Today’s prompt is: 10. Dream of flying over city.

The Resulting Story:The Lands I Know

I’ve talked of dreams already, and won’t repeat that entire realm of the subconscious here. But the idea of flight is tied in with many others, and the first thing my mind leaps to when restitching this corpse is Icarus. For those somehow unfamiliar with the notion of Icarus, it is the story of mad science by the arch-inventor Daedalus, and how he attempts to escape with his son by gluing feathers to their arms. He famously warns his son to not fly to high or the sun will burn the wings, nor to low or the waves will catch him. Icarus enjoys flying too much, flies to high, and proceeds to fall to his death. Tragic in the oldest style.

 

So there is precedent for taking flying as arrogance. A tad obvious, but worth remembering. More interesting is the city. Whether this dream is a nightmare or a fancy is dependent on the city. Do we swerve through a beautiful metropolis or flutter between Gothic towers or slip betwixt nightmarish engines and towers and so on. The potential in cities is manifold, and what sort of experience we give is deeply dependent on the city itself.

The model that occurs to me is the travelogue, where the audience and the narrator both wonder together in some forgotten vista or new found land, and give we will be entering a dream, exploiting this for the growth of our narrator’s character seems natural. Perhaps he or she (I haven’t had a she in some time, I must remedy that) will not change, but certainly something ought to be revealed. After all, the subconscious is rarely uninteresting. And often more opinionated then its host. I wonder what edifices lurk in the skies of a dreaming mind. I’ve never looked up, you see, while dreaming.

I’d be remiss, my dear fellows, not to recommend Dave’s Lovecraft list as well, for those who have not enjoyed Mr. Lovecraft’s actually completed works.
https://davescorneroftheuniverse.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/a-lovecraft-reading-list-for-beginners-part-i/

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