Wogan's world
In it I was Terry Wogan but I was also at university - which in reality I had left almost a decade earlier - and was about to sit my final exams.
The dream was always the same. I had done no studying because there simply wasn't time to do that and present a thrice weekly TV chat show.
As my exams got closer and closer I began to seriously panic.
The nightmare always ended the same way. I would wake up, heart thumping and mildly agitated, before it slowly dawned on me that that it was only a dream.
The relief was truly wonderful and made the escalating panic well worthwhile.
This anecdote probably says more about me than Terry Wogan but I mention it because it highlights the ubiquitousness that characterised that period in his career.
As it happens, a television chat show wasn't Wogan's natural habitat. The pregnant pauses and wry humour that made him unique on radio felt stiff and awkward on screen, especially when he was interviewing some charmless 'celebrity'.
A similar problem befell him on Children In Need where he looked increasingly out of place.
However a fellow broadcaster - the former MP Matthew Parris - described him as "quietly subversive" and that's how I'll remember him.
Blankety Blank, as presented by Wogan and later Les Dawson, was arguably the first game show that made fun of the genre.
Famously he also became the first presenter to openly mock the Eurovision Song Contest, his gentle but scathing commentary including quotes such as, "Who knows what hellish future lies ahead? Actually I do, I've seen the rehearsals."
One sensed that he was equally unimpressed by our increasingly intrusive style of government. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, for example, he once commented:
"The man on the Clapham Omnibus wonders why we're worried about personal information falling into the hands of untrustworthy people, who may use it to extract money from us. Since the Government had it in the first place, it's happened already."
A lifelong non-smoker he gave an interview a few years ago in which he commented on the number of pubs that had closed. Classic Wogan, he didn't offer an opinion as such, he simply noted that:
"People don’t smoke in pubs now, and they don’t want to sit out in the cold and smoke, so they don’t go at all."
In 'Wogan's World', his Sunday Telegraph column, he added, "I hate to break it to you ... but pub culture is over. Five blokes talking rubbish over a pint died with the smoking ban. It’s dinner at the gastropub, and bring your partner."
Refreshingly he openly admitted he enjoyed a drink and even described alcohol as his "big vice". In an interview last year he said:
"We, probably in common with every other middle class person of our age, probably drink too much, but there you are.
“Of course you shouldn’t drink every day, I’m not advocating people drinking, but the fact is that, yes, I have a glass of wine with my dinner and I may have a dry martini before my dinner.
"When you get to a certain age you think, ‘Well, how much longer have I got to have a dry martini?’
“So you’ve got to make the most of it. I make a wonderful dry martini and an excellent champagne cocktail, with a cube of sugar, bitters and Cointreau. It’s delicious.”
We'll never know what he thought of the Chief Medical Officer's latest guidelines on drinking but I like to think he would have considered them every bit as ridiculous as Eurovision.
PS. I started with a tenuous link so I'll end with one.
Several commentators in Ireland have commented today on the role Wogan probably unwittingly played in diminishing any anti-Irish feeling in Britain in the wake of the IRA bombings in the Seventies and Eighties.
Well, I shall be in Ireland later this week and I will happily raise a glass or two to Terry Wogan, the UK's favourite Irishman who became a duel citizen in 2005 and was a fine ambassador for both countries.
In honour of the great man I shall ask for a champagne cocktail with a cube of sugar, bitters and Cointreau. I'm told it's delicious.