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THURSDAY, 22 OCTOBER
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| Dear friend, |
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I woke up gripping the sheet. The falling dream, and what stayed was not the drop but the grip. I found a pen under my pillow this morning, cap still on, which means I was too busy holding on to write anything down.
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Most people talk about what is underneath them in this dream, the ledge or the bridge or the dark, yet I think it cares less about where you are headed than about what you will not set down on the way. Which probably says more about me than about the dream.
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What You Were Carrying
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Falling is one of the first dreams people carry. In a survey of over a thousand university students, about one in six named it as the earliest dream they could remember from childhood. It came before you had words for any of it, and it has been asking the same thing since: what are you holding?
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People have said for a very long time that the feeling underneath the fall points to what you will not put down. Not the height or the speed, but the thing in your hands.
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What the grip might be, in the waking version: a plan you made when you were a different person, a promise given to someone who stopped asking for it, the idea that letting go is the same as giving up. It is not.
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People have said for a very long time that the feeling underneath the fall points to what you will not put down.
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