Recurring Dream

Since a little girl, I have always had the same dream. I’m uncertain as to what it means or why I have it when I have it.

Alone, I find myself standing at the top of a dull brown stoned building in the evening. I’m standing by the ledge and there’s usually not much else around except for the building itself; there’s never been a sprawling landscape or green of any kind. (I often dream in colour and I’m certain some psychiatrist somewhere proved that to dream in colour is to be a sociopath.) The height of the building has always varied, but more so than not, it averages perhaps ten stories. Several times, it’s been a skyscraper made of very clean and shiny glass.

Within a heartbeat, I find myself in my first freefall. There has never existed a precursor to how that actually happens; no one pushes me and I never actively throw myself from the building (this first time). As things often happen in dreams, the freefall just is.

I remember as a baby less than four years old, there was a stretch of road my family and I would take to get to the beaches of Jabal Al Akhdar.** I would always be strapped into the middle of the back seat and baba knew that the trick to making me laugh and squeal was to drive fast. Along that road were – and I would think remain - many large bumps that were more natural than man-made, and so not large enough to harm your car, but large enough to make your stomach fall if you were driving at a fast pace. I loved that feeling…

In these dreams, it’s that same feeling only heightened by ten thousand times. No doubt, that first freefall of my dream brings with it complete terror.

As I freefall, my body is perfectly parallel to and facing the ground. I am not in my body, but rather watching my body. (Can we ever be in our bodies while sleeping a dream?)

At a maybe one foot distance from where I could pound into the ground, I stop freefalling. This is not a ‘flying’ dream because I never fly…I just stop freefalling.

I instinctively understand I can’t be hurt and I’ll never hit the ground. With this knowledge, the rest of my dream consists of me running up the stairs (always stairs, my dreams are clearly not technologically advanced…or maybe I’m just a health freak…or maybe I just like prolonging the anticipation and working hard to enjoy what’s to come…), back to the top of the building from where I then start to actively throw myself off.

I stop freefalling before hitting the ground and run back to the top again…and on goes my dream.

I feed on the feeling brought about by the freefall and spend the rest of my dream reveling it. Strange because it would take a lot of convincing – or maybe a simple dare – to get me to freefall from anywhere. I have a fear of ledges because I believe my head's too heavy and it'll fall forward and over the ledge, taking me with it. Maybe this isn't a fear of ledges but rather a fear of heads? Or maybe just my own because it has...a mind of it's own. Oh my God that sentence proves how lame and cheesy I really am.

Right. So how about you?

**For those of you unaware, I was born in North Africa.