Why I (Don’t) Dream of Falling

Last night I dreamt that my boyfriend and I were looking at waterfalls on our last day at college together. Then my mom showed up to drive me back to Buffalo, accompanied by an annoying boy who has had a crush on me since I was four years old. The thought of three hours in a car with him disturbed me.

The night before last, I dreamt that my entire high school class, plus another few hundred people, was standing in a crater waiting to be picked up from school by our parents. Then a gigantic dinosaur came stomping through the crater and began to crush everyone. I hoped my parents would hurry.

The night before that, I dreamt that I was at the Super Bowl with my mom, my stepdad, and my boyfriend. We were really getting into the game when a gun shot went off, forcing everyone to make a surprisingly orderly exit of the stadium. After we’d been standing outside for awhile, I wondered aloud how long it would be before we could go back in. A women next to me replied, “oh, honey, they’re gonna strip that place down.” So then my mom, stepdad, and I went camping. At the camp I started to make something at the arts and crafts building, but then I had to leave to do something. When I returned, everyone in the building was signing to each other, apparently deaf. I smiled, happy with this particular turn of events.

I remember at least one dream for every night that I sleep, usually. No one else I know can say that. Most of my friends and family remember maybe one dream every week or month, some less then that. I’m very proud of the fact that I can wake up every morning with a fresh dream to regale my boyfriend with later, especially since he never remembers his dreams. I feel as though I’ve been blessed with a talent of sorts, though it may not be good for anything. But its impracticality doesn’t matter – remembering my dreams is something I can do that most people can’t, and that makes me feel quite special.

I’ve had all kinds of dreams. I’ve had dreams about friends, family, death, murder, fighting, love, seas, school, homework, airplanes, ex-boyfriends, kids, etc. I’ve had nightmares in which my head is in danger of being cut off by a comic strip character wielding a chain saw or elephants are stampeding through my house or Yoda is leading me through a dark cave from which I’m sure I will never return.

I have never had a falling dream.

This is a tremendous problem. You see, I believe that since I can remember my dreams while others can’t, I have the right to proclaim myself as a sort of dream extraordinaire. One cannot be a dream extraordinaire if one has not experienced something as basic as a falling dream.

Falling dreams are common – it says so on many dream dictionary websites. Not the most reputable of sources, I know, but falling dreams are so common that it’s common knowledge that they’re common. You cannot imagine how upsetting it is to me that I have dreamed about silly things like the Geico cavemen, and yet haven’t managed to have one teensy little falling dream in all of my dreaming memory.

When I express this disappointment to others, they mostly react in the same way, telling me that falling dreams are terrible and that I should count myself lucky never to have had one. I stubbornly refuse to take this advice. If dream-falling is anything like falling in real life, I know it to be an exhilarating feeling – possibly one of the most terrifying yet exciting feelings in the world. Why wouldn’t I want to experience that in the safety of my own bed, my own mind – a realm where injury or death is impossible? Personally, I think it is remarkably unfair that I have this gift for remembering my dreams when I can’t even have the one dream I’ve been craving for years, especially when the rest of the sleeping world – the ungifted ones – can.

Of course, the real injustice of it all is that I most likely have had a falling dream. Everyone has several dreams a night, whether they remember them or not. Since I typically remember only one per night, it is extremely possible that I have had multiple falling dreams throughout my life and simply don’t recall them. Also, it isn’t like there haven’t been opportunities for me to fall in my dreams. On the contrary, there have been many such chances, all gone to waste. In a dream I had about two years ago, my friend and I were standing on a cliff above a large body of water. I watched him walk to the very edge of the cliff and stand there, swaying, the tips of his sneakers hanging over the edge. After a few moments, he swayed right over the precipice and into the water. At this point, I should have heroically dived off the cliff to his rescue. But, to my dismay, I was merely transported from the top of the cliff to the base in an instant as though that was a perfectly normal way for people to travel, once again robbed of my chance to fall.

My waking life has also provided me with ample chances to have a falling dream. I grew up under the impression that to have a falling dream meant that one was experiencing a great fear of failure. Based on this belief, my first thought might be to applaud myself – “Well done, Liz, you’ve managed to get through almost twenty years of life with such security that whatever fear of failure you’ve experienced has never been strong enough to manifest itself in such a deeply subconscious way as in your dreams. Congratulations.”

Unfortunately, that is not the case. If anything, my fear of failure has been so pronounced over my lifetime that I don’t need dreams to make me recognize it. I imagine that most of my fears of failure are shared by many other people – fear of failing while performing in front of a crowd, for instance. As far as I’m concerned, I have the right to enjoy a falling dream the night before every oral presentation I have to give in Spanish class.

Or before every Solofest I used to go to in high school, where I would be shut into a small room with an intimidating judge so that I could play an advanced piece of music and he or she could tell me about all the mistakes I made.

I also have a deeper, less fleeting fear of failing at life. This fear stays with me day to day, sometimes dormant, other times spiking if I encounter the correct stimuli. I’m not worried about daily activities such as classes, paying rent, or keeping up functional relationships. I’m not even that worried about the more important things like college graduation – I figure I’ll get through all of that one way or another. What terrifies me is creating a successful “Big Picture” of my life. When I imagine my future, I usually see a picture of me standing in the middle of a big city, people zooming by with places to go and things to do. I have nothing to do. I have failed to obtain a decent job – or, heaven forbid, any job – and I am completely, utterly, irrevocably stuck to that spot on the pavement. I can’t move anywhere because I don’t have the talent or skills or knowledge to know how, and I’m too afraid to try anyway. All I can do is stand there, knowing that I have grown up to embody the very word “failure.” I deserve a falling dream for every time that familiar feeling of dread creeps over me and my mind flashes to that picture far in the future in which I am alone, lost, and most definitely failing.

I say “I deserve a falling dream” for that because I imagine falling dreams to be a pleasurable experience – a treat rather than a nightmare. It occurs to me that this perception of dream-falling and how dream-falling actually feels may be two very different things. When I fantasize about falling dreams, I long for the excitement and exhilaration, but I also expect there to be a certain blissfulness to it. I expect to just fall and fall and fall, weightless in the air, knowing that no harm can come to me, that I am safe, and I am falling.

That’s not how dreams work. One’s dream-self does not realize that it is tucked safely into bed, it thinks that it’s on the edge of that cliff plummeting toward the rocky shoreline, or on that rooftop falling into the thorny rosebushes, or anywhere high falling onto anything that’s not a pile of feather pillows. If my desire to have a falling dream was ever fulfilled, a large part of me would probably be disappointed. I would become like every one else, and if ever approached by someone lamenting the fact that they’d never had a falling dream (if another such a person exists) I would join with the others in saying how terrible they were and how that person should consider themselves lucky.

Maybe it’s better if I never have a falling dream, if only because it means I can hold onto my romanticized view of dream-falling. It’s always kind of terrible to lose your innocence about something. To realize that they were right and you were wrong and you can now officially say farewell to that belief that was uniquely and hopefully yours – even if it’s something as simple as thinking you’d really like to have a falling dream.