Preface To Floating: Recurring Dreams

Believe it or not, I used to have a recurring dream where I was floating.

This dream would usually happen at the apartment complex I lived in from the ages of around ten to fourteen.  They were called Villa Cordoba & I've written about them on this blog before, namely here & here.  I hadn't really thought about it before, but perhaps one of the reasons I dreamt about floating there is that I had actually seen the apartment complex from up high, as I often climbed trees which grew higher than the complex.

The apartments were in a square configuration, with the front doors looking out on all four sides, & each unit having a back patio.  The patio walls were solid, they looked like stucco but were perhaps made of concrete or even stone, I'm not sure.  You could clamber up onto the walls of the patios & jump onto trees in the complex, all of which grew inside (in the middle of the complex was a pool & a few apartments whose patios were in the front of the unit, outside the front door).  I wish I could remember what kind of trees they were, but they grew taller than the second story, as I said, & I could even see over the apartments to the middle school to the northeast & the back of the shopping center to the southeast.

In my dreams, I'm not flying, I'm floating.  Hovering, really.  There's no indication how I got up there, & friends & family below me - I'm floating higher than the apartments - don't seem at all impressed that I'm up there.  I recall that I have to strain to hear what they're talking about, & to yell to get their attention.  At some point in the dream, either someone asks me or I become concerned about the prospect of getting down.  I'm over two stories up & not really moving, just floating there.  The rest of the dream is all about how I get back to the ground - sometimes scarily, I just lose the ability to float; sometimes cleverly, I manage to get to a tree or a window; & sometimes skillfully, I figure out how to slowly descend.  In no cases do I actually hurt myself - I would usually wake up before that happened.

But I did write that I used to have this dream.  I haven't had it in years.  Probably not since my twenties, which is more than half my life ago.  But I had them enough to remember them vividly.  & like everything else I no longer experience, I realize now I miss them terribly.