Dreamland

(I dream that) I wake up in bed and someone is putting his weight on my shoulders. I recognize the head off to the side. It’s Kingman Strohl. I know that later on I will dream about him.

Later he’s talking animatedly to my mom or my dad . And he starts to float up into the air. he keeps on talking. I fully understand what’s happening because of course I fly occasionally in my own dreams.

I pull him down and say to my mom that it’s very natural of course he’s floating up in the air. I pull him down again as he starts to float up. I myself try to float up but today it’s not happening.

Later I’m putting out the lights on the porch. It’s a huge porch, three stories tall inside and there are many lights, arrayed in many possible combinations. They look great! You can get two completely different kinds of look just by lighting it differently. There are switches all over the place. By experimentation -- sometimes I turn lights on that were off before -- I eventually turn all the lights out. One of the switch controls a mechanical optical cover for the light, which has a lenslike covering -- it alters the appearance of the column it’s on when you turn it on and it moves. I run this one back and forth several times to see what it is.

Another dream later on. Three of us are on a team that is hang gliding a long distance, maybe around the world. I watch as the support truck, a white semi-trailer, launches the hang glider. Then I say, “that’s what happens when you...” do something wrong. And indeed, the truck is pulling the trailer which has tipped over onto its side. And the glider is stuck at just about 500 feet. It detaches then comes down to the ground.

This next part takes place on a beach that runs from north to south. It’s located just before a channel that comes out of the land, like where the marina comes into the Pacific, but it’s not there. There are some phone lines or electrical wires which come out as a natural obstacle to the south , which is the direction we’re launching.

Then he’s having trouble launching her again. (The truck driver is a man, the hang glider is a woman). I go over and talk to her, she’s distraught. I say I’ll launch you by hand, and start getting the pull ropes that are attached to the hang glider out of the tangle. There are a couple of other people standing around on the beach as the wind makes the gear -- the ropes and the hang glider wings -- flap around mildly. The wind is not very strong, but strong enough for this to work.

I get the rope from the tangle, it’s attached to a very thin string, not a fishing line, but thin compared to the rope. And I play it out as the wind picks her up, it’s kind of like launching a kite. But the thin part gets tangled up. Nonetheless she is airborne, and keeps going up. She’s flying! It looks like the session will go okay. Up and up and up to a good altitude. I’m worried about the thin string though, tangling makes it weaker and maybe it will break. Well, best not to mess with it and hope for the best. If it breaks, she can just glide down. But then she sees it’s untangled and tries to get it untangled, picking at it with her fingernail and then with her teeth. I shout up to her to leave it alone, but she doesn’t. As she’s doing it, the box starts to come down (now it’s a large cardboard box about 6 feet high, not a hangglider anymore). It comes all the way down to the ground, and I say somewhat annoyed “Hang gliding takes all your concentration”. I walk away to cool down. Maybe I say that when I come back in about 2 or 3 minutes we can try to launch again.
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