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I used to have this recurring dream. It made me never want to wake up.
In it, I was standing at the edge of a cliff, staring nervously down into the dark, gaping chasm below me. It was so dark that I saw no end to it, but I threw pebbles down to test its height and never heard them hitting the bottom.
I was frightened. So very frightened.
And suddenly, I would feel this push. Somebody would take my shoulders and shove me forward. It wasn't a hard or angry shove, but it always made me feel terrified and unsteady. I would teeter at the edge, flailing precariously, trying to gain hold of steady ground. I tried to look back, to get angry at the person who pushed me. But I never got the chance to turn around in those dreams.
I would regain my balance, but only momentarily before push would come to shove and I would go flying over the edge of the cliff. My screams were always muffled, always drowned out by the wild panic that gripped me in those dreams, pounding fiercely in my ears.
And then I would grow wings and fly.
They always appeared out of nowhere. One second I was falling, filled with terror and surrounded by darkness, and the next I would halt midair, then begin to slowly ascend with the pressure of beating wings at my back.
I would turn around to look at them—they were glorious, magnificent—and they would beat and flap as hard as they could, carrying me up, up, up, and away. Carrying me out of the blackness of the abyss and up towards the blue, blue, sky and the rays of sunlight. I would bark out a surprised, scared, yet exhilarated laugh. I was not the kind to take daring leaps like this, not the kind to trust my instincts or trust the darkness or trust what I didn't know and dive headfirst into danger. Except for Zunair, and even then I managed to convince myself that I knew him and he would stay.
But something about that dream was so exhilarating. It was almost like I was glad the person behind me had shoved me forward and thrown me off the cliff I was so scared of jumping from.
High up in the air, I would reach forward to touch the rays of sunlight. Closer, closer, almost there, close enough for me to reach out and hold a gleaming, glittering ray in my hand.
And then I would wake up.
Breathing heavily, eyes widened and staring at the nothingness in the air in front of me.
I would slump back onto my pillow and close my eyes, trying to fall back into the dream so I could catch the ray of sunlight.
But it never worked that way. The dream never came to me when I wanted it to. It always came in the strangest of times—when I was upset, angry, or frustrated with myself.
I was stupid then. Naive. Although I was not at all someone you would call "religious", I woke up from those dreams thinking of God. And later, thinking of how I never realized God was trying to tell me something.
He was telling me plain and clear: if I wanted to fly, I would have to grow my wings.
And I would have to trust the fall without knowing what I would face at the bottom.
