Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I slept for seventy-five minutes and then a dream woke me up.

I've heard stuff about what it's supposed to mean when you fly in your dreams, but this had a decidedly "not-flying" feel to it.

I was ... a teacher, I think ... hanging out with colleages after hours. We were talking. I was sitting on a counter. My arms started bothering me and I wanted to work the kinks out of them, so I started pushing myself up off the counter. The two people I was talking to were impressed at how far I lifted myself, how long I could hold myself up, and how many repetitions I could do. One said something about how much strength I had in my shoulders, and I said that what I was doing was all elbows and arms, not shoulder, then was kind of startled at myself when I realized how much upper body strength I (in the dream) had.

Later, standing in another room, my arms were still bothering me, so I repeated the same motion and was surpised when my feet left the floor as a result. So I started experimenting with the effect -- it was an action/reaction thing, twisted into dream-physics. By pushing down really hard with my arms. I was moving my center of mass (aka "center of gravity") lower in my body, which then raised my body to keep my center of mass at the same height from the floor. It was so difficult because I was fighting Earth's gravity trying to pull my feet back onto the ground, but I figured out how to stay airborne between gestures. I said something like, "So this must be how those frauds and fakers pretend to levitate!", apparently unaware that I effectively was levitating by that point. (Note: word in my head in the dream was "fakers", not "fakirs". I'm not sure now, after waking, but I think I was keeping my mind open to the idea that not every person claiming to levitate was faking. In retrospect, "fakir" might have made more sense (though I don't know off the top of my head whether levitation is supposed to be in the fakir repertoire), since I was actually levitating at the time, not pretending. Hey, dream logic.)

Experimenting with the effect, one of us thought it would make sense to see whether I could move while levitating, and it turned out that I could. It was sort of like walking on my hands using magnetic repulsion to keep me off the floor, except that I was upright instead of upside-down. I followed one of my co-workers back to the kitchen, but while crossing the kitchen I encountered an obstacle that upset my balance, and falling over also meant falling all the way to the floor, knocking something over with a crash. Another person came in to ask what had happened, whether I was okay, and what I'd been doing. Trying to form an explanation woke me up.

Instead of levitating while seated cross-legged, I was standing. While moving, I think my feet were nine to twelve centimeters from the floor, but just seeing how high I could go in one place, it was more like fifty or sixty centimeters.

So, any "stock interpretation" of levitation vs. flying? (And why is my mouth so terribly dry?)