'One of my mistakes as a mother was to give my child the things that I had longed for and hadn't received: freedom, adventure, experience of different cultures,' Anne said. In 1990, after the sensational ructions of the Rajneesh commune in Oregon and the exposure of the Bhagwan's legal problems and financial excesses – 'The buddahfield had become a minefield,' Tim quipped – he returned to North London to live with his mother and stepfather. I blinked my eyes, frowned, and concentrated furiously, but I couldn't seem to find the right thought or secret word that would send me through to the other side.' He went on: 'I willed it to happen to me.

'I wanted to leave behind the heartache of this world, to abandon my trouble and vanish into some other, easier place,' he wrote of being gripped at the age of nine by the central premise of disappearing into another reality in Nicholas Fisk's novel On the Flip Side (1983). The consolation of daydreaming made Tim receptive to the computer-generated environments of the virtual world and the people who inhabit them, which was the subject of his next groundbreaking book, Second Lives (2007). In the long periods of solitude and separation, Tim took up residence in his imagination. His mother was seeking her bliss Tim was seeking his mother. 'I was always trying to catch my mother's eye,' Tim wrote in his exceptional memoir My Life in Orange (2004), which is a hilarious and heartbreaking child's eye view of growing up in a commune and one of the best autobiographies of the decade. As a child, from the ages of six to 11 and rechristened Prem Yogesh (God of Love), Tim was toted by his mother Anne Geraghty, a clinical psychologist turned Bhagwan acolyte, from India to Suffolk to Germany in a series of Shree Rajneesh communes. Tim Guest, who has died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 34, was both a victim and visionary of other people's Edens.

On the Flip Side by Nicholas Fisk