- cross-posted to:
- FloatingIsFun@fedia.io
- cross-posted to:
- FloatingIsFun@fedia.io
I think about this a lot. In my dreams, flying feels as natural as walking. Even crazy superpowers I invent and try for the first time work exactly as I expect because it’s a dream and everything works as I expect. For a while, I even believed my lucid dream self was my true form and my waking body was just a less-than-authentic character I control in the real world. I now understand that dreams only feel more real than reality because dreams are 100% intuitive. Still, I can’t help that being flightless still feels like a disability sometimes. I find myself craving the feeling of flying while I’m awake and unable to experience it.
Comic from Vivian Zhou on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.
I don’t think I’ve had full flight in my dreams. I have had a recurring one with near flight. Maybe you can try it.
I am in a suburb. One to idealic to be real, perfect weather, and very quite. Im outside on a lawn. I discover I can climb stairs that are not there. I just sort of walk up into the sky as though there are steps under my feet.
Eventually I jump from a very high point. no fear I feel like I’ve done this before. When I land I find I can jump back up to the height I have fallen. So I just jump from roof to roof. If feels very nice though telephone wires concern me a bit.
Dream flight is just so freeing and joyful and affirming. Sometimes it’s flight like how I think most would dream it, free of limitations, just a magical power that simply defies natural laws but for some reason with me, most of the time when I dream it, it’s a little more ‘grounded’, there are rules. Somehow though I don’t mind this, it somehow makes it even more intuitive, it feels kind of realer and this actually is part of what makes my flightlessness in waking life all that more disappointing and hard to have to accept. Dream flight for me is a kind of gliding experience that is innately possible in the physics of the dream world, anyone theoretically could do it also if they knew how, but of course because it’s my dream, I’ll be the only person to have worked it out. It’s a bit like hang gliding, but it doesn’t need any equipment unlike real life, just a kind of intense visualising and imagining of hang gliding, concentration is key or the whole thing risks no longer working like Wile-E-Coyote levitating above a cliff right up until he looks down. I usually need speed and run up, and jumping from a height greatly increases the distance and duration of the flight. From the moment I’m airborne, I gradually lose altitude until I can find something to jump off, so I’m always taking off with a calculation in mind for where the next solid object is for me jump off to continue the flight. In dreams, I use flight for leisure sometimes, but for some reason it seems it’s most often my way of evading and outsmarting bad antagonists. If I’m being chased, I’ll run on foot until there’s even a slight incline or crest for me to get some height and that’s when I deploy my flight skills that of course no one else in the dream has been able to master. It gives me this immense sense of satisfaction when aggressors are left frustrated and baffled at my unexpected ability to bend physics to my will. Sometimes it’s not even running from people per-se so much as just leaving bad situations, like dreaming of being stuck in high school again and having to do an exam but then just leaving the exam room and taking flight instead. No matter if the dream till that point was stressful, neutral or positive, those first few metres of flight after my confident run-up strides are always ebullient and fill me with pride and affirmation like I’m taking control and casting off weights. Really wish I could actually fly, always leaves me so bummed out when I wake up and there’s a lag between realising I’m awake and figuring out that the intense good mood I’m experiencing is because I can fly except… no I can’t.