How comprehensively, though, do the experiences of adulthood expose to our vision just how far removed from reality our childhood imaginings were. Our youthful ambitions were based upon misconceptions, often fed by works of fiction from authors who offered us just enough truth to set our imaginations running wild.

An interesting question is just what effect the ready availability of information from the modern communication explosion will have on the minds of children and youth? Will truth be slammed into their faces when they least expect it by a chance discovery of hard facts? That would have been much less likely to occur decades ago when baby-boomers were young. Facts weren't so readily available in those days and lack of facts afford us the bliss of ignorance.

My own experience is a perfect example. As a child I was in love with the Biggles stories. The romance of World War 1 dogfights fought in flimsy, gaily colored flying contraptions, spitting tracer bullets as they zoomed, looped and spiraled among the clouds, lit in my mind a fire that blazed strongly for many years. The tales of dashing heroes, of a Red Baron, of flying aces galore charging through the sky with daring bravado inspired me to research everything I could about early aviation.

That research didn't proceed very far as there was precious little information available to me. A few library books and the occasional short clip on television were the only snippets of reality that I could find.

Hence my uncorrected imaginings welled up to a wave of desire to be a part of it all, to such an extent that by the age of sixteen I began to be seriously disappointed when the realization stole into my mind that the First World War was not going to be rerun so that I could become a flying ace.

I felt robbed of my opportunity to fly a Sopwith Camel behind enemy lines over the Western Front, sending chivalrous adversaries to a flaming death in honorable combat. I even purchased a set of Royal Flying Corps pilot's wings from a military memorabilia store. The impact of reality when it arrived was sadly deflating, but reality often brings us in for a heavy landing.

In my older years, as hi-tech information sources became common, I discovered some hard truths that exposed my childhood desires as utterly laughable. I learned that for most of WW1 the average life expectancy of a fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps stationed in France was around three weeks, dipping to just two weeks during the bleakest period of 1917. Hence, if I was going to be a hero the experience would most likely have been very short-lived.

My limited research as a child never drove that truth home to me. I knew from my early reading that almost all of the heroes died, few at all surviving the war. I read of their deaths with such zealous interest that even their fates somehow made them seem to me much more alive here-and-now than the long-gone ghosts they are. Somehow, though, the implications of that fact never materialized in my mind. I didn't know that almost everyone was quickly killed.

I have also recently discovered from research on the Internet that 'Capt' W E Johns who wrote the Biggles stories wasn't a captain at all but merely a Flying Officer, equivalent in rank to an army lieutenant, and he wasn't a fighter pilot. From what I have learned Johns flew for just twelve months after transferring from the army, spending almost all that time as a flying instructor stationed in England. He spent six weeks at the Western Front towards the end of the war flying two-seat bombers before being shot down and captured.

What a let-down it was to learn the truth! That man brought aerial combat to life so vividly in his fabulous writing that I was sure he must have been central to it all. No wonder that when I looked for his name among the heroes list it wasn't there, a fact which had mystified me. He was just a damn good shot with a flying pen, though to have survived as a flying instructor in those days would have been no mean feat.

Nevertheless, even my image of the author responsible for seeding my childhood dreams and ambitions was shot down in flames by hard facts. It's destruction, though, brings to view another piece of the enlightenment jigsaw puzzle. The truth is that if Capt W E Johns really had been a fighter ace throughout World War 1, dealing out fiery death from tracer bullets to worthy opponents who died with romantic honor, he would almost certainly not have survived the war. In that case, he could never have written the Biggles stories that enchanted millions of young minds for decades.

Consequently, I don't feel cheated. I consider that my life as a child was enhanced even if it was by partial truths, and I feel pleased as a mature adult to made aware of the processes involved in that.

I am brought fact-to-face, though, with the fact that the information age will be an age of innocence lost, and that myths that dreams revolve around will be swiftly and totally de-bunked. How will that impact on today's children? Will they grow up sooner? Or will they create new areas of fantasy where there is little chance of cold, disheartening truth invading?