Falling

I had the strangest dream last night.

I was watching someone jump out of an airplane. And for some reason it looked a lot like Hurley from Lost. He was a big guy, anyway. It was the usual "looking at him from above" angle, but the unusual part was that he clearly wasn't wearing a parachute.

So I felt like this was going to be a grisly one.

But then - another skydiver edges into the frame and gets behind Hurley, wrapping his arms around his chest. Must have a parachute on, I thought. But no - he wasn't wearing one either. 5 or 6 more skydivers enter the frame and they all form a chain behind the other 2. Once again, there's not one parachute among them. So now there's a chain of 8 skydivers in a sitting position falling quickly toward the ground.

As they approach the inevitable landscape below, the "camera angle" changes to one from the ground. The chain of skydivers is getting closer and closer to the ground. But as they close in, they start to decelerate. Once they're about a foot from the ground, they're almost floating in place. They land softly, all sitting together in a chain.

Part of me wants to analyze this - do our dreams give us insights into great truths that our conscious mind can only hint at? Was this dream trying to tell me that the only path to salvation is the human connections we form with those around us?

Quite possible. And even more possible is that every dream is just our brain "taking out the trash" of the day, filtering out thoughts, images, and impressions in a completely random fashion - strung together as little "stories" only because our conscious mind is still barely hanging on, trying to make sense out of the senseless?

There's no answer to that. It's one of the few mysteries left in our modern world, and it's not something that we should take for granted.