It isn’t anything so dramatic as Stephen jolting and coming to gasping, suddenly awake like being struck by a bolt of lightning. Nothing so obvious or immediate or clear-cut.

But Benedict looks so lost and there’s something painfully familiar in that look on his face — almost like dementia patients, forgetting where they are — and the surroundings are tilting underfoot. And when Stephen closes his eyes and presses his fingers to his eyelids, trying to clear his vision, then opens them again, he can see


the gaps in the negative space, the shimmer behind the curtain, the fragile corners of the dream where he is so accustomed to finding and applying pressure, moulding and shaping a landscape, and Benedict’s mouth is moving blankly like a startled fish, and for a moment Stephen simply wonders if he’s dreamwalked normally, meandering into his sleeping comrade’s subconscious.

There’s a headache throbbing in the back of his skull. Has he done this before? (He cannot shake the feeling that he has done this before.) “At least I didn’t walk into a sex dream,” he says, more to himself, but then turns his attention back to the other man. “Benedict, have you dreamt this place before?”

It still seems like it might be normal. Maybe.