Tonight in my dreams I was running. A lot. And when I ran… everything slowed down. I could feel all my muscles moving. Think about how to deal with my next step. Contemplate the biomechanics of every step for maximum speed. I experimented with how I moved my legs, and never really found what felt like the RIGHT way to move them for the speeds I was casually attaining.
I would have been able to run faster if I’d been wearing shoes, or barefoot; I had to keep worrying about pulling up my socks. At one point I pulled them up mid-stride, it was awesome.
Every step seemed to take ten seconds or so. And I wasn’t getting tired at all. I felt like I could do this forever. “This is what it’s like to be Rita”, I thought as I soared down a street in slow-mo.
At one point I found myself on a raised platform, partially in a tree. I could leap up, hang on a limb, and swing to the next, still on slow-mo. I could start to swing to another one, decide it looked too weak, and divert to a different one. I only did this a bit before going back to running. I also ran up a slanted wall, then casually leapt off the top; I caught myself for a moment on a protruding decoration on the wall, but it felt unstable so I let go, and slowly drifted to the ground, where I easily absorbed the shock of landing with my knees.
Then I dreamed I woke up. I wanted to reach for my iPad and record this dream. My bedroom was a mess; there was a half-disassembled bike in my bed, there was a multicolored construction of balloons on the floor, there were a couple little flying robots of some kind flittering around silently. I ignored all this and picked up the iPad, then plopped it into my bed. I pushed the bike out of the way; as I did, I heard a sputtering, buzzing noise from the iPad. I pulled it from under the covers to discover that it was plugged in – but the cord was blackened and almost melted in some places, and hooked to a janky-looking little power adaptor that felt way too warm. I unplugged that right away.
Then I woke up for real. Well, assuming this is real.
As I wrote this, I could hear fire engines rushing out (I live on the same block as a firehouse). I decided to go check on the extension cord my iPad is plugged into. Just in case.
The running in the dream was amazing. It felt perfectly normal for time to slow down around me as I ran. I was just noticing it for the first time, is all. I was trying to decide if things looked darker when I was in this sped-up personal time; sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. I am really hoping to have this dream ability return at some point! At the very least, I hope I can recall how it felt a couple chapters of Rita down the line; there’s going to be a sequence with her running for the pure joy of it.
The iPad not working is a common theme in my dreams. Sort of. This is the first time I’ve tried to use the iPad in my dreams; usually it’s my phone that I pull out and fail to use. Often this is because it’s not actually my smartphone; I’ve had an assortment of attempts at building one with 1970s and 1980s tech show up instead of my Nexus One. And for all the time I spend in front of my computer, I almost never dream about it. I’ve dreamt about mucking once or twice, when I was doing that a lot, and that’s it.
There was also something about my mother, my friends back home Jennie and Jason, and an outfit I was wearing for a while whose bra matched the dress. I changed clothes a couple times in this dream, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before.