The Power To Dream

BIMBO CABIDOG

Sleep is the time, according to a passage in the Book of Job, when God visits us. Well, everyone seems not to notice it. 

But isn’t such a humdrum and common occurrence for every human being indeed mysterious? One thing sure, we spend half or one third of our time on earth in that other reality.

Once, sleep treated me to the sensation of a pleasantly disorienting dream. I dreamed of flying. It seemed very real I thought: wow I could fly! 

The experience exhilarated even long after I awoke, which kept me wondering: can I really fly? Yes perhaps I can, owing to some unexplored factor like the power to dream.

Well, this was how I did fly. 

After a fest of chicken in coconut milk broth for a heavy supper, there was nothing to do. I bide time in the moon-bathed veranda of my enchanted hut under coconut grooves. 

In a while, drowsiness swept over me. I snuggled on a bamboo bench and let go. The shutters to the outside world closed. I shunted into the twilight zone.

Immediately, wind flooded through me in a shaking rush. Some esoteric force lifted my body into a horizontal position off the ground, and objects sped past me, or I was actually speeding past them. 

There was an aisle of a massive structure as of a cathedral through which I sailed above the heads of people. It stunned me to discover in split of a second that I was airborne. I quivered to think so.

Into an antechamber and connecting corridor I coasted. Then I was suddenly out in vast open space. I began to climb the heights, soaring on a curve line upward. The atmosphere was thinning. I thought I was touching the sky.

At that level, where houses on the ground already looked minuscule, I accelerated. I cruised along the swirling airspace, farther and farther away from ground zero. Down below spread a stretching vista of magnificent terra firma, a wavy carpet of vegetation glimmering like a massive sea. 

In distant intervals settlements welled, where brightened blocks of houses nestled defined by streetlights. The people must be already asleep, unmindful of what's going on above them.

The scene below under the moonlit night sky bounced back a luminescent aura up to where I streaked throbbing aerodynamically to the rush of wind currents. 

Then I slipped to becoming conscious of myself in a sphere I was not supposed to be. I am human, and I have no wings to fly. I can’t do so. Is it really happening? The weight of the thought began to pull me down.

Hesitation switched to apprehension. I sensed the bright glow in my face turned to the cold ash of fear. What if the force suddenly stops? Up in the towering heights, the earth’s gravity will again assume jurisdiction over my body mass and its paperweight condition will hastily transform into a solid ball of lead hurtling back to ground level with the speed of sound. I quivered to think of it. 

Doubt pulled a quick downward tug on me. Confusion poised to storm in. I intuitively knew, once I allow it, flight would shift to falling. Kilometers up from ground zero would be done in seconds. And I would be swatted on hard ground like a mosquito on the windshield of a car speeding at 150 kilometers per hour. 

Instinct told me that I had to regain the belief in myself flying, and that I could do it forever. With the thought, confidence lifted me up again. I scrambled to try the arching sky-ways. I was now at the threshold of the great ranges of the heavens cruising on a steady course. 

I didn’t even remember that in that altitude, the air pressure could already blow me into smithereens. I lodged on the awareness of myself as itself a dimension of air in human form.

Years since the unforgettable episode, I would keep reflecting: did I dream or did I actually become another being, much like pressing the button of a remote commander and changing TV channel? 

Perhaps, answer to that in a Taoist frame of mind can lead us out of present human dilemmas. Maybe, it can show the way to a better life, and horizons of unlimited alternatives for full existence.

The path starts with the power to dream. Who knows, such may lead to the lost garden where the tree of life grows?