Kevin McCloud wandered into my Edinburgh flat just at the right moment. His knowledge of housing law would deal with the squatting Spaniards. I had never heard of this strange ancient tradition that, they claimed, gave them the right to take up residence in my bedroom. Nor would Kevin – or so I hoped.

My Spanish visitors had barged into my life earlier in the week with babies, children and bags of belongings, convinced that my home was theirs on the grounds that one of them had caught a wasp in his teeth just outside the front door. As TPR squashed yet another small rodent under his foot in the kitchen, he remarked that the Spanish would be more welcome if they were able to exterminate our growing mouse population. Wasps, in contrast, didn’t really bother us.

So, as Kevin demonstrated to a client a piece of modern furniture that neatly transformed at the touch of a button from leather sofa to dining room table, I made my enquiry. I think that I annoyed him with the over-familiarity of my opening gambit “Kevin, my friend”, but he did agree to look into my problem. In the meantime I returned to my over-populated bedroom where I was confronted by a mass of outstretched hands holding out forms for my signature. These crazy people genuinely thought that I would authorise their illegal stay in my flat.

Afterwards I wandered the streets with Kevin. By now I knew that this was all a dream so I was enjoying my little game of inspecting the authenticity of the imaginary location. The shop window displays in the main street indicated that we were in a seaside town on the Dorset coast. Their execution was much better than the streets further from the town centre. These had the two-dimensional feel of Second Life, and I was pretty sure that the large number of pedestrians comprised, in reality, a few drawn characters who took it in turns to follow us around.

When I remembered that I had a lunch party to organise in real life I panicked. My dream was about to take me to a Manor reunion at the University of Birmingham, but I had a chicken to cook. I tried to will myself awake, but it was impossible. I made attempts to scream and flail my arms to draw TPR’s attention in the bed next to me, yet nothing happened. Then I hunted for pen and paper so that I could scribble a rescue note. My failure to wake up was such that I wondered if I had fallen victim to the same fate as Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, comatose in some NHS hospital. Even worse, perhaps I was already dead?