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 When I think back to the time of that extraordinary episode, I recall that I had the same or a similar dream four times during the course of three weeks.
The first time, I woke up with a vague sense of alarm building inside me, turfed out of sleep by the crash of a heavy lorry hitting one of the potholes, about which the local council seems totally unconcerned, in my residential side street. The second time, I was too distracted by a strange sense of familiarity in my dream circumstances to take in the threat.
It wasn't until the third trip to that city back street that I came out of the dream with any sort of memory of a story. The street had a single-lane roadway with narrow pavements on either side, and it linked two side streets, parallel to the main road and some distance from it. The jpair of side streets had once finished here, but a later phase of building had extended both of them
The street in question was more of a rat-run for pedestrians than vehicles. This was probably why everyone, myself included, was using the roadway as freely as the pavements, which were eternally cluttered with varicoloured bin bags and a selection of cardboard boxes discarded by the small shops on the newer side of the street.
I became aware of a growing quiet and an air of tension. Then the people ahead of me, as one person, made a rush for the pavements and pressed themselves against the brickwork or shop windows, facing out into the street. I just stood and watched as pairs of black, curved doors emerged from walls to close around them to create half-pillars with a human core.
Then I woke up.
The fourth time the dream claimed me, I was sort of half flying, half gliding along city streets, cutting through crowds with ease, going somewhere and nowhere with the shifting lack of purpose of a typical dream.
Suddenly, I was in the familiar side street and the pairs of doors were closeing around everyone else. The three people nearest to me were wearing mocking smiles, and I knew that it was too late for me to take refuge as trying to move my body seemed to involve fighting through super-thick, invisible treacle.
I knew something terrible was coming up behind me along that street. I didn't want to turn around to face it; not that I could move in the treacle; and that it was there, the something, almost breathing down my neck when I woke up in a panic.
The next day, I walked into my dream. I was in that familiar back street, which looked even scruffier in real life than it had in the fragments of my dreams. It contained a scattering of people, all walking towards or away from me, all in transit elsewhere. It contained the dream's assortment of garbage. It contained myself. And there was something approaching behind me.
I just stopped and watched as everyone else behaved like the people in the dream. They rushed to the sides of the street and pressed their backs to the buildings, standing almost to attention. I was too busy comparing what I was seeing with what I remembered of the dreams to act on my sense of immediate danger.
When an inner feeling of peril grew stronger, almost irresistible, I was checked, frozen to the spot, by a look in the eyes of the nearest refugee just before his doors closed around him; a look of . . . what? Disbelief? Outrage? Betrayal?
I suddenly became aware of a detail which I had not recalled from the dreams; at first floor level, the four-storey buildings on either side of the small street stepped out a foot and a half into the street, adding a small amount of extra floor space to the upper storeys. This architectural detail created an overhang about twelve feet up in the air.
When the curved doors closed around human bodies, they created the effect of a colonnade.
The sense of danger grew stronger. Instead of looking behind me, I made a dash for a shop doorway. All that came along the road was a council vehicle, a flatbed lorry with a metal mesh cage in the back, which was collecting only blue plastic bags.
I waited in my shop doorway until the three men on bag duty had rushed past me; it was getting on for early lunchtime and I assumed that they were hurrying to finish a route so that they could take a break.
No longer feeling in danger, I stepped out into the roadway again; as an alternative to running the obstacle course remaining on the pavement; and took the shorter route out of the linking side street, which was straight ahead.
When the collection vehicle had cleared the short road, the curved doors opened and retracted speedily and silently. And the compartments which they had formed were empty. All of them. Five people ahead of me had just gone and an unknown number behind me. I never went back to that street again.
 Several years have gone by since that episode. That dream has not returned. I try not to think about it but my thoughts do stray toward it every so often. I try to work out what happened and why. My only conclusion is that the dream, the sense of curiosity created by it and the linking street are components of a trap.
A trap set by whom and for what purpose, I have no idea. But it was a trap which I survived; more by good luck than judgement. ■
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