Nifty scooters, thin and not so thin, zip up and down bike lanes, on sidewalks, in cross walks, in and out of lanes and on any available surface. But do not think that these scooterites are getting somewhere fast. No, this is not the wave of the future for the automobile-challenged or the environmentally committed. These scooterites do not hold a candle to my dominant childhood dream.
I was scooting along, just like the scooterites of today, except that I didn’t need a scooter. I just moved along, wherever I wanted to go. I needed no mechanical means of motion.
My dream — not in, as “I wish I owned it” or “I wish I could do it.” Not in, “I wish I could be the sports star or the most popular kid in the class.” No, not that kind of dream. Not the kind of dream I am conscious of.
Rather, the kind of dream that psychologists analyze — the dream that comes when you sleep. The dream of mixed up memories, fantasies, crazy associations. The kind of dream that sometimes you remember, sometimes you don’t, the kind of dream that sometimes is scary, sometimes baffling, sometimes pleasurable and, as the Talmud says, always contains some nonsense.
This is the kind of dream I’m talking about — the dream I dreamt over and over as a child.
It was always the same dream.
Psychologists, I invite you to have a field day with my unconscious of yesteryear. To the substance of the dream (recorded in detail below), you can also analyze the reality that I still remember this dream perfectly, even decades later.
I suppose I actually had forgotten about this dream for a while, but it came roaring back in my memory as scooters started to prevail on our streets and I started seeing (and dodging) them everywhere.
My repeating childhood dream went like this:
I was scooting along, just like the scooterites of today, except that I didn’t need a scooter. I just moved along, wherever I wanted to go. I needed no mechanical means of motion.
I was in a sitting position, roughly a foot or two above ground, and I simply went wherever I wanted.
Not only that. It did not matter whether a tree, a car, a house — anything — was in my way. As I scooted along, I sailed right through everything. A space magically opened in anything that blocked my way and I scooted right through. Material — brick, metal, anything — became ghostlike, that is, visible but without substance. I scooted right through.
But as I did so, all the rest of the surroundings that I was effortlessly penetrating remained exactly as they were before I came along.
For example, if I were scooting alongside a busy street and was moving through a tree, the part of the tree underneath me and the part above me remained naturally in place. Still more: Even the part of the tree that I was scooting through retained its natural shape and appearance. The reality was that as I was magically moving right through an object, it did not change.
I didn’t need a car. I didn’t need a bicycle. I didn’t need a motor. I didn’t need to push on anything and didn’t feel anything pushing on me. I just glided along wherever I wanted and right through anything in front of me.
Meanwhile, I observed that no one else could do this. I had no compatriots as I was gliding along. No one was with me and nothing stopped me. There was no noise and no crash, and no notice taken as I glided through all material objects. They were not affected by me. If I glided through a car with passengers, for example, everyone in the car remained in place, undisturbed, as the car itself kept going, blithely unaffected as I glided through.
That was my dream and I dreamt it over and over again. It was so real.
It was far better than any scooter of today, wouldn’t you agree?
My dream was entirely empty of struggle or resistance. As I say, I enjoyed free passage through space as if it were empty, even as everything that occupied the space remained unaltered as I moved through it.
Bottom line: When I see all manner of human beings on every manner of two-wheeled scooters zipping along, thinking about how they are getting to where they want to go without hassling with cars or car insurance, without emitting noxious fumes, and perhaps also seeing themselves almost as free as a bird, I am thinking something very different: How nice it was in my childhood dream not to need to hassle with any movable or immovable object whatever — not even to need a scooter. As I say, I didn’t sit in anything or on anything, not in a chair or a seat, for example. I was miraculously buoyed a foot or two above ground. It was just I, unencumbered by any material object, who glided and zipped along, anywhere I wanted.
OK.
That’s the dream.
Psychologists, have fun.
Or, perhaps I was just a child imagining what life unimpeded by anything at all could be. I didn’t wish for this. I already had it, in my dream.
© IJN 2026
