Falling

I remember falling....

I know why so many people fly in their dreams, you can’t feel the ground beneath your feet so your brain makes sense of the situation by convincing you that you are in the air, only when you don’t land your brain responds by assuming that you are flying. It’s that simple really.

In most dreams I do not so much fly as much as I make long leaps, glide, or levitate, usually it’s a glide. I try to move, actually twitching my legs in my bed, and since every step I take results with no ground beneath my feet I begin to make long gliding steps. That’s how it usually happens, though sometimes I make long leaps instead, sometimes I remain in one place levitating, sometimes I’m falling.

I have had so many dreams where I am falling, off of buildings, out of airplanes, in outer space and the planet’s gravity pulling me back home. No matter how preposterous the circumstances the falls are always long, and I mean impossibly long, sometimes the fall consumes the entire dream.

In a short fall, like out of building I always get to see the end of the fall, but the time it takes to land is unrealistically long. They always say you awake right before you hit the ground, but I guess I’m an odd sort of dreamer since I never awaken at that point, I always look down upon my fate and have one of two thoughts; calmly I contemplate death, I’m not kidding my exact thoughts are typically something to the effect of “well I had a good run,” or “well this is going to hurt, there’s a chance I’ll live,” the other thought is an almost arrogant declaration of invincibility where I am completely certain that this fall could not possible kill me. Regardless of my mindset I always survive, sometimes I’m surprised, sometimes not so much. Once I’ve hit the ground I get up and continue whatever adventure I was on in the dream, oddly surviving a fall that should have certainly killed me never registers as strange to me, and I never wake up because of it. That says something about me doesn’t it? A girl I like likes me? Impossible! This is a dream. However surviving a hundred story fall and walking away from it? Sure why not?

In a long fall, like the lost in space kind of falls, that stretch on for what seems like hours, those are the interesting falls. I just fall and think. I think about how I got into this situation and every dream it’s a new situation. I think about where I will eventually end up when I land. I start to look forward to the crash, cause by this time I have grown confident that I will survive because of some kind of dream logic, something like my spacesuit could probably keep me alive assuming I fall into water, and since the earth is two thirds water I got a two in three chance of surviving, or re-enter has burned me asunder yet so clearly I’m invincible, logic that makes no sense in reality but in dreams are quite compelling.

Sometimes the sense of invincibility forces me to assume my black knight identity, that man who could survive anything, sometimes I don’t even need to don my armour and I convince myself that Colin Kelly himself is in fact the un-killable man. It’s in the dreams where I fall endlessly and accept invincibility for myself that my thoughts become very interesting. I start to contemplate my immortality and how I could last so long, and it’s only natural because I simply am not ready to die. Even floating in space looking at stars in the distance waiting for one to pull me close enough to drag me to a planet, I look forward to the new adventure waiting for me when I get there. Sometimes it feels like centuries and millenniums pass while I fall towards a solar system, and the adventure becomes being lost in space and I start to wonder how many times worlds will die beneath my feet and leave me floating in darkness waiting for the gravitational pull of distance stars to pull me to a new world where I can try once again to fit in.

I remember falling, I fall so often in my dreams, yet an end never comes. It’s like every fall is a failure in life and we must endure countless falls before we learn to fly. I think that’s what I’m thinking when my imagination conjures such images, some failures are so great it feels like the end of the world, but there is such great comfort in knowing that how matter how long you fall, eventually you land, and if you are strong you will survive, and if you fall long enough are you not flying?