Flying dreams

The best that poor old Freud could do with flying dreams was to argue that they represented displaced sexual desire. Freud s rebus, you will recall, was that unconscious wishes - and sexual wishes needed to be kept unconscious - escaped the censor s denunciation when the ego was weakened by sleep. If the now free-to-be-expressed sexual impulses were not disguised, by the pleasurable but not sexual hallucination of flying, the dreamer would be awakened by the consciousness of these forbidden desires. Freud never mentioned his own sexual dreams. Perhaps he never had any - or never remembered them. But this is unlikely. And any research participant - or any of his patients - could have told him that sexual dreams, complete with orgasm, occur in the very same people who enjoy flying dreams. 

Occasionally Tanya disappears, wreathed in fog. It often seems that you are going in different directions. As you fly, you recall Sally s admonition not to worry about the phantom Santa Claus. At the time, it seemed there was no real need to find him. But perhaps Sally had, all along, been trying to tell you not to feel guilty about your dreams of flight. She knew it was important always to reach out, break the barriers, leave personal demons behind—to escape from your cages. 

Of course, the brain is never so neatly programmed in dreaming. Even when one specifies a dream action, such as flying, details like one s trajectory, vehicle, and observed landscape may be filled in—as if by chance—or may change without notice, as if automaticity was constantly struggling to regain the upper—or is it the lower—hand ... 

As for integration of vision with other sensory modalities, most of the studies agree about the implied hyperactivity of the parietal operculum, where vision, space, and movement meld so that we experience the world in 3-D as we fly through it (however turbulent the weather ). If we lose this multimodal cortical matching center, we lose dreaming altogether, whereas if we lose our visual cortex we still dream, even though we don t see any more in those dreams. 

Freud correctly assumed that the failure of self-reflection in dreams that results in our delusional belief that we are awake, can fly, or survive surely deadly falls from vertiginous heights was akin to psychosis. As such we accurately regard it as primary process thinking, which is by definition narcissistic, omnipotent, and uncritical. But why does it have this character And by what mechanisms Certainly not to defend consciousness from invasion (because consciousness is invaded by primary processes in this case ). It seems far more likely that this failure to test reality is the outcome of an organic deficit related to two other deficit conditions of dreaming, the disorientation that creates bizarreness and the amnesia that creates dream forgetting. 

My dinner party hostess, who happened to be a descendent of Mary Arnold-Eoster, sent me home with her copy of Studies in Dreams, where the technique of lucid dreaming and its psychedelic delights are described in detail. I was as attracted by the idea of flying in my dreams as I was by the power of self-hypnosis, so I followed Arnold-Eoster s prescription. I simply put a notebook by my bedside, so as to be able to record my dream recall, and told myself, before going to sleep. I ll pay attention to my consciousness, which I would know to be dreaming because of the bizarre discontinuities and incongruities of time, place, and person. 

I echnological feats are made possible only after the appropriate materials 1 have been developed. Columbus made it to the Americas with rugged sails of canvas, firm ropes of hemp, and a sturdy wood hull bound by metal. Likewise, whether our dreams are to remain fiction or turn into fact depends on the materials available to us. Today, with a growing number of remarkable materials, we can send data through fiber-optic cables, crisscross the skies, or fly to Mars and beyond—a sign that the human spirit of exploration is more empowered than ever before. 

When I am successful, a part of my brain-mind wakes up and I am able to notice that I am dreaming and say so to myself. Having done so, I have created a kind of dissociation part of my brain is in the waking state and part is in the dreaming state. And then I can have a lot of fiin. I can watch the dreams, I can induce awakenings so as to increase my recall, and, best of all, I can influence the dream content. I can do whatever I please well, almost whatever. I can certainly fly and can have whatever sorts of intimate relationships I choose with my other dream characters. This is usually enough to make people quite proud and pleased to have achieved lucid dreaming. 

The one orientational anchor that is never lost in dreams is the self, the T who dreams, the I who thus swims, flies, flees, makes love, fears, and fights. True, some dreamers see themselves as dream actors (rather than being the centre of the action), but the self is always there. It is the construct of constructs, the organizational unit of consciousness. I dream, therefore I am. 

When men in racking pain may purchase dreams Of what delight them most, swooning at once Into a sea of bliss, or rapt along As in a flying sphere of turbulent light. 

Bullet Oh, I just wanted to ( more on my rag. If you have makes you sort of dream i all dark and you see shootin in it, and this time I saw big flying in it. They were big ar green and had white wings. — from an interview with a gasoline snifter, in .icjf and -Dnjgs. by Edward M. Brccbei the editors of Consumer Rep (1972). 

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