to warn off flies.

I have been transported to the other side of the world in one step, and the plunge and plummet is bewildering and invigorating all at once. You know that feeling of the first cool morning in autumn, the animal instinctive sense that the seasons have turned, or that feeling you get if you’ve landed in a new country in a different hemisphere, how that change lodges in you, makes the tips of your body tingle? Like that, condensed and concentrated, whacked into a wall of change in one second.

Like in Idiopathy, it’s the transition that strips me, makes me obedient. My sense of certainty and authority over my own life have been seductively and lovingly flayed away from me and I will follow wherever Metamuse leads me.