Better Left Untold

Had a strange dream last night. Perhaps it was sparked by a comment on ger-beans blog about the subject line, perhaps it was about certain experiments underway. But it gave me pause.

In the dream I learned how to fly by a combination of small hops and rhythmic movements. I've had dreams where I already knew how to fly, but this was the first about learning the process itself. It wasn't a lucid dream, so I wasn't aware that I was dreaming, and things unfolded as they would likely happen in the "real world." First off I wanted to make sure I wasn't just hallucinating (happens from time to time) and showed it to some friends at a public place. Now you may imagine this would all be pretty exciting, and it was, but you may not imagine what came next.

In a world, much like our own, where the paparazzi rip apart anyone's life whose story they can market to public interest, where lotto winners become beacons of hope and endless solicitations for those who believe that luck should be shared (unless it's their own); you may predict what happened when anyone so blatantly reveals something magical. It would be like an extinct dinosaur was spotted in the wild; it destroyed my life. I became a zoo specimen. Not physically, but I was a symbol where people projected their desires for power, fears about the nature of a world where science broke down, greed for advantages over their fellow man, prophesies on the coming of the anti-christ, you name it.

Sometimes the events of a dream wash through our memories in the morning and illuminate a single experience, a phrase from a song or poem, or a story we have learned but perhaps hadn't understood all the nuances too. In the wake of this dream came the memory of the creed of all those who explore beyond the maps: To Dare, To Will, To Know... To Keep Silent.