Opinion: dreams can come true... my Porsche now spits flames

Dream big, they say, when you're a kid grinding through another day of school. Even if that school is buried in a rough part of town and break times are punctuated with violence and fear.

So I did, I guess. I didn’t talk about the dream. How could I? Got to save face. Not show any weakness. Bullying wasn’t a dirty word. Just another day. A code to live by. And thinking beyond how to get wasted at the weekend or make a few quid helping the local brickies wasn’t really something you talked about.

On the longest days – not the cruel taunt of summer, but during the cold, bleak winter months – it was an escape. A blinding flash of light and warmth that was recessed deep in my mind. It would hit like artillery, cutting through the mundanity, making me feel powerful. At once in control of something extraordinary, but also in its thrall. Just once, I wanted that dream to thump me in the chest and explode into the real world.

To be honest, I didn’t think it could happen. Not without some cheap technological trickery. A kind of pre-programmed, synthetic version that would inevitably be unfulfilling. Years went by and the possibility would contract bit by bit, until it seemed like a pin prick of light in a universe of darkness. Society was changing, governments and legislators gaining ever more control and greater powers of surveillance. Dream big, but only within the confines of a million rules enforced with suffocating rigour.

And then, it happened. On one of those long winter nights. The rain was hitting in great sheets, balled up and then thrown with furious force by battering winds. I was hungry, tired and just grinding out another day. Messages pinged on my phone demanding words and action that I wasn’t minded to deliver upon. Not again. Sometimes the very idea of creating, well, anything, can feel like an endless, inky black fever dream.

Yet, something was cutting through. My ears pricked up, my senses tingled before my brain truly understood the gravity of the moment. Suddenly I was alive to incredible possibilities. The rapid crack-crack-crack I’d imagined for so long ripping into the forbidding night. Oranges, yellows and even pure, brilliant blue illuminating the space around me and firing synapses in ways I didn’t know existed. Days, weeks, months and years of hoping against hope, of willing this dream into reality... and now, I was living it. Over and over again.

Yep. My Porsche finally spits flames. I own a car that spits flames. This hasn’t happened via some stupid ‘pops and bangs’ map bought over the internet. It’s real. And intense. I guess my life is now complete. Flames, people! How cool is that? Dream big, guys. Enlightenment is out there. Especially if you follow my Porsche at night. Ka-boom!