waking day scenes and low flying nights

I woke from a dream on the couch in the old farmhouse on Putnam Park Road. I felt alone, but not lonely in the way you do at four years old--everything being one small world looking out from your own two eyes. I glazed through those first waking breaths, intimate with the air, the surrounding stuffed animals, the shaggy rug, the windows. Blinking, total zen at four. I woke from a nap, but I wasn't a napper. In those dreamy post-toddler, pre-kindergarten days (the thick soup of being, seeing, eating and teaching stuffed bears to fly), I felt for the first time no separation between waking and dreaming. The TV was on. Was I watching it when I fell asleep? Did I push a button (click) down on the rickety box and change the channel? Rabbit ears and all that lording over the set.

An animated scene unfolded inside the frame, barely in color. A child (or two? a bear?) was stopping up a dam. Buckets, hands. Stopping up all the holes slowly, meditatively in that wordless zen of Sesame Street that understood dreamtime and kidtime and the dis-logic of the passage of time and the adult ponderings of a child's mind and beginner minds and the expansiveness of small, simple things. Just this. Plug that dam. All else will drip away. Maybe there was music? A low hum. Pre-speech murmurings.

Strange, recurring dreams sweet-haunted my nights. A treacherous muppet monster loomed large looking for my Halloween candy while I hid under the red deck. His trademark fur floated like a grey feather halo as he lurched, eyes as big as saucers-if-they-were-sleds darting side to side. Or swimming in a neighbor's pond, we would slide out of the water missing limbs. When I wasn't crouched and hiding or dreaming of accidental dismemberment, I was flying. My heart rate would raise all the same. There was something bleak in the flight...a limited joy, a one day pass.

Here is the scene. I am in a long, low-ceilinged room with Bert and Ernie, two of my few points of reference in my thick, post-toddler, sensory stew. Here is the deal. The back door opens onto an endless grassy field that slopes ever downward. Bert and Ernie are neither benign nor malicious. They just were. They showed me how to step out the back door and fly, lowly, over the grass hill until the power wore off. Or they just expected me to know how to do it. It was now or never. Leap, or stay in that narrow room until the end of time. Or something. I stepped out and flew. Who knew? It was "ahhhhhh" while it lasted and so sad when it stopped. Even hovering three feet off the ground is a step up from mere standing.

I return often to flying. In my dreams. In my work. In my dreamy kid-soup state, I spent hours (days, maybe a year or two) trying to teach a bear how to fly so I could take a ride. I guess I still do that. I stand in the studio and imagine my hips buoyantly bubbling up sky-height. The imagery seeps in and I am low-flying again, always low-flying. As I sleep, waking-ly, I barely hover above the power lines, the treetops. Or I jump in live stop-motion, like a bionically slow bouncing ball. Trampoline feet. Feats. I have it. I bounce down suburban streets at telephone wire height, then roof height, then small tree height, then tall dog height, then it is over. I am running, just running. It wears off like a trip, like the end.