Over the years I would ask other kids if they dreamed of flying. I thought maybe it was because of all of those superhero comics I read. But, no, just about every other kid I asked also had dreams that they could fly, whether they read comics or not.
When I ask women if they had such dreams, they usually look at me funny. "Are you daft?" So I decided to look that up and found that for some reason girls (and women) don't dream that they can fly. It is supposed that it has something to do with self-esteem issues and male-dominated society. That sounds reasonable, but it also may have something to do with the the idea that there are fundamental differences between male and female psyches. I can only shrug. I don't know such stuff.
As I got older I began to dream less and less of flying. I will assume here that as the realities of life are loaded onto adult shoulders one by one, the less likely even the dreaming mind can cut loose enough of those burdens to allow a man to believe he can fly. Not even in dreams. Finally, sometime in my early 20s I stopped having such dreams. They no longer came to me.
However...there are still similar dreams for me. I have them to this very day. Instead of flying, I dream that I can jump. Higher than anyone else. Generally I'll find myself in a building with a vast ceiling twenty or thirty or even one hundred feet high. And I'll brace myself, then bend my knees, and jump high enough to reach up and brush that ceiling with my hands.
No more open skies leading up to space, now. Instead I am greeted by ceilings--but sometimes those ceilings are so high that it's almost like the sky, and I can scrape them with my fingertips. Perhaps there's still hope for me in my old age, I reckon.
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| Mort Weisnger Superman stories! Every kid's dream! |
Light fantasy.
Now it's dark.
2 comments:
I don't believe I've ever had high flying dreams. It's rare, but I have dreamed of high hopping, like you have, tho not with ceilings involved and only as high as treetops, then soaring down again low, worried about power lines. Or landing on my feet, like the Hulk, in a crunch of gravel.
Sometimes my heart feels more open the first few seconds afterwards, as with dreams where I've woken up crying or laughing deeply.
Or I may be riding or driving at a nice clip, as in a car, but without the car being there.
Or, at least once, even hopping while straddling a board and pushing at the ground with my feet like a kid does on a hobby horse. Tho not going as high.
Like I say, they're rare. But all over the decades of my adulthood. And I can never trace them exactly as motivated by immediate waking life. I've felt at my worst the night before and never dreamed of such a release. Or felt better, and likewise nothing of the sort.
Even swaths of mediocre days seem to have nothing to do with it. It just happens when it happens.
I can never trace an event or a moment that would trigger a dream about flying or leaping like the Hulk. I have no idea where they come from except that the flying dreams are the result of childhood exuberance and the thought of endless potential. I was a fairly intelligent kid and usually very optimistic. So of course I would dream of flying.
As for the leaping dreams...that remains a mystery. I've always figured it was the lingering optimism of the child part of my mind. What spurred me to write the blog is that I dreamed of being able to jump ridiculously high this past night. And life has been pretty freaking mundane lately. So I have no idea what triggered it.
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