Xanga Post 2: Dance to the Sky

I don't have flying dreams very often. Most of the time, my dreams are at least a bit more realistic than that.
When I wrote this, I remembered the whole dream. I still do. When I flew, it was the type of dream flying where I had to run. Except it wasn't exactly like that.

1.15.2005 __saturday____
The other night, I dreamt that I was in a beach house, a huge one with three floors, a wrap-around porch, and windows everywhere. The stairs outside led to the second floor instead of the first. The house was elevated on stilts, so the stairway was long and steep. When it reached the ground, the stairs kept going until the steps were the ground.
It was a beach house, but it wasnt't located at a beach. In fact, it was in a field. A field of browning grass that reached up to my shoulders. There was a grove of pine trees next to the house, and they were small enough to be Christmas trees. They might have been intended to be Christmas trees, because they were lined up perfectly.
I was on the porch, looking down at the trees. I walked around to the stairs and began to run. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, and when I reached a landing at the middle of the staircase, I jumped.
I flew in the air and fell into the sky, the ground still far below. Then I fell down headfirst as if I was going to crash, but I positioned myself in a way so that I could land on my hands and feet, much like a frog or cat. I leaped up once I landed, and I flew again. I landed again, but on one hand this time. I kept going, on the ground, in the sky, diving again and again. It was as though I was performing some kind of flowing dance, twirling in the air, with hand motions that came naturally.
And then I tripped on myself in the air, and I let myself fall to the earth. I rolled myself into a ball and willingly let gravity take me, tumbling down the earth-steps and into the grass. When I finally stopped moving, I picked myself up and looked up into the clouds in the sky. They were where they should be, but they looked so far away. So out of reach.
I felt a need to reach them, a desperate feeling to be up there with them. So I climbed the stairs again and started over, knowing it was a futile attempt.

It was a poetic dream. I flew for as long as I could trust myself to dance in the air. And every time I fell, I was nimble and graceful enough to try again without stopping.
Every time, I felt like I could get closer than my previous try.

I don't think I described the house well enough. But I was flipping through a book I have at home a few days ago, and I came across a beach house that reminded me of the one I dreamt about. I don't have it with me at the moment, and I can't remember what it was called, so I can't look it up without doing unnecessary, extensive research. So check back here over the next day or two; I'll upload a picture of it later.

Xanga Post 1: The Trigger

I finally started going through my Xanga. I don't write in it anymore, but I still like to re-read things every now and then. At one point, I deleted my account out of anger, but then I realized that was a big mistake. I thought it was lost forever, all 3-4 years that I'd written down (even though it was full of so many pointless entries).

I was able to contact someone who works for Xanga and asked them if they could restore my online journal -- which they did. They can only do it once, so I won't try to delete it again.

So here is the first dream that I typed out, a few months after I started using the site.

1.5.2005 __saturday____
Did you ever get that feeling when you do something like smell a certain spray or perfume, or you see something in the light of a sunset… like nostalgia..? Well, that happened to me a few days ago, when I smelled something sweet in the breeze (when it was still warm outside), and I had a flashback. It’s like it’s not my memory, but someone else’s, because I don’t remember it happening. What I saw in my mind was this:

I was in a building that had walls and pillars of white marble, and the ceiling was domed. A boy around my age was standing next to me, aaand – that’s all I remember….

I wish I could just pull out pictures from my mind.

I was 14 when I wrote that, so please excuse my poor sentence structure or writing techniques. I promise, you'll see that I get better over time (or so I hope I have).

I know that what I wrote about was a dream I had when I was younger, but I couldn't remember all of it. Up until now, I can't recall the entire dream -- but I know, now, that some of these memories of dreams are triggered by things I perceive with my other senses. Which is interesting, don't you think? That anyone should be able to recall a dream based on something they smell?

That just means I can experience dreams other than by seeing, hearing, or feeling. For some reason, I find that fascinating. I think of taste and smell as unimportant or even absent in a dream, and if ever I notice that I have the ability to taste or smell anything, it comes across as out of place. Or real. It really stands out to me.

Actually, I had a dream this morning that ended with me feeling itchy. Mosquito bites riddled my face and hands as I crawled my way through and around bushes in an open conservatory. I scratched at one, and then two of them as I listened to a man who urged me to leave.

I blinked (which I hate to do in dreams, because most of the time it just means I was thinking that my eyes were dry. That makes me conscious about my state, and then I too quickly realize I'm dreaming.) -- and I woke up in bed still scratching at my hands and face.

I still felt itchy when I woke up scratching, but I stopped, and the sensation faded. When I scratched my skin again, it was gone. I even looked for a sign of a small bug bite, but there was nothing.

I think that's one of the few times I've held on to something in a dream that wasn't a sentence or a song; it wasn't someone's face I remembered, or even a scent. That feeling lingered longer than anything else when I woke up. After it subsided, I had to really exercise my brain to remember why I was scratching myself in the first place, until the memory of the dream finally came back to me.

So what would happen if I woke up in the middle of eating cake in a dream, or catching the scent of honeysuckle flowers?

Would I wake up sensing those things, too?