Mistaking Memories: Flight

Someone once asked me if I had ever had recurring dreams. I told her no, I hadn't. Now, I realize, it is likely that I misspoke.

Today, I recalled a dream, or perhaps a few dreams, I have been having. The only thing is, is that I had begun mistaking them for memories. In this dream (only one episode, not even a narrative, is particularly clear) I sort of "catch" myself in the midst of falling. That may not even be especially accurate, I may also compel myself through the air. That is to say, in these dreams, I am flying. This is, most of the time, not a common trait of my dreaming and I cannot recall any dreams of flight I might have had as a child. My experience of flight in these dreams is extraordinarily mundane and might be described very similarly to Douglas Adams a la the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that provides the difficulties."

And on "How to Fly":

"One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

"It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.

"If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination), or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above the ground in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner." (Thanks to the Guide Wiki for the excerpts.)

In the dream, I manage to avoid some, shall we say, hard contact with the earth by simply forgetting to make contact with it. In every other convention, these dreams are pretty much like everyday life. So, if you want more interesting reading than a haphazard dream journal, you should pick up the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Trilogy" and read it.

Other than that, I don't really know what to say. This dream had slipped unbeknownst into my memory, sometime between sleeping and waking, and likely heightened by hitting the snooze button a few times. I have a habit of recording my dreams, but this one is not--as far as I can recall--one of them. That part, is odd. The writing or other retelling of an episode solidifies a memory in certain ways, even dreams which are especially short-lived in our memories. In fact, though we think of memory as a sort of rerun of the live action version of our lives, every recollection of a memory contorts the episode somewhat to fulfill the expected criteria we have, at the time, of that memory. So, it is like editing those old episodes and maybe adding in a character or scene bit by bit. (This is only how some forms of memory work; skills-based memory, like learning to play chess or ride a bicycle, become hard-wired independently from narrative memory.)

In a way, I am thoroughly shocked. What I think happened is that, upon or shortly after waking, I considered the dream or dreams I had involving flight. Shortly thereafter, with the dream-narrative rapidly fading, I thought of flight in the context of certain vague memories. Then, the two coalesced. Suddenly, I had odd, ill-fitting memories of me flying--or, as Adams might put it, missing the ground--which did not exactly fit the jigsaw puzzle of my personal narrative, but were not glaringly foreign either. They went unnoticed. In addition, I have a sneaking suspicion that I dreamed of having memories of flight that I used in other dreams to "recall" how to fly. If that were the case, then the original dream may never have happened at all; I may have just intuited the "original" memory later on through preconscious memory narration.

So, yeah, a little spooked.

If this made any sense, then you may enjoy reading Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft. Then again, you may not; Lovecraft is not for everyone.