Members of the Babysitters Club were eating pizza, and I held a party at my old home. I regretted this when people started throwing explosives around the living room and I hid in my bedroom until Chris rescued me and took me to a graveyard behind his uncle's house.

3 July 1999

I was in a room with a lot of people around my age. Smill came in wearing a red nightshirt, made a speech, and left. Everyone started mimicking her and it was funny.

I found myself in a shopping centre in Edinburgh with a girl who told me off for using escalators.

4 July 1999

I was in a room in a cross between a nightclub and a library. A thirteen year old girl came in brandishing an essay I'd written about Impressionist Music. "I know it's crap," I began, but she interrupted me. "Too right!" She proceeded to give me a lecture about how older people thought we were soooo clever when in fact we were totally thick. When she went away, I complained about her to the other people in the room, and we couldn't work out how she'd got into this nightclub / library in the first place.

I watched some people play pool. Then I was walking through a heauge field, being followed by two guys, who I could hear talking behind me. There was stationery lying along the edges of this field, and I couldn't help but stop and pick some up. My stalkers caught up with me, and as I'd expected, they were people I knew and meant no harm; they were just bored because all their friends had gone to Oslo. But they got really annoyed when I refused to go to the pub with them.

7 July 1999

I was using ICQ. Chris kept sending me messages which I couldn't understand. (Oo-er.)

10 July 1999

I was sitting on a small flight of stairs playing with toys. After a few minutes, I would move down a step. It featured Chris wearing lipstick and a degree of dodginess, but I didn't have my glasses on so I couldn't see what was going on.

11 July 1999

I was living in the middle of the local countryside and met a girl I haven't seen for seven years. I had a job interview where I had to give a fifteen minute speech while dressed as a duck. I was terrified about being late for it and didn't expect to get the job, but it went all right.

I went to the post office in the town where I live, and on the way there I met a boy who was in Concert Band. I offered to babysit for his younger sister. In the post office it took me ages to get served and the people working there got well annoyed with me.

I went to my grandparents' house with my mother, but stood on the pavement outside. It was Hallowe'en and people were walking past in fancy dress. Two of them were actual ghosts and they attacked me. I was scared senseless, but survived. When I left my grandparents' house, I realised I was half an hour late to babysit and panicked.

July 1999

My cousin got married. Her reception was on the top floor of an enormous building. After a lot of stair climbing, I realised I had left my present for her in the warehouse on the ground floor. So I went back down again. An enormous warehouse door rolled open, and I asked the men inside to give me the present. They gave me an object, but it was a small squashed cardboard box. Before I could protest, the door shut again.

17 July 1999

I was posting on the swansongs.net boards, telling everyone to chat at a certain time, but I knew it would be the middle of the night for all living in the westernmost US timezone and Australia and New Zealand, and I was struggling to remember the names of all the posters who lived in those parts of the world.

22 July 1999

I was in a hot, dusty and nearly deserted place outside a ruined church with my online friend Twi who had written nearly an entire novella of Cure smut. There were a few scenes missing, and I managed to help out with them.

July 1999

I was at a holiday camp with nearly all my acquaintances. Everyone kept asking me where my friend Chris was, and I told them he was working. Two of my former English teachers approached me, and I was worried that they'd tell me off. But they thought I was suicidal and kept trying to give me counselling, much to my dismay.

26 July 1999

My online friend Flink said, "Wake up, it's nearly time for us to chat online. I'm doing you a favour because you won't have to hear your scanky alarm clock." So I woke up, and it was 5.30am, one and a half hours before my alarm clock would have sounded.

27 July 1999

I was at Maths summer school and it was Christmas time. One of my former English teachers told me he'd murdered his son. He justified his actions, but was really upset. My brother Noj had a girlfriend, but she dumped him because she wanted to go out with Chris instead. Noj was not very happy, and admittedly, neither was I.

It was early November and I was at an ice rink in Birmingham. I was showing off and everyone was well impressed. I bought thirteen pounds worth of chewing gum and the woman at the cash desk tried to sell me twelve pounds more. Smill and Richard, who were in my school year, were going out [this would never happen in reality] and they got in a spinning tea cup together. I left the ice rink, to see fireworks in the sky. When I went back inside, nearly everyone had gone to an ice hockey match. I carried on skating, but one of my blades got bent and I couldn't travel in a straight line. It ended with a church service on the ice.

28 July 1999

It was 21 May 1999 and I was travelling with Smill in a taxi. My parents were forcing me to spend a whole summer working in a supermarket and living on my own in a building with only two rooms connected by aevil stairs. The taxi driver and myself climbed them, and when we went back down again, I vowed never to use them again.

I was in the New Hall at school taking a Maths exam. Question 2 was misprinted and the rest of the questions were really long and difficult. I was struggling to concentrate, but managed to make some progress with the first one. Then a former Maths teacher came over and said, "You'll struggle to get an A in this - and you're writing in the wrong place!" I panicked.

29 July 1999

I was on a big boat in Victorian times with half my school year. We were putting on a play and I didn't know my lines. I managed to improvise, but the play became reality, and I ended up talking to a bitter old woman.

2 August 1999

My family were staying in a holiday cottage. It was really hot. My parents went out for the day and Noj and I sat in the living room, bored senseless. I read a short story in "Readers Digest" (about some people fell-walking), one in "Woman And Home" and one in "Bunty" (an extended "The Four Marys" story). They were all really bad.

It was my birthday and I was going to Buskers nightclub. Before that, Mum, Noj and I travelled to a nearby Spar in our car. There were loads of people larking about in the car park, and Noj and I were scared.

I was travelling down some flights of stairs with a former English teacher. I accidentally went up two flights. He started telling me about the time he'd done that, and I tried to get away.

3 August 1999

New baby fish had been born and they were already quite big. Then I noticed that one of my old fish was dead. It had left the tank and was standing upright on a plug.

I was in the New Hall at school. A school event had turned into a disco. Katie, Helen Wo and Smill, girls in my school year, asked me about the drugs I'd taken. I said, "I've taken ecstasy" and my former religion teacher (who was the DJ) overheard and looked horrified. Katie said, "I've taken everything" and I was thinking, what, even really boring stuff like cough mixture? After a while, everyone started to leave for Buskers nightclub. I wasn't in the mood, but everyone went without me anyway.

I was living in my old home and scared to leave our flat because some kids were playing in the garden. Eventually, I left, and found an old computer in the outside corridor. My parents decided to pay me to play games on it, but before I could, Dad told me to take him to Spar. I waited by the car for him, but he didn't come outside.

I loaded ICQ and got a message from my online friend Sarah Yoj.

4 August 1999

My online friend Sae was working at my parents' shop for a week, and I was supposed to meet her there. The two of us and several other people (one of whom was another online friend, Tim) ended up getting in the back of a heauge van.

I was to play in Concert Band and the conductor told me I was really good. To get to my seat, I had to climb over loads of percussion, and one of the percussionists started attacking me with a drum (in a harmless sort of way).

I was looking at a map of the world, illustrating what every country thought of ice cream. It was really confusing and it frustrated me, and I said, "Why couldn't they just present that information in a table?"

My mother and another woman were trying to organise a trip to Ibiza (apparently, the ice cream capital of the world). They were getting a group of kids to play recorders and percussion there. However, they only had four rehearsals and sounded terrible.

My mother and I got on a train in Scotland to take us back to Carlisle.

5 August 1999

I was sitting at a long table with my online friends Heather and Megan. I kept unwittingly doodling with a pencil on a white paper bag belonging to Megan and apologising.

It was a Saturday and I was in a gift shop with my family where my parents argued about bottled water. Then we went back to an apartment where everyone started groaning about the school video being on TV and us missing it for the fourth time.

I went out into central Carlisle and rollerbladed with Les, a girl in my year at school. She was much faster than me, and took off along a muddy track. She turned into my friend Katrina and we reached a changing room, where we removed our rollerblades, with the intention of walking up a hill. Instead we just sat and talked. She was really bitter about something.

She turned into Chris N, a boy in my former school year, and it became a Wednesday lunchtime. My former PE teacher came into the changing room and yelled at us since we weren't supposed to be there. Chris made some excuse and we walked back to the main school building.

He complained about scales (of the musical variety) and once inside school, he turned into my friend Roe who did the same. I asked what was so bad about scales, and he said, "Look at it this way. When they ask you to play C Major, you have to play D Major." That didn't sound too bad to me.

I went to my locker to put my rollerblades away. I passed my former tutor who regarded me strangely. I heard the choir singing in the chapel as I headed for the carrels. The next lesson (General Studies) was presumably cancelled.

In the carrels, the other Chris was reading a junior science book and enjoying it a lot. I read one paragraph, which said, "The suns laugh and shake off years. One empties a rubbish bin over the other. Don't try this at home, kids." I picked up the book, pretended it was really heavy, and dropped it on the floor.

6 August 1999

I was staying in bed all day. In the evening, Mum persuaded me to get up, but not until my Blondie album finished playing. When it did, and I had a shower and listened to a CD in there. The CD got all covered with water and soap and I hoped it would still work.

I helped Mum with some household chores, but the TV was on in the background and I heard Chris's name. (Oh no!) I asked Mum if it was the local or national news, and she answered, "Local, but it'll be national soon enough." I connected to the Internet and looked up the story at a slow but funchie search engine.

7 August 1999

I was working in a butcher's shop, selling human meat. This didn't bother me, even though my family were killing the people. I was doing a roaring trade and enjoying myself, unlike everyone else who went for lunch breaks before 11am.

(I must confess, Chris did appear. But only for a few seconds while we agreed that he would keep out of the rest of this dream for the sake of my sanity.)

I was on the PC, chatting on IRC with some relative strangers. The conversation moved too fast for me to keep up with, and I started looking at some other sites instead. I remembered I was supposed to be chatting to my only friend Meaghan, so I attempted to load the JSC chatroom, where we usually meet, but the browser was being a bleendog and I couldn't.

When I looked back to IRC, it said, "You have been sent to prison." IRC had changed into a text adventure in a mansion. The prison was in the basement, so I typed "up" to escape.

On the next storey, it was a Repton-esque game, where you had to collect various objects before you could leave. I finished that level and the next one, then got stuck. The game became real and in order to finish that level, I had to hoist myself onto a platform, which was too high.

I found myself in the office at the shop, where Mum started telling me how to do it. But two teenage girls came in (I was only about ten), having problems with credit cards, and Mum turned to assist them. She never got back to me.

8 August 1999

I was in a car park in Brampton, the town where I live, with my Dad, repainting all the cars there. I tried using brushes and rollers, but they failed, but I found a method of spraying them. Then I ran out of paint.

I was in an enormous theatre watching a play I'd already seen. It took ages to start, because the cast kept looking for props.

I was in a classroom with some twelve year olds, having a music / science lesson. The teacher was good, but I kept thinking, "I wouldn't have known all this stuff when I was twelve." The kids managed, though.

12 August 1999

I went back to school, but no one could be bothered going to lessons. My friend Roe and I skived Maths and went to the chapel. When our teacher saw us, he was really sarcastic.

It was 12 August 1999, and I was lying in my bed. The phone rang and I heard Mum answer. It was my online friend Twi, and Mum said she'd bring the phone to me. Mum brought three phones - blue, pink and yellow - into my room, and she started messing about with them. Twi played Robbie Williams music down the line and my brother Noj wanted to record it on my cassette player, but neither of us had any blank tapes. Mum started painting the ceiling and when I tried to talk to Twi, she had gone.

14 August 1999

My house was in London, and my online friend AevilSteve was staying in the front room.

15 August 1999

I got a letter from Sarah, founder of Sushi.

27 August 1999

It was the beginning of the third millennium and there was a solar eclipse. Everyone was being religious, and I found myself on a talk show on TV where people tried to convince me to find my way to God.

I was talking to some people about A Level results. Then we started unloading a van. It contained mattresses, pilllows and stuff belonging to five different schools, all within walking distance of each other. I carried all the stuff belonging to my school, then started on the rest.

There were problems. In the third school, St Anne's (Smill's former school), to get inside, you had to climb through a big mailbox, and inside, Smill started talking to some choir members, leaving all the work to me. The fifth school turned into my penpal MentalJen's house, and I was taking a rabbit to it. However, to get to the door, I had to walk through a garden full of cruel stinging plants, so I ran away. On my way back to the van, I passed a moving car with my online Sarah Yoj in the back seat. We said bye (in Zobo-Creat and Rutherian) to each other several times.

My friend Will invited me to his house, which was a few doors away from mine. He gave me a skirt and his mother started talking about power points.

28 August 1999

I saw a man turning into a vampire at a party, and a ghost of a girl entered my house. It was 1993, but I was wearing clothes I didn't own then. My friend Katrina and I walked to the bus stop in Brampton. There were no buses, so I sat in a waiting room with my family.

I was at a family gathering in a light and airy pub. A man I didn't know called me on a very old fashioned phobile moan. He started chatting me up, but I wasn't interested. My relatives kept taking the receiver off me then giving it back. It turned out that his name was Dave and he lived in Edinburgh. We were discussing how light the nights were, when Smill entered the pub and started talking about A Level results.

The conversation ended, and I followed Smill and some other girls in my year out of the pub. We piled into a car (which turned into a bus) and started heading for Helen Wi's house. The weather was really nice and the possibility of going via the shop was discussed, but I said it was too far out of the way.

It was 26 September 1999 and my mother was about to send me to Cambridge. I said, "Hang on, shouldn't I check whether Freshers week actually starts now?" She agreed irritably.

30 August 1999

My online friend Meaghan and her parents were living in my house. I went to a book shop (which resembled the biology lab at school) with a girl about my age. She wanted to phone Irvine Welsh, but Meaghan was there and said, "Irvine Welsh is dead! He's been dead since the 1920s." I managed to convince her otherwise by showing her the publication dates of some of his books, but she was very annoyed.

I was in a large restaurant type place with a boy I was going out with, who was two years older than me. He told me I needed to lose five pounds.

31 August 1999

I was on holiday with my family in some town in England. It was 4.30pm and we were wondering what to do. Dad was keen on the idea of going to the cinema, but we only had until 6pm and I didn't think there was enough time. Then he said, "Right, I've got an idea." He stopped the car outside a small supermarket. I headed straight for the toilets. They were really busy and quite disgusting.

Mark Renton (of "Trainspotting") was being arrested for stealing cars. When asked what I thought of him, I said, "I think he's lovely, except for the heroin problem." The people around me laughed.

1 September 1999

I went back to school and me and some other girls were put in the small carrels. I was upset about this, but when a teacher tried to ask what was wrong, I didn't want to tell them.

4 September 1999

I was in the back of a moving car sitting next to Bloke I Fancied When I Was 13. In the dream, I didn't like him at all, but he liked me, and we ended up kissing.

I was on a road trip with my family, somewhere in the Cambridge region. One morning, I got a package in the post, a present from my parents. It was a word processor, almost identical to the one I have. I thought, "Why do I need a word processor when I've already got one AND a PC?"

I met my online friend Heather and was staying briefly in a house by the sea with some people in my year at school. Natalie and I went for a walk on the beach and up a path taking us to the top of a cliff, where we found the rest of the group.

5 September 1999

I was at a party in a big house. I read a novella about a girl who went to a laundrette, had some of her washing stolen by a young boy, received a letter from a bloke in a foreign country and ended up near a lake.

6 September 1999

I went to some sort of music camp by train, but I arrived before everyone else, except a girl I know from Concert Band. It was in a big hall, and she desperately needed to write three compositions before the thing started. She had written one, in Microsoft Word, but she wanted to change the background colour. I sat down at the computer, and she tried to tell me how to do it, but she spoke so quietly I couldn't hear. I got fed up and ran away.

Later, everyone else arrived, including my brother Noj and my mother. Noj was making some kind of performance, but my mother said, "Let's go: it's 4.30 and we have to get to the shops." She had already been there with Noj, to buy school stoof for him, and now it was my turn. So we left and went to Carlisle. On the way there, she talked about the things we needed to buy. "You need two jumpers and a thick catalogue," she said. "Don't you mean cardigan?" I answered, and she agreed, but irritably. Then she started talking about money. Since I had some and she didn't, she was going to make me pay for everything we bought, even though she'd paid for all Noj's stuff. I was thinking, "Not a chance."

But we went to this gym. I helped an instructor carry a sit up machine into a hall, then he left me and Mum to use it. We couldn't work out how to set it up. Mum thought it should be twisted round, I thought it should be straight, but both positions were truly uncomfortable. I suggested asking the instructor, but Mum refused.

7 September 1999

I was in the secretary's office at school with my mother getting my A Level results. They came on two pieces of paper. The first showed all 'A's; on the second, there were 'A's but also a 'B' and a 'D'. The 'B' was in Electronics, the 'D' in an unimportant subject, but I was still upset because I wouldn't get into the newspaper. The breakdown of the AS Physics results was also available, and I saw people in my Physics group rejoicing about how high in the class they'd come. I didn't get mine: my mother dragged me off up the main stairs.

My Dad had a protest about mortgages. It made page one of a national newspaper. However, people living all over Brampton, where we live, didn't support him, and they showed their contempt by putting the newspaper article in their windows. He was really annoyed.

Mum spoke in a debate on the subject (that strongly resembled Convivium). She and I were living in a house in London, across the road from a tube station. Outside the tube station one morning, we ran into Prince Charles. He congratulated Mum on her speech, even though he was on the opposite side of the debate, but Mum made some retort and strode off into the station.

Inside, there were newspapers for sale, with "Flink weds Prince Charles" on the covers (Flink being an online friend) (!!!) Dad couldn't contain his anger; all I could think was, "Whatever happened to Vettori?" Prince Charles moved into Flink's house, but she got all this posh furniture. I saw an interview with her lying on a sofa, saying that she still wasn't happy. I was afraid to speak to her.

Then the room turned into the school library, and I was sitting on the sofa with a really geeky bloke. A voiceover started talking about the likelihood of us getting off with each other, and we did just that. My Dad was right in front of us, but he had his back turned; he was looking at books.

The bloke turned into Chris (oh no!) and we went to room twelve, which was our form room, hoping it would be empty. But it was the end of lunchtime and the corridor was full of kids, soaked from the rain and mud outside. Teachers entered the corridor and started unlocking the classrooms. A very short German teacher moved to unlock room 12, but by the time she reached the door, it was already open.

Inside, everyone was complaining about the state of the desks. Mine had turned into a smouldering pile of ashes, and I asked where I was to sit. Alice said, "Desk 32. It's in the back lefthand corner of the room, next to Rohan and Chris." Cheekily, she added, "Which should suit you fine."

"Shoot oop and die," Chris said, paraphrasing me. "Hey," he said to me, "after school, we need to come up with a list of retorts for every conceivable circumstance." (Although presumably not in policeman-speak.) I agreed.

Helen G asked, "What's, 'Please can I have an agricultural lorry?' in Spanish?"

"Well, 'please' is 'por favor'," I said.

"And 'lorry' is 'lorrie'," Natalie said, rolling the 'rr'.

"Really?" I asked, sceptically.

"Oh, yeah," Helen assured me.

"Well, I don't know what agricultural is," I said. "Probably agriculturelle."

14 September 1999

I stood outside the school library with some boys wielding six-foot long guns. I went to a warped version of the sixth form carrels where I took a very heavy Computer Science textbook out of my desk. People started throwing things at me. My former biology teacher came in and asked if I'd been to the cinema lately. I tried to recall all the films I'd seen, but he interrupted my list with, "Did you go with any boys?" When I answered in the affirmative, he started cackling like a psychopath.

15 September 1999

I was at a port in the east of Canada for a few days with my family. I wrote three postcards, one to my parents, one to Noj and one to my friend Marion. I thought about sending one to my friend Smill, then decided against it.

18 September 1999

This dream was as if I was writing the story. I wrote the most vivid scenes first, then watched them again and added in background detail. So this account is in the order of the story, not the dream itself.

I was having lunch at a restaurant with Chris (oh, no!) The waitress was useless: she brought the food in pans and balanced them precariously on the edge of the table. To me she said, "When you're nineteen too, you'll eat like he does."

"But I'm not nineteen," Chris protested.

"I am younger than him, though," I said.

He disappeared and I went to the technology block to collect a wooden boat I'd made during lower sixth. I had to wait ages to get it. Outside, I saw most of my year playing basketball in the yard. I also found myself in the corridor at my old home. Dad handed me a modem cable, and told me to plug it in. But it wasn't long enough to connect the modem to the socket.

At the end of lunchtime, I got the boat, and walked back to the main school building with my former English teacher. He asked me what I thought about the school play. The star part had been given to a fourth year girl who no one had ever heard of, and it had caused great commotion. I said, "It's strange." He told me there were rumours about the casting in the school musical too.

I had to wait outside the carrels with Natalie and Helen G. We discussed Alice's youngest sister. At this point I woke up, so the final sequence of the story didn't get properly connected:

I found myself in Naworth Castle, my old home, with two girls. We had to escape, so we smashed the kitchen window and jumped out into the courtyard. We were making our way up the hill when there was a rumbling in the sky. God made himself visible and spoke to us reassuringly.

19 September 1999

I was on the Internet, surfing and sending e-mails and chatting to various people. Chris (oh, no!) got very excited by the fact that I'd downloaded Logo. He updated his website and I got so excited that I woke up, to find that it was 4.30am.

20 September 1999

It was a day that my brother Noj was supposed to be at college, but he and I were sitting in the back garden listening to Catatonia. The doorbell rang, and he went round to the front of the house to see who it was. "It's Chris," he reported. (NOT AGAIN!)

"Let him in," I said, then ran upstairs to hide, since I was only wearing my pyjamas. My house had partially turned into school, so I went into room 13 and got into bed. This has to be a dream, I thought, because it's flipping stupid. With that, I woke up, but I heard footsteps outside my room and remained very scared for several seconds.

21 September 1999

My mother started her own business.

I was in the office at the shop when I got a phonecall from a bloke in Cambridge. He started describing all the parts of Churchill College (where I was going in a couple of weeks).