First we float

Are our dreams training us for something?

Leonardo Da Vinci took particular interest in how air swirls and eddies just like water, wafts leaves in maples just like currents wave kelp beds.

And creatures ride those currents too, move up to lofty heights with a flap, sink like us when wings are tucked. But we are ground bound without machine force or fire to lift us into the heavens over our heads. We have to pay for that lift with debit cards, or concentrated dinosaur bone, or hot air, or helium, and it only ever lasts for just awhile.

In dreams, though, how it started was like swimming, like a toddler moving from couch to coffee table, swooping in long bounds and sometimes losing control and floating or being stuck in midair or sometimes losing faith in the flight and falling back to that ground bound state.

That’s how Superman flew at first, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but then either the creators found this boring or Kal-El got the hang of moving through airlike an orca, but faster and faster, able to turn back time by flying against the revolution of the Earth. Who knows where he could go?

I’d like to think this is part of what dreams are for.