When I dream, I go to a different place.

Very rarely have I dreamt of a place that I know in the waking world. When my dreams are set in real and familiar surroundings, they're usually nightmares.

I'm often driving, in my dreams, but not on roads that I know or recognise from reality. The roads, woods, cities and fields in my dreams are places that are familiar only because I have dreamt of them before. Some areas I know equally well (or even better) than any place I've ever visited awake.

I used to think that the geography of my dreams was based purely on a distortion of the environment I knew; even though I didn't recognise it, I assumed that my brain was simply transforming familiar places as a stage on which to play my dreams.

But when I moved from Sussex to Yorkshire, I found that the usual geography changed, and I began walking, asleep, down roads I had never seen before. I could not understand where I was.

Over the six years I have lived here, that geography has become more familiar to me, and I find myself losing the shape of the older lands. Only a few things are retained: the huge fallen tree that serves as a bridge; the steep switchbacks leading up to the Ridge; the circling roads with trading tents pitched at the centre.

Now I visit a different dream country. There seem to be more structures in this land - there's a dilapidated house with a rusted tin roof and waterstained floorboards that I visit regularly, and a pub in a clearing of woods called the White Rose (tellingly, the symbol of Yorkshire.) There's a whole city, in fact, whose name I can't ever recall on waking.

What gives me pause here is that when I visit the south, I never dream of my "yorkshire" setting - but I have dreamed instead of my older lands. And conversely, I've never dreamed at home in Yorkshire of my old dream haunts. This apparent division only affects the landscape of my dreaming: the people I meet in dreams are, where known, from any period of my past.

Does the land sleep? Am I the dreamer, or the dream?