Dream A Little Dream

Posted On 12 September, 2019

Have you ever had a dream so vivid you believe it to be real? I had one back in about 1974. I dreamt I had a Mini Bike something like this.

All the cool kids had a Mini Bike. When I was at school all the cool kids were called Gary, Barry or Steve not Ross. Ross was not a cool name it was a take the Mickey out of you name. There were no test cricketers named Ross, well except for Ross Edwards but he only played 20 tests, averaged 40 and wasn’t mentioned in ‘Cmon Aussie Cmon’ so doesn’t really count.

I’m pretty sure Barry Cadwallader had a Mini Bike. Now he was cool. If he got any one cent pieces in his change after buying his Sherbies, Red Skins and Scanlens footy cards at the milk bar he would punt them across Canterbury Road and watch the other kids scrabble about in the nature strip to find it. Mind you Canterbury Road was only two lanes back then not six lanes with a median strip as it is now, but still a pretty impressive feat for a primary school kid. That is next level cool.

So there was I a kid with an uncool name with his very own mini bike. After I awoke from the dream I still believed I had the mini bike. Then I had this strange realisation that the places where I had been riding it didn’t quite match our neighbourhood. Surely I still owned it. But no I didn’t. What convinced me was the laughing and taunting of my brother as he delighted in telling me I didn’t have a mini bike.

The realisation that it was just a dream felt like a bereavement especially for a kid who had lived a pretty good life. For maybe a week after, even though I didn’t have the dream again, I would wake and briefly think of the mini bike then come crashing back to earth. The dreams I now usually have are about being at work wearing only a tee shirt and not pulling it down to cover my privates as it would only draw attention to the fact that I was naked. Or running late for the train only to find I am on the wrong platform but when I swap platforms I find I was on the right one before. Or needing to go to the toilet only to find that the cubicles are full or overflowing with toilet paper and unmentionables or there is only one toilet with no door or walls in the middle of a busy room.

So in hindsight owning a mini bike if only in dreams is much preferable to dreams of naked work, missing trains and overflowing toilets. But now that I am in my late youth I have the wherewithal to turn my mini bike dreams into a reality. But not just a mini bike a fully fledged motorbike. When I say fully fledged I’m not talking Harley or Ducati here but the equally impressive UBCO 2X2 an electric dream machine with a maximum speed of 50kmh. Look on it in awe.

You will be hearing more about this ball tearing dream machine but now I might finally be Suzi Quatro’s Daytona Demon.