‘Malky! What do you ask that for? No. No, you are definitely not dreaming!’ Susan sounds alarmed.

As quickly as it started, the feeling wears off.

‘I’m sorry … I just had a sort of … flashback.’ I shake my head, vigorously. To be certain, I quickly look at the clock on my phone. Everything is fine. ‘Float,’ I say to myself. I can’t float. I sigh with relief.

It was as though something had flicked a switch in my head. A sound? A sight?

No. The smell of the tea!

‘I’m all right now,’ I say, and it’s the truth. I do feel okay, but I don’t want to speak for a moment. I look across at Susan and Mola and they are both sitting with their eyes half closed, as though they are enjoying the silence as much as I am. I sip my tea and close my eyes as well.

I can hear seagulls and the soft hum of traffic on the seafront, and the gentle rustling of a tree outside, and a bicycle bell pinging, and away in the distance – so far away that I might be imagining it – a child shouts something.

There’s something else as well, and it’s a moment before I work out that it’s the fluttering of the little flags that form a large cone around the flagpole in the garden, and I’m reminded of the evening – only a few weeks ago, but it feels like a lifetime – when I first heard them, and saw them, and met Mola too.

I feel like, if I could just detach myself further from today, I might hear the sound of the clouds moving, or the high-pitched buzz of a sunbeam, or the soothing hum of the blue sky, and everything will be back to normal.

I can’t do it. I open my eyes and find, to my embarrassment, that Susan and Mola are both looking at me. Mola smiles and nods. ‘Welcome back.’

‘I was … daydreaming.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘More people should try it! Silence is not empty, Malky: it is full of answers.’

‘I was thinking,’ says Susan, replacing her cup in the saucer precisely. ‘Malky. You think that Seb is somehow “trapped” in a dream of your … your making?’

I sigh. ‘I guess so. I mean … that’s as good a way of putting it as any. No wonder people don’t believe me.’

‘Can’t he control the dream he is having?’

‘I don’t really know. A bit, I think. But not enough to wake up, obviously. Something’s gone wrong.’

Susan looks over at her grandmother. ‘Have you heard about this, Mola? This dream-sharing?’

Mola doesn’t look at us, but gazes at a point in the distance so intensely that I turn my head to see what she’s looking at, but there’s nothing.

She nods slowly. ‘I have heard of it. I had a lama – a teacher – who talked about it. He definitely believed it was possible. Maybe belief is all that is required.’

There’s a long pause before Susan speaks next, and I hear the seagulls cawing again.

‘So … Malky … could you go back to the same dream?’

I think about this. ‘And … and do what?’

‘Well, you say your powers of control seem to diminish the longer you are in the dream?’

‘That’s what’s been happening, yes.’

‘And also the realness of the dream increases at the same time? So you get a sore arm from the crocodile, and Seb’s wrists get rope burns?’

‘I suppose so. Is that what’s happening? I don’t know for certain.’

‘Well, neither do I, of course. But it sounds like that is what is happening. Doesn’t it?’

I sort of nod, but I don’t really know what to say and the garden returns to its previous silence. Mola hasn’t said anything. She’s just listening, her tiny dark eyes flicking between Susan and me as we talk. Then she gets up, accompanied by a percussion of cracks and pops from her joints, and starts walking up the garden. She pauses to look back.

‘You coming.’

It isn’t a question.

‘These are nice,’ I say, referring to the strings of coloured flags that Mola has taken us to. Close up, their fluttering has become a rattle that is noisier than I expected. I add, ‘What are they for?’

Mola has turned her face up to the sun.

‘They are prayer flags,’ says Susan. ‘A tradition in Tibet. We say that the wind carries the prayers away.’

I nod. ‘Carries the prayers up to God, yeah?’

Susan shakes her head. ‘We don’t believe in God. Or at least – not like “God” god.’ She pauses, lets this sink in and I find myself wishing I had paid more attention during our RE lessons with old Mrs Puncheon at school. ‘But we do believe in prayer, and we like to think the winds will carry our prayers of compassion and hope to every corner of the world.’

I stroke a pale pink cotton flag through my hand. ‘They’re very old,’ I say. ‘And faded.’

‘That is a good thing! It means the prayers are being taken.’

We’re both kind of waiting for Mola, who was the one that summoned us to the flagpole, but she is just standing there, silently. Just as it’s beginning to get a bit awkward, she looks up at me with such force that I want to turn away, but it seems rude, so I make myself gaze back at her.

‘I warned you. You remember? I say, “Inside your head is bigger than outside. It is easy to get lost in there.”’

‘Mola,’ says Susan, protesting. ‘Poor Malky’s feeling bad enough already.’

Mola flaps her hand as if my feelings were the least important thing in the world right now.

‘How old are you?’ she says.

‘I … I’m nearly twelve.’

‘Huh. Old enough to know better. My grandfather is a teacher of young children when he is your age. You wanna know what I think?’

She’s being so direct and intense that I hesitate and she jumps in again. ‘Well, do you, Dream-boy?’

Susan replies crisply, ‘Mola. Malky did not come here to be told what to do about Seb by you or by me. It’s not his fault. He’s just scared.’

‘No, Susan,’ I sigh. ‘She’s right. That’s kind of exactly why I came.’

‘Yeah!’ says Mola, pleased. ‘He’s scared! And should be. Messing with things like that. It’s like a video game to you, innit? Bam-bam-bam, now I’m dead, press “replay”, new life. And now you find out it’s real! These things, these dreams, what we call milam … these are the result of years of study, of thought, of meditation over centuries. Centuries, boy! Then this fella comes along with his … his toy –’ she spits the word out as if it tasted foul – ‘and you expect it to be all la-la-la fun-games. Huh?’

What can I say? My mouth has turned down with sorrow and shame, and worse a tear is leaking from one eye. And still this fierce little old lady is going on at me, while Susan stands by, not stopping her. Though how she would, I’ve no idea.

I say it so quietly that I’m not sure it’s even audible above the fluttering of the prayer flags. ‘What should I do?’

Mola steps forward and stands in front of me. ‘You asking? You asking my opinion?’

I nod.

‘Cos, you know, the opinion of one old lady don’t mean much. But –’ she raises one finger – ‘if you asking me, then I say you go back. You fall asleep under your toy and you do the only thing possible. You go back in your dream. And, while you there, you take the greatest leap into the unknown. And you take your brother with you. You can put right what you have put wrong, Dream-boy.’

I don’t understand any of this. It sounds like gibberish. A leap into the unknown?

‘What do you mean, Mola?’ I say, sniffing and wiping my eyes. I’m not going to start crying now, because I am trying to concentrate on what this strange old woman has just said.

‘You need to go to the edge of your dream and then go further. Go beyond.’

I blink at her, desperate to understand, and she smiles back at me.

‘You’ll know when you get there. Sometimes the greatest journeys have no map.’

Then she places her palms together and says, ‘There. Now it is yoga time. Excuse me. May all things be well – tashi delek.’ She turns and walks back into the house, leaving me and Susan standing by the flagpole.

Go to the edge of your dream and then go further.

Simple.

Only – with no Dreaminators, how am I supposed to get there?