I CAN FLY!!!

Photo by Karina Carvalho on Unsplash

For a long long time, I have believed that I can fly. I have thought about this for nights and for days and I really do believe I can fly. I know you think I’m only just echoing R.Kelly 1998 hit song I believe I can fly, but I’m not. I think his song is a classic but my thoughts here are classical. When he sings about touching the sky he means it metaphorically, when I think about touching the sky I mean it metaphysically. And when he heartily sings about spreading his wings, I can only drearily think of the tale of Icarus and Daedalus, which is a very dreary tale indeed.

The fall of Icarus. 1636-37. Jacob Peter Gowy. Flemish. 1615-1661

It all started when I was about 4 years old, which is about when children start to have explicit memory (i.e. ability to recall actual experiences) of entities, activities, persons and places. I had this particular memory of me levitating from off the ground and into the air slowly but steadily, you know, like Kyle in Kyle XY when he first discovered he could levitate or (for those who haven’t seen the movie) like a magician performing but trying not to mess up his flying trick. I didn’t fly as high as the birds do (obviously I do not mean the ostrich or the fowl, both which are domesticated by humans; the former in the zoo to feed our eyes, the latter in the coop to be fed on with our mouths; both for human satisfaction) but I went as high enough as the kites we flew when we were much younger. We are still young.

About the age of 9 I think, I had a memory of me having that memory, a memory’s memory (kind of like what was portrayed in the 2010 Sci-Fi movie Inception by Christopher Nolan, except that while he depicts memories as dreams I distinct memories from dreams), and that is when I consciously started to think about it. I didn’t know what to make of it.

 At first, I thought of it as a memory of a dream.  For one, I never used to remember my dreams, let alone have a memory of it 5 years later. Even a fish could do better at remembering a fisherman’s bait than I could at remembering my dreams, yet I did. Secondly, it felt quite real, like an actual experience. It felt more real than nightmares (which aren’t real but nevertheless feel so) and more real than dreams that come to pass (which may be argued to be real but nevertheless are not).

I thought also that perhaps it was only a figment of my imagination (as the romantics like to say, but which is actually a tautology; figment means something produced by imagination), but imaginations are things you consciously think of not things that come to you as a memory. I have recently seen the movie, A Beautiful Mind (a biography of Nobel Prize Laureate John Nash) so this point particularly disturbed me. John Nash made up a conglomerate of people, places and ideas that never really were. He lived and interacted with these people, went to these places and did many other things that no one else could attest to. But John Nash was schizophrenic. I am not. The people, places and things in my world are real. If you need a confirmation, well this is your confirmation: I write not for imaginary readers but for you, except of course you aren’t real.

The movie: A beautiful mind 1:38: 45

What I had had to be more than just a dream or an imagination. It was something more.

Some days ago I had the experience of flying again, but this time only in my dreams. The result of this was that it triggered again the memory of these things I have written about above. It is in fact the spur for writing this article. Unlike in previous memories, I felt this experience like I normally felt my dreams, or at least  my regular dreams. There was a clear difference between the experience in this dream and that of my memory’s memory; this was a dream, that could not have been. I wasn’t even flying as high as I did in my memory’s memory. I was only as high as the highest tree in most neighborhoods (minus the coconut trees if you have any in yours) which is less unbelievable and more realistic for a dream. Anyway, the spur for my flight (physically and physiologically) was a little dog, the size of a 101 Dalmatians. It was a local and regular dog, but it was a mean mad one. A mean mad one because why else would I be afraid of a little local dog if it wasn’t mean and mad? It had to be. The dog wanted to tear me to pieces. To have me for supper perhaps (and perhaps its last supper) because I remember that dusk dawning already at the time. Even as I was up, it surprisingly flew as high as to almost yank me down. And when I flew forth to where I was to buy some things (I cannot remember what they were) and back to where I was, the dog still hovered below and bellowed still. I must have been scared to death because when I eventually woke up I felt really drained of will and energy. And funnily I was the only target in the whole of the neighborhood, a neighborhood packed with many and perhaps more appropriate targets: men sitting lazily and drunk of beer, little boys scantily dressed with all their delicacies in clear sight, local fowls dizzily perched on poles and fences of modest heights and some in open hutches. The dog was definitely mad. Just what this dog found tasty or perhaps repulsive in me, I couldn’t quite place my head around. I wouldn’t have been able to tell anyway since I couldn’t see myself in the dream to tell what I looked like. I saw every other thing but myself, the way a bird in flight sees every other thing but itself. The mind’s eye sees differently from the eye’s eyes I guess. Or maybe it isn’t even that, maybe I just didn’t see myself because I was in physiological flight. People in a state of fear are hardly ever aware of themselves; they focus their attention on the cause of the fear and how to get away from it. Anyway, whatever way I looked could not have been enough justification for me to be its target, the dog was just mad and couldn’t think clearly (and really to be fair, since this was a dream, and I certainly wasn’t thinking clearly, how could the dog?). As the dog continued to linger below, although it was my dream, I began to wonder why no one bothered to gun the dog down. It was a mean mad dog after all and as the saying goes, mad dogs ought to die. My only escape route as I figured out much later (but quite late) was to wake up from the dream, so I took it.

As I said earlier, the dream triggered memories of my past flying experience. So I sat on my bed thinking about that. Could I really fly or could I not? Did I really fly when I was young or did I not? These thoughts consumed me. Flying just seemed too incredible to believe but I could not altogether dismiss the thought. And then I thought: maybe I did fly in the past, but maybe it wasn’t my earthly past, maybe it was before I was born. G.K Chesterton, one of the greatest thinkers of the last century, used to say that “paradise is a hope but also – in some strange way – a memory.” He says we recognize paradise partly because we recognize we have been deprived of it. As humans, we have a tacit awareness of what should be that isn’t. We sense that there is more beauty than all the beauty that we’ve ever seen. We have an ideal of the perfect man but no man has ever lived up to that ideology. We romanticize the thought of a true love, a love that is perfect and unconditional yet the only experiences of love we have are flawed and almost always break our hearts. We continually amend our laws to be more just, but just according to what standard? As kids and even as adults, we besiege people with questions of “Why?” (especially about the world we live in and the meaning of life) yet when we get an answer we continuously ask “why?” because we sense that such answers are incomplete, even though we cannot explain why we think that they are. Summarily, we have an awareness of (and desire for) perfect and unconditional beauty, being, love, justice and truth, but we have no experience of them here on earth. We know that these things do exist but we’ve never seen them in existence. If anything at all, our world is imperfect and conditioned. It means that not only do they not exist in our world, they cannot exist in our world; the perfect cannot result from the imperfect, an effect cannot be greater than its cause. So if we did not and cannot learn of these perfect and unconditional modes from our world, from where did we get the idea of them and to what can we base the desire for them? Perhaps, and most likely, from something beyond and outside the dimensions of the world. These awareness/desire seems to serve as evidence of the Transmateriality of Human Beings i.e. the notion that we are more than what is material or physical or corporeal and as such more than mere animals or biological accidents. Some people have reasoned this to mean that humans have a natural propensity toward the transcendent and spiritual, but that isn’t exactly the bone in this contention. Let me remind you: the bone here is whether I can fly or not.

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

My high school principal used to say that Plato said (I use the language this way because I have no memory of Plato saying so) that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a "blank slate" at birth; that not all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses; that all attainment of knowledge is not an acquiring of new information, but a remembering of previously known information; that before we were born, we existed in a perfect world where we knew everything. Wiki says philosophers refer to this platonic phenomenology as Innatism. My principal used to use this to encourage us that we could indeed fly (i.e. be whatever we wish to be or be whatever we put our minds to) because we already have the genes laying dormant in us somewhere someway and somehow, all we had to do was to activate it. I’m not sure he actually exactly believed this himself since he was a Christian fundamentalist, but he doubled as my maths teacher so I understand why he said so. He wanted to make us believe that we all could excel at maths (in flying colours). Anyway, I believed him, and I still do. I believe that that my memory of me flying was no fudge. I believe I can fly.


By Ogunkoya Oluwamuyiwa 
Member of NIMELSSA EDITORIAL TEAM 19/20