The Echoes of Childhood
A Vivid Dream 2
Here I am. I’m confined in an unfamiliar institution and a heavy-set security guard is angry that one of my acquaintances has escaped. The guard shows me CCTV footage of the rather daring and ingenious getaway that had been pulled off. I’d never quite realized before how inventive this acquaintance of mine was.
As I watch this footage on the gray laptop that the security guard has laid out on this desk, my focus begins to drift. My friend walks free into a dark summer’s night. Suddenly, I’m him. The humid summer air is swampy but enlivening. I walk off into the deep purples of the night, when one of my childhood best friends appears at my side. I don’t realize that I’m dreaming though, so his abrupt arrival doesn’t strike me as odd.
He asks me about how I escaped and I explain it to him. After a moment though, our conversation drifts instead toward this impossibly still summer’s night. We’re walking along a straight road that stretches out into a black night. On our right, there’s a dense forest of oaks that are swaying gently against the inky black sky.
On our left, there’s a fence and what appear to be apple trees. They’re perfect and symmetrical, but they’re standing far apart in this dark, open field. Even though there’s no moon in the sky to be seen, the trees appear to each cast an eery shadow on the roots beneath them.
It’s a haunting sight, but we continue walking quietly along the road.
“I love nights like tonight,” I say.
“It’s beautiful. Weightless almost.”
“Nights like this feel suspended. Like we’re frozen in time.”
“You feel almost like you could just leap into the air and fly.”
“I was just thinking that,” I respond with a sigh.
The scenery around us dissipates hazily but abruptly. Day has replaced night yet I’m none the wiser. The changes that occur within dreams are usually difficult to pin down. It’s one of the reasons that it’s so challenging to become aware that we’re dreaming.
Times of day change, locations shift, faces alter and personalities vacillate in ways that simply go over our heads. Even the most spectacular transitions can go comically unnoticed.
All of a sudden, we’re standing in the field that separates the two playgrounds of my old elementary school. The road that earlier tonight stretched out into an ominous horizon has been replaced by a placid field of green. Ten years ago, this entire school was leveled. The playground beside it no longer exists.
But here we are. We’re walking obliviously through it as though not a day has gone by. The sultry summer night has turned into a gentle summer day. The trees above us sway wistfully in the wind. Behind them is a pale blue sky of distant dreams. The playground is barren.
There’s not a child on the jungle gym, not a teacher in their classroom and not a car on the street. A butterfly flies past me through tall grass and dandelions. An orchestra of bird chirps drift quietly down from the trees on this lazy afternoon. The warm breezes that drift idly by me only mire me in this frozen moment. They send blades of grass into soft frenzies of motion. But in these frenzies, there’s an unmistakable stillness. Blades of grass teeter timelessly. Distant wind chimes echo remotely. Leaves drift off into an air of inconsequence.
There’s a circular garden encased within a white picket fence. It’s overflowing with flowers. They reach above the fence and toward a nostalgic sky.
As I walk through the tall grass, warm rays of sun shine down through swaying leaves. Lilies wobble ethereally with soft gusts of wind. As I look to my right, I see the playground we spent each recess on as kindergarteners. To my left, I see a larger playground — this was the playground that we spent our kindergarten days looking out on yearningly.
This larger playground had been designated for only the 1st graders and up. As kindergarteners, we used to fantasize about all the mature sorts of games the older kids must play there. We were deeply envious. I make my way toward it.
With each footstep, I notice myself growing increasingly weightless. I find myself prancing gleefully through the grass. With each leap I seem to almost hang in the air. I begin dancing and spinning and skipping — each footstep lighter than the one that came before it. I feel now like I’m on the moon.
My friend has begun having his own fun on the playground. As my leaps and bounds grow airier and airier, I call out to him. But my voice is oddly muted. I jump near one of the play sets now. As I begin to near the monkey bars, I notice that I’ve become untethered from the earth entirely. I hover here baffled and amazed. After a minute, my friend makes his way toward me.
“I’m flying!” I labor to say. Judging by his dropped jaw though, he seems to have already noticed this.
“I thought I saw you getting a little high with some of those jumps back there, but I didn’t think I could be seeing it right! How?!”
As I hover here weightlessly, I think about my time at this school. I think about my first teachers. I think about the games of make-believe Jurassic Park that my best friend and I used to play at recess. I think about the precarious “spiky balls” that fell from the trees next to our kindergarten swing set. I think about all of the times I leapt from that swing set as the recess bell rang, making sure to get enough air on those final few pumps that I could have a gravity-defying descent to earth.
As I continue floating, a new friend of mine seems to appear out of nowhere and approaches me on the playground. I’m ecstatic to explain what’s happened, as though it isn’t obvious to anyone looking at me. But I still struggle to speak. I’ve had dreams where walking grows difficult, but I can’t recall having this trouble speaking. And what’s especially strange here, is that my body feels as free as a bird. Typically it’s the flying and the hovering where I’d run into issues — odd. I awaken.
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