My first flying dream felt like a real memory. I was in 5th grade. My dad was living in Philadelphia, and we were living in L.A. We had visited him there a few times, once on a road trip from Phoenix, another time by plane during the holiday break. Since back then, I’ve always had a “memory” of floating around sky scrapers, circling a clock tower so closely that I could almost reach out and touch it. On God, if I close my eyes, I can still vividly see bits of cloud dissolving into the edges of my peripheral vision as the force of motion separates it. It never occurred to me that this would’ve been impossible to experience as the passenger of a commercial aircraft. Maybe in a helicopter (I’ve never been in one) or a small plane doing stunts (obviously, no). Up until recently, my brain had placed this sequence of events in a file called, “Things I Saw While Looking Out Of The Window On Long Flights,” along with the Grand Canyon, the crystal-blue Gulf Coast of Mexico, and countless small town Main Streets lit up under the dark night. “Downtown Philly, in the early morning hours on a foggy day” was my first memory in that file, buried underneath countless others that were recorded while on hundreds of flights throughout my youth, adolescence and early adult life. I hadn’t thought about it in decades, until a few years ago.
In general, when I remember my dreams, they are loud. They have a lot to say, and while I might not always understand the language, I have the ability to store information. The important bits, at least. When I was 13, I had a dream that I was a hermaphroditic angel. In 10th grade, I dreamt that two women told me about my most recent past life. Tripping in a dream is kinda wild. I’ve had a ton of dreams about being unable to speak, or run. I think most people have those. Swimming dreams are lovely. A reoccurring theme in my dream playbook is the story of being at a fairly large house party, or in a busy hotel, searching for someone. More than once, that type of dream has unveiled hidden answers or provided warning about future events. Again, really hard to decode a lot of the time, but stored in the filing cabinet, nonetheless. This cabinet, incase you were wondering, is exponentially deep in every direction and organized in several ways.
The first way is what we would call linear. Start at the beginning, keep traveling until the end point, or at least the current end point, which is now. Sure, this has to do with our perception of time and the illusion that it only moves forward, but it’s also about how we build our reality. Data is accumulated and sorted, from the beginning and forever onward, and that is the clay from which we mold our solidity. Each and every one of us does this, and I think it’s important to constantly be reminded of it if we want to break free from the confines of birth and death. A lie told to us from Day One, to comfort and remove uncertainty, is that what we are experiencing is the only tangible reality, when we have actually been building it with our thoughts the whole time. I learn a Thing and then I learn Another Thing. These two Things hang out with each other and correspond. Then I learn More Things and they all correspond, too, queued up in a pretty little row, like lines of code or bricks. Piece by piece, layer by layer, we construct the Truth. Eventually, there’s a house of What I Know, and I decide to live there. It’s cozy and warm, and safe. Could it have been built with different materials and still be a place I’d want to live?
Another method of cataloging the memory cabinet is by relativity, more of a connect-the-dots strategy. Within this framework are also many categories, the first of which is pretty self-explanatory: memories about specific people, events, locations, etc. As we go deeper into our emotional attachments, joy, traumas and pivotal moments, we start to create new pathways to remembering certain details. This can be a helpful tool or a hinderance, depending on how we decide to approach it. Recently, when I find myself stuck in a negative state of mind, making all the self-loathing, hyper-critical connections, I try to remember to “put my thoughts down” for a minute if I’ve been holding on to them for too long. I give myself some time to self-soothe and usually by the time I come back to the shitty thought, I find that I’m less affected by it. My brain remembers, every time I do this, that I can do it, and the next time I’m creeping toward a meltdown, it gets easier to redirect. The pattern of relativity has changed, and will continue to.
Once we allow ourselves to recall more of this stored information, and relax our reactions to it, we can start to see that like most things in the Universe, our reality is cyclical. We want to resist this, because we want so badly to be “more,” and we (humans) bought into the idea that progress can only be accomplished in a linear fashion. When we view time as a spiral, it’s easier to understand why we tend to return to certain people, places and life lessons. Unfortunately, most of us avoid this part of the journey because we’re worried about moving backward, or regressing. When you play Monopoly, the game never ends (until The Man wipes out everyone else on the board, but I’ve never played long enough for that to happen. I don’t think anyone cares too much about winning at Monopoly, we all just wanted to buy Park Place.) You keep circling the board with your tiny metal shoe, buying land and charging people to stay at your hotel. And when you pass the starting point again, you get $200 for FREE, for literally doing nothing except playing the game and continuing to move forward. If only we were taught about cyclical time, and how to recognize these moments of revisiting something as an indication that we are right where we should be in life, and being given an opportunity to make sure we still feel good about the reality that we’ve constructed.
During most of my flying dreams, I become conscious of the act while in flight, and immediately aware of the landscape from my viewpoint. Before I knew it existed, I flew over the Caño Cristales. I told my mother about the dream, describing patches of jewel-toned colors painted on the rocks under rushing water, and she excitedly told me that it was a real place in her home country. I figured that I must have heard about this river at some point and forgotten, just another file buried in the cabinet. Maybe I’d seen it in National Geographic when I was a kid, or on television, but I couldn’t remember at the time. What I did remember were the feelings of freedom and joy that I felt when I was flying. It felt so easy, like the most natural thing in the world. This confidence has been consistent in all of the dreams in which I fly. In each and every one, I am so thankful to finally feel like myself. Something else that I’ve noticed is consistent with these dreams is pain. Typically, it’s when I’ve experienced a considerable amount of physical or emotional pain in my waking life that I’ve had flying dreams. One would conclude that my soul becomes so distressed in my body that it needs a quick break, and who can blame it? Human bodies are amazing, strong and beautiful. They are also limited, sensitive and have been contaminated by our toxic lifestyles. A couple of years ago, in 2018, severe muscle spasms led me to a complete overhaul of everything I knew about my own body. I was immobile, unable to work or even sit up straight, but the constant pain didn’t allow me to sleep fully for weeks. When the spasms finally subsided, almost 40 days later, I slept deeply, and had the most important dream of my life, thus far.
I came to consciousness on the wing of an airplane. Clutching on with both hands as it ascended into the night sky, I was aware that I was losing my grip on the cold metal. I thought to myself, “This won’t hold; I’m gonna fall.” Immediately, I heard a voice that sounded like my own but wasn’t me, say, “Just stand over there,” and my focus shifted to the space below the wing, which was nothing but open air. Yet just as I looked toward it, a 3-D platform emerged from out of nowhere - a secret step, like in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. At that moment something just clicked in my mind, and as I walked out onto the surface of this invisible floating tile, I remembered how to fly. So, I did what any logical person would do: I put my arms out over my head in a Superman pose and shot out into space at the speed of light, toward Andromeda.
When I arrived, I flew low over fields of flowers and bodies of water. The sky around me was pinkish-purple. It felt like paradise, with a huge city off in the distance. I slowed down as I neared a small cove, which had an old tree growing from the middle of it that formed an island of trunk and roots. The voice I had heard on the wing of the plane said, “You can rest here” and suggested that I lay back over the water and hover for a while, assuring me that I wouldn’t fall in. I remember thinking, “This is such a lovely dream!” and in that same instant was answered with, “It’s not a dream. It’s real. Reach your hand down under you, and feel the water.”
Please, if you are able, either now or at some point today, fill a bowl or cup with water and dip your fingertips in it. Bring your awareness to the physical sensation of skin meeting liquid, which you recognize instantly because of the magic of your nervous system. Think about how when you do this, nothing can deny that it’s happening. Your brain registers the experience differently than when you imagine it.
This is how it felt to touch the water below me.
Later on, after the red Sun had set, the voice came back to wake me up from my nap in the cove. I opened my eyes and saw thousands of diamond stars in the night sky above me. “I want to stay,” I thought. I was free, untethered for once, in a state of bliss. I was home. I had detached myself from my previous reality. This new one felt more natural, more like me. The fear and pain and confusion had vanished. None of it mattered. It was all a way to learn. In this new place, I was already whole.
“You have to go back,” she said, “There’s so much love on Earth.” That’s all it took for me to remember. My partner came to mind, despite the intense struggles we’d been facing at the time. He has such a gorgeous heart, and I know all of its corners now, as he knows the corners of mine. My dog, my parents, my siblings. Every single person I’d ever loved or even met, and all the ones I haven’t. I was suddenly capable of knowing the depth of all of their love and it was the most important thing in the Universe. So, I did what any logical person would do: I got up and flew back to Austin, Texas.
On my way out, I looked to my right and saw the city that I’d noticed on the horizon earlier. Now glistening in all of its midnight glory, it seemed familiar, like I’d been there before and knew I would return. I soared out toward the dark, further and further until I crossed through an asteroid field. Once I made it that far, I shot back toward Earth at light-speed.
A few weeks later, I started receiving massage and reiki treatments. During one of my first sessions, the memory of that plane ride to Philadelphia came to my awareness. The practitioner and I had talked about me working through some deeply painful trauma centered around my parents, and when this memory file was suddenly reopened, my sorting methods got to work. I knew that I needed to heal a part of myself that had been suffering since my parents’ divorce. But it wasn’t until that day during treatment that I realized the memory wasn’t made while sitting on an airplane. It was a flying dream. I had dreamed about flying over Philadelphia because I missed my dad, and knew he had moved there. I started sobbing silently on the table, releasing waves of sadness from the dregs of my heart. I saw the clock tower, felt the wispy clouds on my face. To me, it was a visceral recollection of events, stored in completion forever as a real thing that I experienced.
As real as the feeling of dipping your fingers in a cup of water.