DC: Cupboard under the stairs?

CA: Flat-share. My mate Shandy and her friends rented out the cupboard under the stairs as a fourth bedroom. Just big enough for a bed and a power socket to record my ASMR. No good if you’re claustrophobic, but I’m not.

DC: Tell us about that. ASMR.

CA: You know what it is? Do you get tingles?

RP: I do, yeah, the sound of scissors and shoes on wet pavement, mostly, but sometimes—

DC: Just to clarify, Ms Aaron. By ‘ASMR’ you mean ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’, which it must be noted has only a flimsy scientific basis—

CA: That’s not true, they’ve done actual science and it’s a thing!

DC: —but is a cult phenomenon originating on YouTube and more recently recorded on BigSky’s AR sub-platform, Sweet Dreams. So, Ms Aaron, do you listen to ASMR, or do you record it yourself?

CA: Both. I have a channel, but I’ve not updated it for ages. Since I got the narcolepsy I haven’t been able to do it. I fall asleep while I’m recording.

RP: It’s not funny, Donato.

DC: I wasn’t laughing. So tell us about this narcolepsy. When did it start?

CA: After the study at Excelsior-Barking. So . . . summer last year.

RP: While you were taking a break, I looked up the paid studies in the nanotech department but couldn’t find anything that matched your description. Unless you mean the AR one. ‘Enhancing peripheral nervous system response to AR triggers through internally delivered feedback.’ There was no infection as such, it was a neural booster.

CA: That’s the one. You took a drug, they monitored you and put you in an AR simulator to see if your experience was more convincingly real.

RP: And that study concluded in April. Your illness started in . . . ?

CA: June. The narcolepsy started in June. But the dreamhacking started the day I took the drug. I was on a coach going to see my mum and I fell asleep and wandered into the dream of the person sitting next to me.

RP: Walk me through that. How did you know you were in their dream?

CA: Well, it obviously wasn’t my dream. The dreamer was busking in the tunnel under the Natural History Museum, collecting money from tourists. There was a flood and he was up to his waist but still playing.

DC: You could have been dreaming that yourself.

CA: Dreaming in vivid detail that I was a violin player performing Paganini? Ha! You’ve obviously never heard me sing in the shower. My mate Shandy says she’s heard dying walruses with better pitch.

DC: OK, moving on . . .

RP: No, please continue, Charlotte. What happened after the bus?

CA: Just so we’re clear. The guy’s name was Piotr, which I knew because I was in his dream and I could hear his thoughts. After Piotr and I both woke up on the bus, he and his violin case got up and changed seats. He looked straight at me and said, ‘Stay out of my head.’ We were both right freaked out, but I can’t understand why he was hostile. I actually materialized a rubber dinghy in the tunnel to save him, which I thought was pretty resourceful considering I’d never even been in anyone else’s dream before. He just didn’t appreciate it. Maybe he had a death wish.