Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Hovering

I have a skill in dreams that I never before thought about much in waking life. I can brace my elbows (on nothing) and hover around, just off the ground. My feet can brush the pavement, or I can be a little higher up. I can do this up to about a full story or so off the ground. I can also just do this in place and swing my legs around. It's different from flying, which I can also do when I remember to do it. Hovering happens in a healthy majority of my dreams as I walk around. It's faster and lazier than walking, and it's a nice sensation of coasting and smoothness. It almost always begins when I'm on a sidewalk, mostly when I'm waiting at a crosswalk.

My last dream this morning before I finally got out of bed involved hovering. It was a brightly lit, white-sky day and I was walking down the sidewalk, street on my right, approaching the intersection. Two men were ahead, one in the street on the right, one on the perpendicular bit of sidewalk I was approaching. When I got to the crosswalk, I leaned onto my elbows and started hovering. I paused to have a brief interaction with the men, we talked about something. I hovered out into the crosswalk, then up and to the right, into the middle of the intersection, except that I lifted up to about 10 feet up in the air above the men's heads... maybe 16 feet up total. We talked some more, though I don't know about what, and I lowered back down. I went to the man in the street, and I woke up.

I continued to think about this dream for a while, until I realized that hovering was a dream skill. That is, I knew I could do it in dreams, but my brain was confusing dream memories and waking memories and suggesting to me that I had, in the past, used this skill in real life. It took me most of the day of thinking to put the memories in the correct compartment. Not that I ever really believed I could hover, but it was truly an uncanny flipping of my vision of reality for a good portion of my day as I worked to process this. I think most of the problem was in the fact that I've never taken much time when waking to think about hovering, but I've done it so much in my dreams that it seems fairly normal.

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