The thing I liked about it was the captain’s regular updates and his newsy conversation about how the flight was going. He’d let us know when he was going to do something and tell us how it might feel – for example, if he was going to bank to the right, or if he was going to change the altitude of the plane.
I can’t tell you how reassuring it was and his attitude was so pleasant. He was chatty.
I’m like most people. Flying isn’t my favourite thing but I’m usually tolerant and calm about it. No one would think that I were nervous or apprehensive if they saw me settling in at the beginning of a flight. I am a bit though.
For years, I had a recurring dream that involved a plane. The odd thing is, I wasn’t inside the plane. I was watching it at a distance. It was going down and I thought at first it was on its descent to land but I suddenly realized it was going down way too fast for that. I couldn’t hear it – I could just see it, going down down down.
I never saw the crash. The plane always disappeared behind the trees along the horizon but I always saw the huge cloud of smoke that drifted up in the aftermath of the apparent explosion.
It was an upsetting dream although not really a nightmare. I didn’t wake up in a cold sweat or in a panic. I just woke feeling really bad about that plane going down.
A few years ago – I don’t really know when – the dream stopped. It’s not the sort of thing you can pinpoint.
Since then, I have had another dream that has been repeated but I’m not sure I can yet refer to it as a recurring dream. I’ve probably dreamed it two or three times – more than once anyway.
The dream is about walking but get this: it starts in the airport. I’m leaving the airport and heading to Halifax but there’s no car or bus available so I start to walk. It’s a four-lane highway and the Halifax airport is famously far from the city. (I saw the Royal Canadian Air Farce here once and one of their jokes that has stayed with me is, “Welcome to Halifax, a lovely city whose airport is conveniently located in New Brunswick!")
There are no settlements along the highway – it’s pretty much wooded on both sides and to be honest, it’s not at all a pleasant or appealing walk. The dream is nothing but the walk. It doesn’t have a neat and tidy ending like the plane going down behind the horizon. It’s just the kind of walking where you keep going and going and what you really want to do is turn around and go back but at a certain point, you know you’ve walked too far to consider that – so you keep going.
That’s about it. I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a resolution.
It may be – and don’t think I haven’t thought of this before – that both these dreams are masking an anxiety about flying that I’m not admitting. Could be. I don’t know.
The night before we left London coming home from our recent trip, we stayed in an airport hotel at Heathrow. You may think of an airport hotel as being surrounded by asphalt, under the flight paths, in a heavily trafficked area.
But this was the view out our window at a Heathrow airport hotel. I found it very calming.
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