i felt like i could just fly
at nine, i discovered my talent for lucid dreaming. i remember the first time clearly: riding bikes with my sister, i explained to her that it was all a dream, that we weren't really there. shortly after that i realized that in a lucid dream state, i could do whatever i wanted, mold reality any way i liked, escape the constraints of awakeness. at first i spent a lot of time humming around in a transparent spaceship; later i floated through walls and watched people as they were sleeping. for some reason, i would replay each dream over and over again, bathing in every astonishing detail. even now, some conversations i have with people in dreams contain more information than ones we've had in "real life."
over and over i saw my hand curling over the crystal throttle, controlling the ship's motions through space and time, floating through solid rock, rocketing across the earth so fast that the sun would float up from the horizon and disappear over my head like a traffic light while i ran time forward and backward, watching river valleys form, deepen, split - and then heal, as if the water were pulling behind it a gooey stream of molten earth, each rock and hunk of dirt sliding perfectly into place, each tree rotating into position, righting itself, and then slowly shrinking to nothing
lucid dreaming isn't the hell you’d imagine it could easily become, a mind feeding upon itself, because, like regular dreams, each one arrives with a fully-formed landscape, situation, and emotional charge, ready to be shaped but already complete in its singularity and strangeness. my dreams changed utterly when i began driving, though; i would "open my eyes" and be behind the wheel of a deathmobile instead of my crystal spaceship, piloting it along wide, dark, empty highways that rose into the air and turned back on themselves, curving into immense mobius tangles with rollercoaster dropoffs and threatening bridges that hovered over oceans of fog beneath a swirling sea of stars. i blame these dreams for my complete inability to drive safely in an awake state.
over and over i saw my hand curling over the crystal throttle, controlling the ship's motions through space and time, floating through solid rock, rocketing across the earth so fast that the sun would float up from the horizon and disappear over my head like a traffic light while i ran time forward and backward, watching river valleys form, deepen, split - and then heal, as if the water were pulling behind it a gooey stream of molten earth, each rock and hunk of dirt sliding perfectly into place, each tree rotating into position, righting itself, and then slowly shrinking to nothing
lucid dreaming isn't the hell you’d imagine it could easily become, a mind feeding upon itself, because, like regular dreams, each one arrives with a fully-formed landscape, situation, and emotional charge, ready to be shaped but already complete in its singularity and strangeness. my dreams changed utterly when i began driving, though; i would "open my eyes" and be behind the wheel of a deathmobile instead of my crystal spaceship, piloting it along wide, dark, empty highways that rose into the air and turned back on themselves, curving into immense mobius tangles with rollercoaster dropoffs and threatening bridges that hovered over oceans of fog beneath a swirling sea of stars. i blame these dreams for my complete inability to drive safely in an awake state.