The next hour is a bit of a blur, to be honest.

There’s me getting dressed because I have to go with Mam to the hospital with Seb. There’s Fit Billy carrying Seb downstairs and lying him down in the ambulance, Mam crying …

There’s me and Mam in the paramedics’ car following the ambulance to the hospital.

There’s Mam on the phone to Dad, shouting, ‘I don’t know, Tom, I just don’t know! Nobody knows …’

There’s the people at the hospital – doctors? Nurses? I can’t really tell – who meet the ambulance and rush Seb inside, and then take me and Mam to a little side room …

There’s Mam asking again and again if Seb is going to be all right, and people being gentle and saying things like, ‘We’re waiting for results,’ and, ‘We’re doing everything we can,’ but even I can tell that they’re not saying, ‘Yes, your son will be all right,’ because they can’t, can they?

We sit in a beige-coloured room with a faded wall painting of characters from the Narnia books while Seb is taken for tests, and Mam calls Dad again, and Mormor and Uncle Pete, and her cousin Barbro in Sweden and tells the whole thing again and again.

She’s crying a lot, and it all makes me cry once more, and then I start to think again about what might be happening to Seb and I feel sick.

And then, maybe an hour or so later, a lady in a green hospital top with short sleeves comes into the small room, closing the door behind her.

She gives us a nervous smile and introduces herself. ‘I’m Nisha. I’m the Emergency Trauma registrar, and I have …’

Mam interrupts. ‘Is he awake yet? Can I see him?’ She is on her feet, practically shouting.

‘Please sit down, Mrs Bell.’ We all sit, and it seems a bit calmer that way. Dr Nisha takes a deep breath and I really think she’s going to say he’s died or something. ‘At the moment, Sebastian is stable, and his condition is not thought to be life-threatening.’

Mam sighs a little and grabs my hand hard in hers. ‘So you know what’s wrong with him then?’

Dr Nisha pauses, enough for me to know she means no. ‘We have had the toxicology results back, and there is nothing to suggest that Sebastian has been poisoned. So far as we can tell at this stage, all of his bodily functions are consistent with someone who is fast asleep. He is not fighting any obvious infection that we can see. There is no elevated blood pressure, or heart rate; his blood-oxygen levels are normal …’

That word again. She goes on and on. EEG this and ultrasound that … I can’t remember it all. Then she seems to slow down, like a clockwork toy before it needs rewinding, and then stops. The room is quiet for what seems like ages. Eventually, Mam speaks up.

‘Have you seen anything like this before, doctor?’

Dr Nisha glances down, as if embarrassed. She takes a breath and holds it a little before replying.

‘No. I have not personally come across a case like this. What we propose doing is keeping Sebastian in for observation, and as soon as possible he will be seen by a neurologist and a sleep specialist to determine the exact cause of his failure to wake up.’

So the minutes tick by in the beige room, and they become another hour while we wait for people to arrive, and I have plenty of time to stare out of the window at an empty paved square and at the Narnia mural and try to work out what I know about the Dreaminators.

It’s not much. All I know is that it’s not magic. It’s definitely not magic. How could it be? Magic doesn’t exist. What with the crystals and the pyramids and the batteries and everything else, it seems more like science. But it’s not like any science I’ve ever heard of.

Is it possible for something to be … both magic and science? Like the two are somehow combined and the result is that Seb now can’t wake up?

What’s worse is I was warned. I was warned by Susan Tenzin and her grandmother, and all of that started the very morning after my very first waking dream when I floated to the cave ceiling.

The problem was – I didn’t listen.