As the poem below would indicate, flight is a common motif in dreams. Does this indicate limitation or freedom in the substratum or surfaces of the waking world? For example, I haven’t had a flying dream in a long time. But while young, I’d often dream flying over El Paso at night. This notion is reflected in my story “Ejay Mariposa Dreams a Rocket Real”

In real life Mariposa drove a Buick. But in his boyhood dreams he sometimes had a lighter vehicle that could fly and fly fast, the anxiety in such a dream having to do with the height of electrical wires strung between the street poles (which he’d always interpreted as symbolic of the fear of accomplishment, the conundrum of those millions who might have been somebody if they hadn’t suffered insurmountable frictions in their busy and torturous lives). The dream began with the vehicle propelled upward by whatever energies and just clearing the wires. Then the car would gain speed, more and more speed, fly into infinite blue until the speed was so great, so gut-wrenching and reckless, that Mariposa the Younger would wish for a revoking of momentum, and he’d find himself back on the street, peering up at the electrical wires, then waking, haunted by the dream’s incredible physics. But now, Mariposa the Elder was trapped at the top of a rocket, wondering whether he’d bounce on impact with the desert, watching the sun climb the cloudless, rotund sky, the wind screaming in his ears.

The question is, of course, rhetorical, or should remain mysterious. Susan’s poem has no answers. It merely presents an image. Something happens, leaving us suspended in the image. Like spiders suspended in webs. A memory. The anchor’s in the red door. Could be terror there.