(I kind of like this entry, so I'm cross-posting it here. I keep forgetting to cross post the others.)
I had a dream last night, not the Martin Luther King, Jr. type of dream that inspires a nation and changes history, just your average old dream-turned-nightmare that involved driving my car around a turn on the interstate so fast I ended up in the median. Of course, my brain hates me and as soon as I ended up off pre-approved ground, the world dropped away and I had to use all my skills (which are dream-mad, yo!) to keep from plummeting off a very steep cliff. In fact, at one point, I caught a glimpse downward and it was pretty much a bottomless pit.
I had a dream on Monday night, too. In that dream, I was driving my car through a fog so thick that it would give the Hollywood version of Victorian London a run for its money. Suddenly, I noticed a flashing light in the rearview mirror and lo, I was being chased by the police. In a random moment of dream insanity, I decided I just wasn’t going to accept a ticket, so I didn’t stop. Instead, I hit the gas and hurtled forward even though I couldn’t see where I was going. As can be expected if you’ve shared my dream-world before, I crested a hill at such a high speed that I caught air. For a moment, when I was two feet off the ground, it was exhilarating. Then, the hill dropped out from under me and I was twenty feet in the air, with the knowledge that landing was really going to suck and I probably should have just accepted the ticket. Also, I had the vague fear that the cop might shoot me even if I survived the wreck.
Now, I’ve left out all of the extraneous details from these dreams (zombies, lesbians making out, burned out shells of gas stations, the random loss of body parts), because there does seem to be two things in common about these dreams:
1. I’m in a car and driving at a fast speed; and
2. I’m suddenly airborne.
While I don’t really think that dreams are omens of any sort, I do think they tell us something about our lives by capturing a tiny bit of our subconscious and parading it in front of my active brain until it picks up on it and puts on a picture show for my enjoyment and edification. Or, clearly, if your brain hates you like mine does, you end up on the edge of plummeting to your death.
It doesn’t take a medium or a psychoanalyst to interpret at least a few basic themes in my dream. I hurtling towards the unknown. I feel out of control. I’m afraid that the higher I get, the worse the crash is going to be.
At some point in the past, about a billion years ago, according to legend, a boy named Icarus tried on wings and flew as high as the sun. He burned himself up and fell to the sea, dying in the process. Fiction writers and artists ever since have been retelling his story, making sure to beat us over the head with the lessons hidden inside it’s hallowed words.
If you get too high, you’ll fall to your death.
Pride goeth before the fall.
Know your place and stay there.
Obey the wisdom of those who have come before.
What a load of absolute balls.
Icarus flew. Let me repeat that, because it’s worth repeating: Icarus flew!
He fucking flew! And he saw sights that no man had ever seen before. He saw the world stretched out below him. He saw the heavens above. He touched clouds and soared with the birds.
The legends don’t say if Icarus was scared, but I think he must have been. The same way, that in the midst of my fear in those dreams, there was also a knife edge of exhilaration. There was the knowledge that if I so much as breathed too heavily, I would likely plummet to my doom and there was the certainty that at some point there would be a rough landing, but for the heartbeats of eternity in the dreamscape, I hovered.
How much more incredible would it be to fly? To shed the shackles of gravity? To soar in defiance of nature?
When I wake up from these dreams, I shudder under my comforter. My breathing is fast, my brow is sweaty, and the cats complain that I’m disturbing their slumbers. Once I decipher that, no, in fact there are no zombies (or lesbians, damn!) in my room, I am left to ponder the rest of the dream.
What if my dreams aren’t warning me that I risk destruction? What if, instead, they are telling me that if I don’t take more chances, I’ll never get more than two feet off the ground?
Two years ago in February, I was laid off from a job. I spent the next five months looking for work, spiraling into depression, and feeling like my entire life was a complete mistake. Out of desperation, I finally hung a shingle and started working for myself.
It’s not easy. I won’t lie. I think I suffer crash landings more often than the Wright Brothers ever dreamed. There are days where I doubt my will; I doubt my intelligence; I doubt my sanity; and most of all, I doubt myself. Those are the days when I feel like slowing down the car, and meekly turning back to the median or pulling over and accepting the rebuke that I was driving hazardously.
Then there are the days where I feel like saying to the whole world that they can suck it, because I am flying. Those are the days where I know why Icarus flew too high and risked everything. It wasn’t pride. It wasn’t nervousness. It wasn’t hubris.
Icarus flew because once he took his feet of the ground, he couldn’t remember how to do anything else.
Death comes to everyone. Some of us will meet it at young ages. Some of us will be old. Some of us will be wealthy, some poor. Most of us will leave behind people we love and people who love us. But how many of us will leave behind a story that passes to fable that passes to legend that passes to myth?
Who amongst us is brave enough to reach for the sun, because we no longer are satisfied with the earth?
I hope that when the time comes for me to leave the world, my body will drift in the Icarian Sea, because that will mean that before I died, I flew.
To clarify, zombies in my dreams = bad. Lesbians = welcome. Just saying.
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