
The topic this week for Illustration Friday was "Dreams". I started racking my brain for an idea and it didn't take me long to come up with one. For years I had dreams where I could fly. And they always gave me a really great feeling when I flew, which must be what Superman feels. It's a feeling of complete freedom. It's been 5 years since I've had a dream like that. But I think that maybe it's because of the strange and kind of scary thing that happened with the last one.
I was busy with school at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and living on the 9th floor of a 10 story apartment building with my 2 roommates. My room, if you could call it a room (Technically I lived in the dinning room) was connected to the kitchen and the living room. Off of the living room was our balcony, other bedroom and bathroom. Soon after I fell asleep one night I began to have a very vivid dream. In my dream I woke up from sleep to find it a bright sunny day. I walked to the living room, opened the sliding glass door, and stepped outside to the edge of the balcony, gripped the railing and pushed off into flight. I flew around downtown pittsburgh, dodging buildings and swooping under bridges. I even saw someone else flying around, but damned if I couldn't catch him (he had a rocket pack on his back). After giving up on catching him, and flying around for what seemed like many more hours I started to get cold and decided it was time to go back home. So I flew back to the North Side, found my apartment building and landed back on my 9th floor balcony grabbing the hand rail as my feet touched down. Still feeling cold, I started to feel the pull of reality and began to wake up. Something was wrong, instead of feeling the warmth from my blankets I was still feeling a bit chilly. Which was strange. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see that I must have still been dreaming because I was still on the balcony, but instead of a bright blue sky there was a hazy black one. As I stood there and realized that I wasn't dreaming, I noticed I was still gripping the handrail and felt that I was leaning slightly over the rail. At that point I got really freaked out, because I had apparently sleep walked right out onto the balcony in the middle of the night and almost leaped to my death. I realized how much it would suck if I woke up from my dream and was falling to my death. It took me a few day to get over it, and it took me almost a year before I told anyone what I had almost done. How weird is that?
Anyhow, have a great week, your comments are welcome as always.