Last night Victor was telling me that he needed to start exercising because lately he couldn’t fly in his sleep and I immediately assumed he was having a stroke but then he explained that he’s always been able to leap incredible heights in his dream, almost like flying, until recently when he started getting out of shape.
This sounds ridiculous to me, both because my dream body and real body aren’t really related, and also because I’ve never been able to fly or jump or do super-human things in my sleep. In fact, in almost all of my dreams I am sunk into the ground of the dream so deeply that I can barely walk. My feet literally are sucked into the dreamscape as I move. A few years ago I learned that I can walk almost normal in dreams if I use everything around me to physically pull myself along. It’s a hard slog and I am forever caught in quicksand but this is normal for me. And normal for Victor is flying.
Which seems…sort of not fair.
I’m sure it goes back to our personalities. He knows he can accomplish anything. I cower and become paralyzed at the slightest things. I wonder if everyone else is like this.
“So how do you attack the monsters in your dream?” Victor asks me.
“How do I what now?” I reply.
I have never attacked a monster in my dream. I rarely even see them. At my most successful I manage to hide until my dream changes. I can’t even imagine fighting.
“I’m a goddam Bruce-Lee-level monster slayer in my dreams,” Victor says.
I don’t know how to fix this. Or if I should. I can’t fight. I can barely even walk.
You know what I can do in my dreams? I take pictures.
I take the most extraordinary pictures in my dreams. I know enough to realize that this world is strange and beautiful and I am constantly pulling out my phone to document it. And then I wake up and realize that the pictures don’t exist and that I am wasting my time even in my sleep.
What a ridiculous and pointless talent.
This post doesn’t have an end or a point but I wonder if we’re alone. Do you fly in your sleep? Are you stuck in your dreams? Is this just the way we are made, even unconsciously unable to escape the person we see in ourselves?