another dream... The BEST Flying Dream of My Life

our family and other members of a "small christian church" were having an outdoor service in the high plains somewhere. the landscape looked a lot like how it looks outside of boulder, colorado... tall meadow grasses, gently rolling hills, foothills/mountains in the distance. it was a traditional christian service. we were all sitting in folding chairs, listening to the sermon. my attention started drifting... and then i got up and walked away from the group. i started looking north, away from the church service, out across the plain along a ridge, pointing north and i saw an enormous forest off in the distance... dark, green, filled with HUGE trees... 200 feet tall, creating these grand forest hallways topped by a sun-dappled canopy of leaves and branches. i could feel a soft wind on my face, moving the grass back and forth. and i got the notion that i should try and fly. so i just started running, flapping my hands by my side as hard as I could... and I STARTED FLYING! i absolutely could not believe it. but i didn't have too much time to celebrate... i

saw that i was headed for the power lines that were stretched out above the dirt road i was just running down... using my BRAND NEW flying skills, i crudely and barely avoided the power lines and rose above them, heading north, flying along the ridge line toward the forest. the forest seemed a long ways off, so i just started seeing how fast i could fly... how much altitude i could gain. i was exploring my new flying skills... but cautiously... i didn't know the limits of this new power and it kind of scared me. also, it took SERIOUS EFFORT to fly. imagine how much exertion it would take to run as fast as you can -- that's how much energy i was exerting to fly.

but it was totally working... i was flying at what felt like 120 miles an hour! zooming above the rolling hills on a sunny day toward the forest. wait, i was nearly to the forest now. i was flying so fast that I had covered about 4 or 5 miles in what seemed like only a minute or two. i entered the forest near the canopy at about 200 feet above the forest floor, going about 100 miles an hour. immediately, the temperature dropped. i was covered in shade. it felt exhilarating to fly (still) but i was also VERY aware of the tree trunks, thick branches and leaves zooming past my face and shoulders and flapping arms at 100 miles an hour. i would DEFINITELY either die or get seriously F'ed up if i hit a tree going that fast. i also noticed that flying was seriously tiring me out. it is AN ASS-KICKING WORKOUT to fly, trust me.

when i entered the forest, flying, it was like i had entered a great wide hallway made of huge, majestic trees. they must have each been hundreds of years old. as i flew deeper into the forest though, the wide of this great hall rapidly narrowed and by the time i realized what was happening, i saw that i didn't have enough room to do a wide, arcing turn and head back out of the forest safely. the walls of the forest had narrowed to the point that i didn't know how i was doing to turn around... and the walls kept getting more and more narrow. and the canopy above me prevented me from just flying out the top of the forest. i had flown myself into a narrowing box. i was most definitely going to slam into a tree in a matter of seconds. also, i realized that i was getting very, very tired from flying. i had to make a decision quickly.

so i gained as much altitude as i could without flying into the canopy and i just sort of turned my body around in mid-air and starting flapping and kicking with ALL OF MY MIGHT in the opposite direction. i immediately slowed down and began falling to the forest floor. oh my god was this exhausting! imagine going from 100 miles and hour and then trying to go 100 miles an hour in the opposite direction, fighting all of that momentum. i saw that i was going to crash right into the dirt and roots of the forest floor -- an ugly crash -- so i kicked and flapped even harder...

i BARELY missed the floor... it was completely gut-wrenching, but i had done what i thought was impossible... i had turned around and was flying back out of the forest canyon... i felt incredible and very happy. like i had dodged a bullet. but i was completely exhausted now. i was sweating like crazy and wasted tired. i wasn't sure that I could make it all the way back to the family out there on the plains. so as i was flying, i started looking for a branch to land on. i found one and started flying toward it, slowing down, hoping that i could do a semi-controlled "tree landing" like a bird does.

as i got close to the tree branch, i saw scott (my brother!) flying toward me. he was headed into the same canyon that I had just flown into. i yelled at him... 'Hey scott! it's me! slow down! land on this branch!" he did. when we saw each other, in the tree, we both started freaking out with each other about the fact that we both had just learned how to fly and how amazing it was that we saw each other in the forest at the same moment. we were both really, really tired too. it felt good to be sitting down and not flying... we were about 100 feet up in the air, clinging to a tree, just checking out the forest. we looked down at the forest floor way below us and saw people walking around, like what you'd see if you looked down at a small tourist town... people milling around, shopping, eating at outdoor cafes...

scott and i started weighing our options... we could jump out of the tree and hope that we could flap and kick hard enough to accelerate and start flying before we hit the forest floor, or we could climb down the tree and walk out of the forest. we were both really, really tired, but we also weren't quite ready to give up the idea of flying out of the forest. the dream ended with us both looking down, looking out, gauging our courage, trying to make a decision.