I dreamed I was in a foreign city, a place I had never been to before. It had a Moorish feel, Arabian or Moroccan: dusty, blanched, secretive, full of tunnels and strange houses as curved and smooth as bones. I had the impression that I had entered the distant past. The landscape around the city was like a Bible illustration. Behind it was a desert, stretching fat and molten as far as I could see. In front of it was the sea, glittering. The sun was very hot.

So there I was in this city which was empty. Everything was silent. I stood there for some time in the glare and tried to work it out. At first I felt quite sure that I was dreaming, and that in my dream I had arrived at this city in which I was a stranger both in place and time. Nothing at all happened.

After a while, as the dreamer, I decided that something ought to happen, given that I had come so far. At the very moment in which I thought this, I began to change. I started to remember things about myself and my circumstances. I remembered that I did in fact live in this city and that my life was extremely unpleasant because I was a slave. I struggled to halt this metamorphosis, feeling that I would have preferred to be who I was before, but I seemed to have surrendered control over the dream and could not turn it back.

At this point the city came alive around me. The streets were all at once swarming with people shouting and rushing about. I tried to find out what the commotion was for, but nobody would tell me. I decided that this might be a good moment to make my escape from slavery while everybody was distracted. I ran down various twisting passages, seeking an exit and growing more and more afraid of what I was doing; for although everyone else was doing the same thing, I felt marked out in some way and sure that I would be caught.

Eventually I reached the edge of the city. The city was round and ended as abruptly as a large cake sitting on the desert.

Just as I was about to step outside it, a man leaped at me from a doorway and grabbed my arm.

"Gotcha!" he shouted, or words to that effect. In fact, I think he was speaking a strange language. "The penalty for slaves caught trying to escape is death!"

"No! No!" I cried.

Then the man said that seeing as the city was about to be invaded by Vikings, I would not be put to death but instead would be stationed as a lookout to give the warning when I saw them coming in their longboats over the sea. I was not allowed to desert my post under any circumstances, not even after the Vikings had been and gone. I had been selected for this job because I had done the Vikings at school and knew what they looked like. Knowing from these same lessons what Vikings did to people when they went on a raid, I saw that I was being led to a death even more grisly than my execution would have been.

I pleaded and resisted, at which point a group of men emerged from the same doorway and surrounded me. I was marched out of the city and across the desert towards the sea. Everything was very flat and bright, stretching for miles and miles. The only visible object was a huge stone pillar situated on the beach direcdy in front of the water. This, I was informed, was my lookout post.

"If the Vikings don't come," I enquired, 'how long will I have to stay up there?"

"Thirty-three years!" they cried.

Sobbing and protesting I was hoisted up onto the pillar.

The space at the top was about two square feet. It was very high and I could barely move. As soon as I was up, the men turned and ran away, and I was alone. The thought of my thirty-three years had quite driven Vikings from my mind, and I became possessed instead by a different and much stronger fear. My fear was of boredom, and I don't think I have ever been as terrified of anything as I was in that moment.

In desperation I cast about for something with which to entertain myself and to my surprise saw sitting beside me on the pillar a Walkman. I shrieked with joy at the sight of it and picked it up in my hands. As I did so, I realised that I had no tapes to play. I turned it over and over, trying to think of some other use for it, but there was none. In the end, despairingly, I jettisoned it over the side of the pillar.

Just then I saw on my other side a huge book bound in an old leather cover. It was sitting on a wooden reading stand and was opened about halfway through. Again I shrieked with joy, for it was so vast that it looked as if it would easily take thirty-three years to read. I leaned over the reading stand, and as my eyes met the page I realised that I had forgotten how to read. I tried and tried, forcing myself to remember, but the words meant nothing to me. At this I began to weep; and with that I woke myself up.