A Dream of Flight
After lovepuppy asked whether flight or invisibility was preferable as a superpower, katydid offered one of the most uniquely amusing and quirky answers I could have imagined:
My immediate response is invisibility. Wouldn’t it be funny to see a car driving around with what looks like no driver? You could put your dog on your lap and it would be even funnier.
While I agree with Katy that the comic value of invisibility would likely exceed that of flight (though the latter isn’t without its pranking possibilities), the whole question gave me momentary pause.
Not terribly long ago, I was in Texas sitting on some cracked red rocks looking into the darkness over a nighttime plain. I suddenly thought that it would feel quite familiarly nice to surge up and forward, off of the ridge and into the air, and fly through the sky; it took perhaps a single second for this thought to trigger a terrible realization: I don’t know how to fly.
A few more moments of confused and despairing thoughts followed before I was able to coherently reflect that I’d never known how to fly and that indeed flying isn’t possible. The despair I felt was quite real, a shock of anguish that I couldn’t quite explain, and then I realized:
I had dreamt, some weeks or months before, that I could fly. In the dream, it was simply a matter of holding my breath in a particular way and willing myself forward, at first low and fast over the ground and between trees, but soon high above cities and seas. Every now and then, I’d lose my breath or forget which muscle groups to tense and would fall back to the ground, but without damage.
I’d had this dream and hadn’t realized on waking that it wasn’t true; I hadn’t remembered the dream and compared it to my waking life, and so had for weeks been living with an unconscious, unarticulated belief that I could fly, a buried delusion.
I know it’s silly, but the sudden recognition that it had been a dream was vertiginous and painful; I felt disoriented and irredeemably sad. This beautiful sense of freedom from the dream which I’d lived with was quite casually crushed by a drab facticity that was indifferent to my longing to fly.
So, as funny as invisibility might be, I choose flight: if you’ve ever known how to do it, as I think I did, you know it’s the most wonderful feeling imaginable.