By Elisabeth Strillacci
For the Salisbury Post

I’ve been thinking back about old dreams in recent days after a nightmare that haunted my childhood came back to visit.
It is not a bad thing, though it may sound like it, because while I understand why it terrified me as a kid, it no longer does, as the intervening years have let me see that there is nothing to fear in the impossibility of the dream.
I know that the cause for the dream was a long since resolved childhood fear, too, and so the nightmare itself did not frighten me this time around.
Instead, it has made me think about something that I know I have done in many dreams that scare me. I have, in those dreams, forced myself to fly to escape.
I suspect this is a common thing among many of us — creating some super power that allows us to escape or defeat moments or things that scare us.
But it has left me wishing I could do that in real life.
In my old dream, I was under the house where I grew up — it was not a full basement, as the house was built on a hill, and you had to enter from the outside. It had a dirt floor that was hard-packed mud, and it was always solid. Toward the back the ground rose to meet the foundation so there was storage room for about 12 feet before the space began to narrow.
My dad’s lawnmower and all the yard tools were under there, as were my bicycle, roller skates, skateboard, seasonal ornaments, that sort of thing. And the door had a lock on it to secure the tools and the recreational items that we didn’t want to lose.
I lived on a dead-end street, two houses from the end, and it was a street full of kids close to or at my age. We all had the same bikes, skateboards, a basketball for the hoop in the circle of the dead end, and we spent hours outside playing kick the can, skating, biking the neighborhood, so none of us wanted to risk losing the tools of our joy. Basement doors were locked even when back doors may not have been.
At any rate, in my dream, I went under the house looking, for some strange reason, for my grandparents. Someone had come to the back door asking for them and I thought I would find them gathering yard working tools, since they often helped my parents with gardening.
When I opened the door, instead of my own basement, I saw tombs. Several mounds of earth that were built to curve over burial mounds. Four tombs at the front were lighted by a gas lantern, and instead of the short space I was used to, the burial ground stretched far back into the darkness. I turned to go back out the door, and felt a hand on my shoulder. A human, long since dead, was behind me, and holding on tighter and tighter to my shoulder.
Of course I screamed for help, but not knowing where my grandparents were, and realizing that the people who had come to the door asking for them were clearly also dangerous to me, I felt completely trapped and helpless.
In that moment, I closed my eyes and willed myself to lift off the ground. It was slow at first, which was terrifying in itself, but eventually I got high enough to be out of reach of the creature trying to hold on to me.
I flew then out the door and over the heads of those who had come calling, down the embankment toward my neighbors, where I could see my grandparents standing and talking with the couple next door.
As soon as I knew I was safe, I dropped to the ground and screamed for help.
Of course my grandparents saved me then.
But for years I thought about that dream, which was to come back to me often over a period of years before fading. I thought about how my mind helped me find a way to save myself when it seemed all else was failing. Even if I can’t really fly, my mind was working desperately to help me help myself.
A few nights ago, I realized I was having that old dream, and instead of being afraid, I was excited about the moment I would lift off the ground and save the day — for myself. I was aware that I was dreaming, but instead of wanting to escape the dream, I wanted to see it through, to relive the moment when my feet left the earth and I knew I had done it. It was exhilarating.
And since then, I have been thinking about how we can find ways to do that even when we are not dreaming. Maybe we can’t actually fly, but can we be our own hero? I’d like to think so.

Elisabeth Strillacci is former editor of the Salisbury Post.