human error

I swear I had to have lived on a different kind of planet in a past life because the dreams are back. I just woke up from one where I could thrust off a little and go right up to the ceiling and lightly come back down, and I was having loads of fun with it. When I was really young, I flew in nearly every dream I had, and I could go super fast or float slowly along, and even hover if I stayed focused. I crashed a lot. As I grew up the dreams were more about not being able to stay up and the crashing grew rather horrifying, so I stopped having those dreams for a long time.

When I was young, I thought the flying dreams were just something I did, but I mentioned them to my dad one day after I got grown up and he got so excited, oh yes, he flies in his dreams, too, and over time he never stopped like I did. He loves his flying dreams. And once internet arrived, I found out that dreaming about flying is a very common thing, too common, in my opinion, to be explained away with meanings. This feels too much like memories to me, something I used to take for granted. Think about it- flying doesn't come naturally to these bodies at all, but it's something we dream of doing and even create characters in stories who can fly. Flying is something we feel like we want to get back to, something we feel in our gut should be a thing.

I've considered that this could be genetic memory from long ago, because fish sort of deal with this sensation all their lives, and the most world adaptive family in the animal kingdom is birds. Many bugs fly, bats fly, even some reptiles and other mammals glide, and flying (or the sensation of flying) just seems like a key part of life. When humans finally really got off the ground, most of us were thrilled. Many of us adapted quickly and love looking out of glass elevators or riding crazy roller coasters or watching documentaries with lots of land flyovers. Some people make careers out of flying, from monster jets right down to hot air balloons.

We could say flying allows the feeling of more freedom, especially for those who need to 'get away' or feel confined to disability, but I was dreaming of flying as soon as I was walking, and I'm not sure how all that got into my head, because I've been able to properly visualize perspective in my flying dreams long before I ever saw it on television or any other way. How did I know what the ground would look like from above? How could I conceive moving through air so naturally if I was barely grasping how to use my body in real life? I loved running and jumping, but I was the klutz kid and shredded my knees a bit.

That dream last night felt really good after the one that had woken me up before...

I dreamed I was watching a little girl, possibly in another country, at least a very different family than mine, partly because the language was different and partly because everyone had black hair. I come from redheads and tow heads with black hair rarely sprinkled in here and there. The little girl was about 3 or 4, and the family was very strict.

One day the little girl was taken into a separate room with a few other children and some drunken men, and they learned to sing a funny song and do weird things, but since the men were laughing it was no big deal. The little boy sang the song while he was playing the next day, and while it was a little shocking, no one bothered him about it. Boys get to talk about that kind of stuff. The next day a mom or gramma (couldn't tell, extended family and everyone had children young) asked the little girl a question and she sang the funny song. This female adult was so outraged and mortified that she screamed at the little girl never say that again, and beat her very hard all over, even her head and face, until she was swelled up and ugly, and never stopped now matter how hard the girl screamed. I had to walk away and not watch because there was nothing I could do to make it stop.

I woke up pretty upset, as you can imagine, but I've had dreams like this before, where I'm a fly on the wall watching other people (aboriginals call this soul traveling), and after a little reflection, decided the adult beating the child must have grown up sexually abused and had held all that in, and once she'd become a mom and then a gramma, no one bothered her any more and she had forgotten it. When the little girl sang the song, it triggered all the horrible memories, and she did to that little girl what she wished she could have done to the people abusing her- make it stop.

I think the underground abuse cycle that a lot of people have been starting to open up and deal with in the latest few generations has a lot to do with the sexualization of children as objects, and sometimes the broken adults around them not knowing how to deal with it when they see it so they hush it up. They have no other way to deal except to shut it down so they don't have to see or hear it.

I know people from both sides of the track, as they used to call it. Some families have no clue what it's like beating children, in other families it's a way of life. It's not always about sex abuse, but it's definitely an abuse cycle. Being able to hit other people is becoming more of a mental illness nowadays. We are starting to say it's bad to hit people at all, whether it's a wife or a stranger, whether we are in school or out in the street. Some people seem to enjoy hitting, and oddly, there are a few people that enjoy being hit.

Then there's another type- those that actually enjoy hurting their own offspring. They don't just get angry and lose it, they actually bait their children, lay out psychological traps that lead to physical and emotional suffering. I've seen this with my own eyes in a waking state, and even lived through it to a point. There is something about hurting one's own child that comes with a complete set of matching baggage full of justification and righteous indignation. This happens all over the world, in every religion and even outside of it.

Our dreams of flying come from a simpler life. I don't think we are trying to escape in our flying dreams (unless we are being chased), and I don't think analyzing our frustrations about flying fails has that much to do with the lives we live now. I think we want to go back to the simpler lives we had. This life is much harder, like a higher class level, and we're having to synchronize sensation to all kinds of internal motivation and feedback. We're  having to embrace the realization that we cause pain. I think we were innocent of that realization in a life before on a different kind of world.

I sound like a kook to a lot of people I know, but some of you secretly nod. Even if I'm not right, we wish this were the case. We like ideas that make more sense outside of constantly seeing in terms of this one world. There has to be more going on 'out there' than just this world that feels so hard sometimes.

On really hard days when I don't enjoy this world at all (it really doesn't make sense to me that my body is so easily messed up by plants and sunshine and food- if I live here, you'd think my body would be adapted to all this, I'm like a fish allergic to water or something), I ask- What am I learning here? Several things have been very hard for me to learn in this life. Compassion is one of the biggies. Patience. Kindness is my favorite. I'm not a naturally kind person, but I have learned it, and I really like the idea of it. I like that compassion and patience and kindness give me a kind of power that you don't get with anything else. It's a sweet kind of power, the kind that heals souls and makes wizards of us. I'm not just flying around enjoying sensations. I'm using everything I've ever learned, even if I don't consciously remember it, to incorporate new ways of thinking into myself that progress me forward as a more holistic soul. I experience to learn, I learn to grow, I grow to become.

I didn't read books to get that. I've lived it. I've thought it. I've looked hard at who and where I am and recognized it. I believe this is inside all of us, and that we are all here to learn the same thing. I wonder sometimes if the belief that karma sends us back is one interpretation of feeling stuck on this earth because we haven't learned this lesson yet and get held back for another go at it. Escape into nirvana or heaven is the interpretation that we graduate this world and move on to another class.

I see no other reason for being aware of one's own existence. Everything we do is either right or wrong, loving or hateful, healing or hurting. I think there's only one true way 'out' and that's to embrace these lessons and apply them to ourselves. It doesn't matter what ideology you grew up with or believe, all that matters is that you don't get out of this until you learn something. I think this fits with Christianity just fine, as well, and perhaps the reason we're eating up so much heaven and hell 'smashing' in our entertainment is because we feel like we are literally turning our lives into our own hells and we're all trying to figure out how and what to do with that.

All of us. Rich, poor, super wealthy behind the curtains... Yes, I'm speaking to you, too. Even they have bosses, I'll bet. And turning it all into a mythos to tame the proles and using marionettes to pull the social strings is only a distraction for you too, because we. all. die. You're not winning the game.

I'm loving that my flying dreams are coming back. I really enjoyed that dream.