Flying dreams revisited

Waiting for a train, I glanced up at the station clock. It was a beautiful, antique, analogue clock, its hands set at 7.30.

I glanced away and noticed another clock, a little further away. It was showing a completely different time. I noticed a third, and fourth clock, each indicating various times of the day. I checked back with the original station clock, where it was no longer 7.30 but mid-afternoon.

Someone asked me if this was a dream. I assured them it wasn’t.

They were persistent, so to humour them I rolled my eyes, rose onto my tiptoes, and flapped my arms. To my utter surprise, I flew high into the air and into lucidity.

“Look,” I called to one of the people on the station platform, “you can fly too. You can do anything in a lucid dream. Come on, it’s amazing!”

“I can’t,” she replied, “I’m a dream character, not real, an aspect of yourself.” And, in that instant, she freeze-framed as did everyone else in the dream. Time stood still – perhaps the clocks breathed a unison sigh of relief, their message delivered. I was free, beyond the realm of linear time, to explore my dream in the timeless now.

Except that I woke up, high on flying and laughing at my dream character’s droll response. I looked at the clock. I’d like to say that it was 7.30, but it was a little earlier than that and resolutely measuring the steady rhythm of linear time.

The dream clocks woke me up to the fact that I was dreaming. What an apt dream symbol for a wake-up call.

I have written in other blogs and in my most recent book, Bird of Paradise, about my brushes with lucid dreaming. Although I enjoy it occasionally – and it blows me away every time – my more common experience is that a dream character asks me if I am dreaming and I go on to prove that I’m not. I try to fly, and fail, or I dismiss the question because – obviously – I am not dreaming!

During normal dreaming the more rational areas of the brain – the prefrontal cortex – are not very active. That’s why dreams seem real while you’re in them. They make sense. If you’re keen to wake up inside a dream and become lucid you can remind yourself, while you’re awake, that dream clocks are not very consistent with telling the time, that dream books can be very difficult to read because of morphing words, and that dream mobile phones are notoriously impossible to navigate to a successful outcome. If you encounter a dream clock, book, or phone, there’s a chance that someone in your dream – and it might be you – says, “Is this a dream?”

Other people in a lucid dream are usually more co-operative than my cheeky person.

You can chat, ask them questions, or introduce a mentor or someone you admire into your dream to seek advice, get creative, adventure, or chill. When all is said and done, though, these characters – like all dream characters – are created by you. They speak with your voice (drawn from some deep level), draw on your perspectives, even though they may seem infinitely wiser (or less wise) than you know yourself to be. Why is this? It’s because you are freer in dreams, less constrained by your waking life perspectives, open to the greater fluidity of your unconscious mind.

My droll, freeze-frame dream character might have reflected my perspectives on time (enjoying freeze-framing linear time and entering the timeless now). No doubt she was also an aspect of my dream analyst self, and the humour I like to use to communicate analytical things. But most of all, she is the part of myself that perhaps believes she can’t fly, the part of myself that sometimes raises to her tiptoes and flaps her arms in a dream only to fail at flying and fail at going lucid. Perhaps she’s a part of me that sometimes freezes instead of flying in waking life: fear of flying. Metaphorically, that is.

This all brings me to the point of this blog, the intention I had when I sat down to write.

If you’re familiar with my writing, you’ll know that I enjoy a lot of scene-setting in the lead up!

My recent lucid flying dream led me to reminisce some of my non-lucid flying dreams over many decades.

I have flown high, flown low, flown acrobatically, flown in hops and skips, flown downstairs instead of using the steps, taught others how to fly, practised fly-running (big, moon gravity leaps, covering the ground fast), and insisted, in many a dream, that flying is a special talent that anyone can develop: look, watch me, you can do this too!

But there’s one recurring flying dream I had in the months leading up to really taking off (see that clue?) with my work in dreams. We’re going back almost 30 years here.

In this recurring dream I would be sitting on the floor – or on a chair – with other people, listening to someone giving a talk. I would be at the very back, behind everyone else. I was happy sitting there, listening, learning. But periodically my body would lift from the floor, just a few inches, but enough to be flown to the front of the group and into the speaker’s position. I would decline, walk back to my seat on the floor, only to be lifted and moved to the front again. If I was on a chair, my chair would be my low-flying chariot. It was a kind of passive flying. I wasn’t frightened (it wasn’t a possession kind of feeling). It felt, in the dream, like I was being encouraged to take my place, to teach, but I also felt, in the dream, that I didn’t feel it was appropriate, or that I was ready.

In those very early days of my work I wondered whether the unseen flying force in my dream was an ego that needed to be kept in check, or an energy within myself that knew I was ready and urged me to stand up and teach. To some extent my dilemma was resolved when situations kept arising, as if by magic, to move me into the speaking space. I was carried upfront passively and set on my feet. My job was to accept the situation and deliver.

We can all fly, in our dreams and metaphorically. While our flying dreams may not be about our potential (they might reflect flying to escape facing something, or not being grounded, or many other possibilities), they often help us to understand our potential, why we might hold back, when we have flown too high, when we need to find balance, or when it’s time to face fears, spread our wings, accept, and deliver.

Spread your wings!

 

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