Despite the fact that I have a multitude of vivid dreams, I rarely fly in them, so when I do, the results can be pretty spectacular. Last night’s dream didn’t disappoint in either respect.
* * * * *
I’m walking in a hospital [hospitals sure do seem to feature prominently in my dreams lately] to visit a friend who recently had a baby. She used to work at the hospital in previous years, before a career change. She’s been recuperating there for a month or so now, and she’s both rested and restless, so she takes walks around the entire hospital to stave off boredom and visit with her friends and former colleagues. I see her walking down a long hallway, and jog over to where she is. We walk together into a large open room that is a sort of lounge area. There is a grand piano in the room, and a group of tables nearby, where a few employees are sitting and talking amongst themselves when we walk into the room. The other people see my friend and instantly light up. They wave her over to where they’re sitting, and I hang back for a minute to let her talk with them. I walk over to the piano, which is positioned next to the door of the supervisor’s office. It’s kind of a tight squeeze, and there are a bunch of other instruments (mostly drums and cymbals) stacked over there too, which are actually blocking the door to the office. Since I seem to be the only one who notices this, I decide to do a little mitzvah and move the instruments out of the way.
As I start to move the cymbal stands around, a very tall, lanky acquaintance of mine appears and says hello. He puts his arm around my shoulder and leaves it there awkwardly while I’m trying to move instruments around. “Not the best time for that arm to be there,” I tell him. “Maybe wait until I’m not trying to move a bunch of stuff.” He moves the offending arm, and I reach for a cymbal. The friend I came to visit calls to me and gives me a little come-over-here motion with her hand, so I walk over and join them. She introduces me to them, which attracts the attention of the supervisor, who walks out of his office and sits by himself at a table in the middle of the room. He is a very heavyset man in his mid-fifties, and his gaze moves from person to person. He says nothing at first, but the jovial mood of the group instantly changes to a more somber one. The supervisor knows my friend from her time there, and obviously knows all of the other employees, but there are three of us who are visiting, so when everyone else is quiet, he motions for the three of us to stand together so that we can answer a question. He asks us what we do for a living, and the first person is a young guy of around twenty-one. “College student,” the guy replies, to which the supervisor thinks for a minute and says, “Six hundred dollars.” Apparently, the man is estimating each of our various levels of income.
The next person to respond is a woman of short stature who’s nearing fifty. “I’m sort of a cross between a social worker and a nurse,” she says, wearily but proudly.
The man is clearly impressed with her answer, but his voice remains gruff. “Sixty-five thousand,” he says, and turns to me for my answer.
“I’m a musician,” I tell him and the group.
The man sputters with laughter, which makes me angry, and I look away. “Three days,” he says. “You’re lucky to work for three days in a row.” He stands up from the table and walks back into his office, still chuckling to himself. The three of us in question rejoin the group of employees.
“What was that all about?” I ask my friend. “We don’t even work for him.”
“It’s just his way,” she replies. This isn’t an answer that improves my displeasure, so I tell her that I need to go for a walk around the block and cool my jets for a few minutes. I walk outside and take a look around to get my bearings. The hospital is a hundred-year-old stone building, surrounded by well-manicured shrubs and trees, with colorful groups of flowers at various places along the sidewalk. It looks more like a church than a hospital, and the neighborhood is similarly beautiful. The sidewalk is very uneven, and there are lots of up or down steps here and there to make walking easier. It’s not an easy walk, though, and there are even small bushes growing over (or even up out of) the sidewalk in a few places. As I walk along, I find myself jumping over the bushes and steps when I come to them. Before long, my jumps are getting longer and higher, and I think, I might as well just fly.
As soon as I have that thought, I leap into the air and fly around in circles over the neighborhood, next to a few tall buildings nearby, and finally toward the high roof of the twenty-story hospital, thinking, I probably should’ve done this before. When I arrive at the top, it occurs to me that I should be careful not to attract attention to myself, since nobody else can fly, and I might arouse suspicion, or jealousy, or worse. I decide to go back to where my friend is, so I fly down toward the ground, attempting to stay close to the large trees near the edge of the hospital grounds. As I lower myself to about thirty feet off the ground, I feel a small electric shock on my right arm. I look down to see a man with a type of low-voltage taser gun pointed at me. He pulls the trigger, and a green bolt of electricity hits my arm again. It’s not powerful enough to hurt me, but if a small group of people used their tasers at the same time, it would be more than enough to drain my energy and render me flightless. I fly away from the man and land nearer to the hospital. I run to it, and duck into a white, unmarked door along the outside of the building. It’s a supply room, and I rummage around in there until I find a box full of ugly purple polo shirts with the hospital’s name embroidered on the breast in white letters. I grab one and put it on, hoping that this will be enough to fob off at least some of the people who would try to stop me, or to ask me questions.
I walk back in to get my friend. “I’m sorry, but we have to leave now,” I tell her. “I can’t really tell you why, but we may be in some danger.” She gives me a look and starts to protest, but I grab her hand and quickly escort her outside.
“Wow,” she tells me, “you sure do know how to get in trouble quickly. You’ve only been gone for a few minutes.”
“I know,” I say, “but I’ve found out about lots of things in those few minutes.” I put my arm around her shoulder and raise my other arm to fly. “Hold onto me.”
Now she’s really starting to protest. “What the heck are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“I love you,” I tell her. This takes her completely by surprise, and she stops pushing against me, which is what I want. It’s much easier to fly someone else around if they’re relaxed than if they’re not.  I leap into the air and my friend clings on for dear life, looking between me and the rapidly receding ground. I try to reassure her by telling her, “In my experience, I’ve found that a little bit of shock value, or at least surprise, makes people relax, which makes it easier for me to ‘fly’ them.” She doesn’t seem to like what I’m saying. I continue flying, until we’re on a precipitous hilltop that is as high as the hospital. The hill is covered by grass, and is only a few feet across at the top. It’s so high that there’s actually a bit of snow on the tiny ledge, which makes keeping our footing difficult. My mom is up there too, as well as the college kid who was in the room with me, being questioned by the gruff and blustery supervisor. I tell my friend, “Sorry for having to do that, but I just did what I had to do in order to get us out of there, and that’s the first thing I thought of. We’re safe now.” I hope she believes me.
I tell the three of them to wait for me, and I’ll come back for them when things are safer. I fly down in wide circles toward the hospital. Along the way, I feel more taser blasts on my arm. I look down to see about twenty people, in different locations, all working in conjunction to bring me to the ground. I think, This is disappointing, they don’t even know me. I land on the ground and run into the hospital’s parking garage.
The dream’s time frame changes, and I have already brought my friend, my mom, and the college guy down from the precipice. I’m walking through the parking garage, and when I look through a stairway to a lower level, I can see my mom walking by herself toward her car, unaware that these men are after us. I think, I need to get to her, but I can’t risk flying. I decide to jump off the level of the garage that I’m on, and down the outside of the building, feet first, using my hands and shoes to slow me down. I do this successfully, sliding down two levels and crawling into the window, where I land with a thud. I remember that gravity gets stronger the longer you fall, so I need to be careful here. I see my friend walking outside on the sidewalk, so I dash over to where she is. She’s visibly angry with me.
“Hey,” I start to explain, “I’m really sorry about all that, but I had to do it in order to keep us both safe. That’s what counts, right?” She’s not impressed. “I do love you – that was true – but I know you’re with someone (and you guys have a kid!), so I would never do anything to interfere with all that. There’ll probably never be a chance for us to be together, and I totally understand that. You guys have nothing to worry about.”
“Listen to you, talking like an old person,” she says. “Why did you have to go and say that? It’s not appropriate.”
“I didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers. But there are people nearby who want to hurt you, and me, and your friends, and even my mom. I had to get us out of there.” My friend is clearly finished with this conversation, and is starting to become exasperated. She gets up in a huff to walk away. I start to ask her something, but think better of it. “I’ll leave you alone,” I say, “IF that’s what you want.”
“Yes,” she says tersely, “that’s what I want.” She walks away from me across the sidewalk toward the grass and the parking lot at the far end of the lawn.
I need to get to where my mom is, and the dream location changes quickly to the top of the parking garage. I try my sliding-down-the-wall-trick again, but after the conversation with my friend, I’m flustered and not thinking clearly, so I forget to factor in the amount of gravity that I’m dealing with. I slide out of control down the side of the building, slicing my hands and destroying my shoes. I continue to fall and fall, but I never hit the ground. Somehow I curve and fall horizontally about ten feet off of the ground, constantly gaining momentum and speed, until I’m traveling feet first, face down, at hundreds of miles an hour. I try to stop, but I’m unable to, so I decide that some sort of force must be acting on me now, and I decide that I’d better not attempt to fight against it.
I wake up on my stomach, completely calm and relaxed, despite having the feeling of flying low, face down, only moments before.
