A Dream of Human Flight

For years I've had recurring dreams in which I abruptly fall and wake up. Usually the fall is only a few feet, a missed step off a curb or stair, and I'm grateful that I wake up before I hit the ground. Occasionally, however, I find myself at a much greater height, often deliberately stepping out into space from a cliff or building and since the result is always the same as the more modest falls, I find these to be my most disappointing dreams; a chance for flight (imagined) lost.

Recently I had my first successful dream of flight. I had attended a wake (whose I forget) and as my sister was taking the death especially hard, I was asked to bring her home and keep an eye on her. We returned to my parent's home, which had been transformed in the dream from a modest two story farmhouse into a swank, metropolitan high rise penthouse. My distraught sister went to sleep on a couch and I retired to the master suite.

At some point during the night I heard scratching and discovered that my parents' dog and cat had both gotten trapped in my room and were trying to get back out. I got up to open the door and discovered that the cat had shit on the floor. Too late. Angrily, I let the animals out, checked on my sister and began to clean up the cat's mess. I carried the cat shit to the master bathroom to flush it away and was astounded to find that the bathroom opened into a massive room with floor to ceiling glass windows on all sides overlooking the town (the setting seems to have been downtown Dover, NH but it had been altered into a bustling metropolis).

There was enough space in the room to run at full speed for some distance and I amused myself by running back and forth before I became self-conscious that someone might be watching me through the windows. I stopped and realized my mother was there and I asked if the glass was tinted. She explained that no, the glass wasn't tinted but that we were too high up for anyone to see. An argument ensued about whether or not we were visible and to prove my point, I walked to a window and without pausing, calmly stepped out into the air.

At this point I fully expected to, as usual, drop a few feet and then wake up, heart pounding. However, this time I fell for several seconds before I gradually slowed and then began to rise. My heart now pounding from excitement, I realized that I was effortlessly, inexplicably, most certainly flying. Argument about tinted glass forgotten, I soared over downtown, changing altitude and speed at will, buzzing a few feet off the ground and then rocketing up to hover several hundred feet above the city. Conditioned by years of film and fantasy, flight was everything I had hoped for and imagined.

Eventually, I returned to the ground where I was obliged to give a press conference. I of course said all the right things, blithely denying any assertions that I was special and assuring the audience that yes, I was prepared to elude the Venus rockets that had been engineered specifically to seek me out and pierce my superhuman heart (not sure when that came up).

"Coach keeps me ready, one in twenty of those things is gonna get you - even me - and you just have to be prepared. I'm not worried."

3:07 am. I woke up. Got a class of water, jotted down some notes, then, exhausted, fell asleep for six dreamless hours.