End time: 12:27 a.m.

Mrs Haugh-Wombaur blows off a lot in her sleep. It sounds like she keeps a foghorn under the duvet. Of course, to look at her daylight life you’d never guess. She has ruffles on her bedding, and her pillowcases always match. She keeps her socks and knickers in separate drawers. None of her bras are tangled up. Even her Rabbit lives in a special velvet case with lube in a zippy bag alongside. Everything in Mrs Haugh-Wombaur’s life is under control – except her colon in the middle of the night.

Oh, and of course: her dreams.

That’s what she hired me for. Normally I wouldn’t snoop around people’s rooms to see what kind of vibrator they have in their drawer, but one time I had to make a lightning search for throat sweets when I had a coughing fit in the middle of the night. That’s when I noticed that Mrs H-W’s tidiness extends right down to alphabetising her make-up: blusher, concealer, eyeliner, foundation, lipstick, mascara. (I snipe because I’m jealous. I’ve had most of my make-up since I was seventeen and it’s spread over the bottom of my saggy H&M carryall so that all the containers are covered with a greasy light brown dust like fallout from an explosion.)

At the moment, I’m in the middle of Mrs H-W’s recurring nightmare. I know it inside-out; it’s become something of a thorn in my side. Every session I do my best to get in there and change the trajectory, but no matter what I do, it always seems to end the same way. Mrs Haugh-Wombaur is invigilating a History A-Level exam in the nude while jeering students launch plastic Angry Birds piggies at her using catapults made from protractors and rubber bands.

For some people, this would be just the beginning of a hot sex dream. Or a funny sex dream, at least. Not Mrs H-W. She’s genuinely humiliated by her body, and the Angry Birds thing apparently goes back to her student-teaching days when an eleven-year-old secretly recorded his friend shooting Green Pig into her bum crack during a lesson on the Roman Empire. The video went viral.

I know I can help her get over it. On this particular occasion, I have a dressing gown all ready. I’m lurking in the dream at the back of the exam room, where she can see me smiling and being encouraging. I’m like a dream coach. In Mrs. H-W’s dreams I always present like my real self, because she’s insecure and I’m unthreatening. But technically I can change myself into anything I want when I’m in someone’s dream. Once I changed myself into a horse so that my client could gallop off into the sunset alone, leaving his mouthy ex-boyfriend behind.

Mrs. H-W doesn’t need a horse. I really don’t think there’s much wrong with her; she just needs a bit more confidence and less body shame. When all her clothes vanish, I’m going to rush forward and cover her up, then inform the offending History students that they’ve failed their tests. I am going to use my mean voice.