Nearly everybody has flown at least once

✦ TODAY IN DREAM SIGNS

The one you were sorry to leave

Flying, and why you remember yours so much better than it deserves.

I HAD THIS ONE TOO

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🦅

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TODAY’S SYMBOL

MONDAY, 17 AUGUST

Dear friend,

I have had a handful of flying dreams in my life and I could describe every one of them to you, which is not true of most things that have actually happened to me.

The last was years ago, low over a road I half recognised, and I woke pleased with myself, as though I had managed something.

That is the odd thing about this one, since it is the only common dream people are sorry to wake from.

Today is the light one, then, and it comes with a finding that changed how I read it.

How rare they actually are

When researchers ask people whether they have ever flown in a dream, roughly sixty three in every hundred say yes, which makes it one of the most widely shared dream experiences there is.

🌊 I swam through the air	💫 I jumped and stayed up
☁ I flew and then lost it	👀 Somebody watched me do it
Tap the one that fits

But when researchers stop asking and start counting, going through more than fourteen thousand recorded dreams, flying turns up in somewhere between half a per cent and three per cent of them.

Almost everybody has had one, and almost nobody has them often.

Which means they are remembered far out of proportion to how often they happen, and that disproportion is the subject today.

“	Almost everybody has had one, and almost nobody has them often.

Why they stay with you

A dream you have once and recall for decades is doing something the nightly ones do not, since the ordinary sort washes through by breakfast and this kind sets.

Part of it is that the sensation has no waking equivalent, so there is nothing for the memory to file it against and it sits on its own.

And part of it is that people want them back. Among experienced lucid dreamers, flying is the thing most of them plan to do first, ahead of everything else you might imagine somebody choosing.

✦ BEFORE YOU GET OUT OF BED

Tap one to answer it

1

What It Is Asking

The dream turns up when something dependable has started to move. A relationship, a position, a chance, a version of yourself that used to fit. Even the good ones do it, because a new beginning still asks you to put one down.

Teeth are fixed. They are the part of you that is not supposed to change, so your subconscious borrows the most solid thing it can find to describe a situation that has stopped being solid.

Ask yourself these before you get out of bed, while the feeling is there.

✦ BEFORE YOU GET OUT OF BED

Tap one to answer it

1

Where do I feel unsure of myself right now?

2

What have I been afraid to say?

3

Am I worried about how someone sees me?

4

What situation has stopped being mine to control?

5

Which part of who I am is changing?

6

Where do I need somebody to reassure me?

One will be harder to answer than the rest. That is the one.

What To Do This Morning

Write it down before you move. The pictures stay with you all day, but the feeling burns off in about ninety seconds, and the feeling is the message.

Then name the strongest emotion in one word. Fear, shame, grief, helplessness: each points somewhere different, and the one you reach for first is usually the answer.

Then do one small act that puts your feet on the floor. Say the sentence you have been drafting for a fortnight. Ask somebody for reassurance. None of it is dramatic. That is rather the point.

✦ CARRY THESE WITH YOU TODAY

My voice deserves to be heard.

I release the fear of being judged.

I trust myself through periods of change.

I am safe as my life transforms.

My confidence is returning to me.

Tap the one you need

✦ WRITE BACK

Which of the six did you not want to answer? I read every reply.

TELL ME WHICH ONE

Your teeth are not going anywhere. Something else in your life is, and I suspect you already know what.

Sleep well,

Dream Signs

P.S. If you had this one last night, tell me who else was in the room. I mentioned mine over breakfast. “You always get that one right before you do something,” she said, and went back to her toast. She is usually right, which is annoying.

✦ TONIGHT’S PRACTICE

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The moment before it started

If one turns up tonight, write what you were doing just before you left the ground, since that part goes first and it is where the sense of it sits.

Tell me what you wrote

✦ MANIFESTATION TIP

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Write down the good one

Most people only record the dreams that trouble them, so the notebook fills with bad ones and gives a false account of the year. Put the good ones in too.

What came back

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