We walk down a rolling hillside that never seems to end, until somehow we’re walking up another hillside that looks almost identical. Down and up, up and down. There’s never a moment where we come to the bottom of one hill or the top of another, no point where you can say, ‘Here, here is the place where up becomes down’. It’s like you blink and the world has shifted, the sky and earth changing places in the brief instant your eyes were closed.

We walk through rainforests filled with impossibly tall trees and covered in creepers rich with honey-scented tropical flowers.

We walk through fields full of rich, golden corn, of orchards of trees filled with the most perfect apples and pears and peaches that you could ever imagine, of gardens of alien shrubbery, at once familiar and not familiar. Everything looks wholly untouched, like it sprang up exactly where it was, but somehow also tightly organised, grown according to a strict plan.

We come to a sea of flowers, stretching away as far as the eye can see in every direction, the most glorious carpet in the world, undulating up the gentle curves of the rolling hills and down again, an ocean of every colour you can imagine. The smell is beautiful, intoxicating, and we drink it in, and then suddenly I’m lying on the ground, the sky closing over me like a blanket.

A quick glance at my phone confirms I’ve been asleep for an hour. It takes me another half an hour on top of that to drag everyone else out of the field.

‘It Wizard-of-Oz’d us?’ Phil asks blearily. ‘For real?’

‘How are we going to get across?’ Cardy asks.

‘I have an idea,’ Holly says, and pulls a cigarette lighter out of her bag.

The field takes another half an hour to burn.

I try not to look down as we tramp through the blackened remnants. There’s more dead here than just flowers.