You wake without knowing you have awoken – without knowing you have been asleep – and the spell of the marvellous is still in you. Was it beauty that possessed you? Was it you that possessed the greatest beauty that ever lived? All you know is that from henceforth, you will always live in the marvellous.

It is only gradually that you become aware that you were asleep, that you are now awake and that what you experienced was a dream. And all at once a terrible pang of sadness comes because you will live for ever outside that dream. You keep your eyes closed and your body still, to try to recapture, even for a nanosecond, a millionth of a millionth of what you have experienced and you know it is all in vain. The day has called you – life has summoned you – and there is no return.

The Olympic Games were rather like that. Day after day of marvels, marvels interrupted only by wonders and miracles. And whether we sought the thrill of partisanship, the joy of high drama or the high and rarefied experience of the incontrovertibly excellent, the Games supplied it without stinting.

It was a dream of sporting perfection and I am by no means convinced that it actually happened and that I was there. I try to recall the peak moments and it is as if I were lying in bed vainly trying to remember the naked woman with whom I was soaring above the earth a few seconds ago.

My colleague Marc Aspland, our Chief Sports Photographer, took two photographs that summed up this sensation that Beijing was a dream of the marvellous. The first was his picture of Tom Daley, the 14-year-old Great Britain diver, upside down, apparently floating in the air as we do in dreams, a boy leaping at the stars.

The other showed Rebecca Adlington on the podium after winning the 400 metres freestyle gold medal, talking to her teammate, Joanne Jackson, who had won bronze. The innocent delight in Adlington’s face – she is only 19 – is a thing of joy. She seems to be saying: “I can’t believe this is happening.”

I couldn’t, and I was there. She wasn’t supposed to win this one; she was said to have a much better chance in the 800 metres. But the two favourites for the race spent too long sizing each other up and Adlington came through to seize her moment with a savage strength and purpose.

There was a marvellous sense of rightness about the events that took place in Beijing, a strange sense of certainty. A train of British gold had been set in motion and it moved along with a dreamlike inevitability. It was that middle weekend that did it, that extraordinary couple of days in which Britain won 17 medals, eight of them gold.

The British charge was not so much an upswelling of genius as a kind of infection, a rampant, raging out-of-control disease. The Britain team were struck by a plague of victory. One gold medal led to another, and another. Each individual, each team, found that the role of Plucky Brit had been plucked away. Gold medals were no longer a glorious fluke, a wonderful bonus. They were expected.

And if one Britain athlete could do it, so could the next. Success drove success. A new sporting culture was being established before our eyes. In truth, it had been years in the building, beginning when lottery funding first came into British sport after the 1996 Games in Atlanta. Just 12 years ago, eight gold medals would have been accounted a detonation of unsurpassed brilliance if they had been won over the course of an entire Olympic Games. Now Britain had achieved such dizzying things in a couple of days. Britain ended up fourth in the medals table, with 11 golds, 26 medals in total and, yes, a couple of places higher than Australia. Was this dreamland?

If so, it comes at a fearful price. In the waking-up period that follows, a new reality makes itself plain. There is another Olympic Games in four years’ time and, as you may have heard, it is going to take place in London. And yes, Great Britain will be expected to perform much better than they did in Beijing.

The Brits have something to live up to, something to beat. And in the meantime, all the rival nations will be looking very hard at the way Britain worked, especially at the cycling, the sailing and the rowing, and will be attempting to copy it. In this post-euphoric period, there is a nasty, hollow feeling that the Brits have peaked too soon.

It had long been said that fourth place was the target for the London Games, and plenty of people scoffed at that and said, basically, in your dreams. But Britain did it four years early on the other side of the world, can there possibly be scope for improvement on that?

The job of the British sporting organisations is to improve on something that looked like perfection. It’s a pretty tough gig. Meanwhile, London has a job on if it is to follow the Games of Beijing with anything other than a let-down.

Britain had an equally stunning Paralympics and they too will be hard to follow. The Brits finished second in the medals table behind China, with 42 golds and 102 medals in total; this is even better than Athens, when the British were second again, but with fewer medals. The cyclist Darren Kenny had five medals, four of them gold, while David Roberts had four golds, bringing his lifetime total to 11 medals. Is it seriously possible for British athletes, and for the London organisers, to live up to this?

Me, I’m not inclined to be pessimistic. I think British Olympic sport was vindicated on that extraordinary weekend and the restless, driving minds of the performance directors will not be thinking about treading water. The Paralympic coaches will be dreaming about a first place, particularly as 58 per cent of the athletes were at their first Games.

When the London Games begin, they will be on a more human scale. We will have Games with a touch of irony, self-deprecation, even style: a pleasant change of mood from boasting and bombast and Brobdingnagian architecture.

But I’m in no hurry. Let the four intervening years move past at their own leisurely pace, with the usual triumphs and disasters. I welcome the return to sporting reality, the usual humdrum rows and transfers and the slow unwinding of the seasons, the hints of promise in tennis and cricket and even football: how long will all that last, I wonder?

Then in four years, it’ll be time for the mad 16-day festival to begin all over again. And the Games will be great, and the British performance will be stunning. Beijing has given everyone the hardest of hard acts to follow. So much the better. It will be worth the waiting.