Another Level

For as long as I can remember, that is up to a few years ago, I have had dreams in which I am flying. Not the kind of Superman flying, up with the clouds whizzing along at great speed, more a kind of balletic floating above the ground. Sometimes, I am in a wide open park, my legs at right angles to my body spinning like an upside down helicopter, or at other times, more elegantly, dancing across a sandy beach at the shoreline, my feet not quite touching the ground. Frequently I have been indoors, floating repeatedly, just by willing it, from the floor to the ceiling. This is usually accompanied by feelings of exhilaration and I love it when it happens. In my poem Listening to Lilac, I describe skimming the surface of a coastline. This is not just something from my imagination, but a memory of a dream, or many like like it.

Dreams are so real aren’t they? I have often contemplated the idea that we travel to a parallel world when we sleep and our dreams are a window into our activities there. Of course this notion only amuses me when the dreams are pleasant and I’m engaged in some exciting adventure, or enjoying a sell out exhibition in Cork Street and being hailed by Charles Saatchi as the next big thing, or being seduced by some gorgeous bronzed Adonis. It’s quite different when something terrifying or disturbing is happening to me and it's always a huge relief to land back in reality where I can gratefully embrace my very ordinary life. Worryingly, on a number of occasions I have dreamed of burying a body (or once bundling one into the boot of a car) and wake up alarmed and deeply anxious that it might have really happened, or it’s a premonition of some future atrocity I’m going to commit. I have always been racked with guilt if I even swat a fly or kill a wasp, imagining as a child that giant cousins of the murdered creatures would come back to eat me, so the mystery buried body haunts me irrationally even in my rational conscious mind.

Some of my dreams have been so vivid and the storylines so riveting that for a few minutes after waking, I have lain there unsuccessfully willing myself back to my astral film set, and being dismayed that almost immediately it starts to unravel and fade from memory. I’m convinced they’d make brilliant dramas if only I could capture and document them. Sadly my waking mind never seems able to come up with anything anywhere near as compelling. I’m sure this is true for most of us, unlike the brilliant Max Ernst whose dreams were a rich source of inspiration. One of the founding members of the Surrealists, he first experienced hallucinations as a child and claimed when he became an artist that he was able to fix them as a faithful images in his conscious mind, like a camera, and transform them into works of art.

Believing as Freud and The Surrealists did that dreams are a disguised expression of unconscious wish, I have been wondering why for a long period I haven’t been flying in my dreams, and what has changed in my psyche to clip my wings, metaphorically speaking. A quick Google search of flying in dreams revealed that they are

“. . . very often a precursor for lucid dreaming, a dream state in which we are aware we are dreaming and can manipulate the outcome of the dream and is a sign that something is generally going right in our lives! Freely flying as high or as low as you wish using your arms or feet for direction, often with the ability to do acrobatics in the air is an indication that you feel really good about something in your life, feeling very proud of an achievement at work or at home, and life is good. We feel on top of the world and are soaring to great heights in our minds when we fly.” (www.mysticalblaze.com)

Ha! Well three years of frustration on the work and home front and not being in control of my own life might well explain it then, and I can now look forward to discarding my shackles and once again gliding serenely and effortlessly through my subconscious sojourns.

I like the idea of being able to choose our dreams before sleeping, like selecting a movie on Sky and replacing the actors with whichever character we wished to play in whatever scenario we needed to act out. In one of the aforementioned epic dramas I get involved in when I’m sleeping, I find it hard to believe that they have only lasted for a few seconds, or do they say it's just a few minutes? But then I also have my own notions about time and our existence in it. The first time I read Jesus’ statement “Before Abraham was, I am” it was like a light bulb going on. I had some instinctive realisation, though I couldn’t articulate it, that there was some truth in this, that time was relative to our perception of it, or our existence in it, almost like circles within circles, and it was possible to move in and out of time zones or planes. I understood this as his being outside of time as we knew it, that for him there was no past or future only an ever-present existence. This is just a feeling, not very well expressed. I haven’t the brain for understanding mathematics and physics (Grade 6 in both); it’s more a deep-rooted suspicion that we exist on different levels and it is maybe through our dreams that we see glimpses of our other selves and travel through different time zones. Pure nonsense of course, but I like to play with random thoughts and hypotheses.

Now, just to satisfy my curiosity, I’m going to Google the meaning of burying bodies in one’s dreams and hope I’m not too disturbed by what I find.