Flying was second nature to me when I was young, and I found it difficult to understand why everybody wasn’t flying over the park with me instead of just watching.

I could feel that all eyes were on me as I zipped around overhead, and since I had their attention I began trying to teach these observers how to fly.

I tried to make it look easy, and yet they would just watch me as I floated easily up a flight of stairs, then perhaps reaching out to the handrail at the top so that I could quickly spin around to look back at them, but these silent onlookers would never join my flying games.

The Method of Flying One's Self

As they gazed, I would explain the method, and being a young boy, I explained it in a way that even an adult could understand. “Put yourself about this far (with my hand, I would show how far; it was the width of the hand of a small boy) “When you get there, your body will follow you.”

I loved using the stone staircases in the park as a teaching tool.

I would often find groups of people gathered at the bottoms of these staircases, and making sure that they were all watching, I would lean into the staircase and then jump, but instead of tumbling onto the stone steps, I would straighten out like a spear, and then just float up to the top.

As a flight instructor, I felt that it was comforting to the student to know that flying isn’t always done high in the sky, and that some of the most fun was had near the ground, maneuvering ordinary sidewalk and bridges without touching anything.

I did most of my flying down near the ground because that’s where all of my students were, but I’ll admit that I did enjoy showing off a bit too.

These things are amazingly fast when needed.

Of course, flying over the treetops was a wonderful sensation, but I almost always flew slowly up there, not wanting to get where I was going too quickly. At the end of a night though, I would often leave my astral classroom in a flash as fast as a thought.

Steering and General Navigation

When I first began to fly, it often seemed like an external force was attached to my chest, like a tether of consciousness, pulling my body around, but after playing with the controls a bit, I soon realized that I could move the feeling around, to just over my head for the classic straight up, up and away trick, or balancing the tether in the middle of my back for horizontal flight, and then adjusted accordingly for easing up or down a staircase.

Will Powered

Probably one of the most satisfying things that I remember from my flying days was that feeling of connection to myself. At first it was easy to think that it was some kind of higher self, guiding me around with some grand purpose, while I soon found that it was actually my will alone that lifted me. When I was soaring around the park, I knew that it wasn’t some outside consciousness tugging me around-- it was clear instead that I was that consciousness, and I simply willed myself into the air with a carefree laugh.

An Astral World

It was something to note that with all of my careful instructions to my onlookers, not one of them ever tried to get off of the ground. It does occur to me now that perhaps my ‘students’ were unable to communicate with me in my dreams because they were actually disembodied souls, and they recognized my otherwise-embodied body with some fascination, and that maybe I appeared to them like a warm floating light in that dimly lit park.

I haven’t been flying in many years.

Maybe it was too lonely up there, or perhaps I just outgrew it. I can remember mornings having a clear memory of how to fly in a dream, and actually being frustrated that I couldn’t make my physical body leave the ground with my keen methods, the very same skills that I’d also failed to teach anyone in the astral realms.

Occasionally, I’ll still try, (when nobody is looking) to put myself right outside of me, just over my head-- perhaps the height of an apple above me, and sometimes I imagine that I feel what could be called an upward pull, a little tug. Imagination? Could be, yet I don’t do it often-- out of fear, probably.

Not necessarily the fear of bumping my head on the ceiling, or forgetting how to fly while at treetop level, but the fear that I would never be able to tell anyone, that it might be possible to do such a freakish thing as to fly. Can you imagine further, a grown man flying over your lawn one day? They would put me away for sure.

I think flying is for children and dreamers, but I’m not sure.

Apparently I have other things to do now, and other things to remember, than trying to remember how to use my will to fly around the park all night.

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illustration above by me 2018, colored pencils and ball point pen on blue paper
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