Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

I’m not finished complaining. Last month the gripe was airshow jingoism. (One email in support, one righteously aghast.) This time it’s the editorial overuse of the phrase “the dream of flight” and its related constructions.

For example, the sentence “As a boy in Kansas, Edgar was seized by the dream of flight, believing that one day he too would soar….” Or maybe something like “For thousands of years, mankind gazed upwards, watching the birds follow their long, lonely track across the sky, and dreamt the dream of flight, until finally two brothers….” That sort of overly lofty stuff is what I’m complaining about now. The phrase “dream of flight” has a definite annual cycle, like ragweed, peaking with the advent of AirVenture every summer, which is why I’m irritable. Read EAA’s Sport Aviation and all the Oshkosh hype. You’ll see.

(I suppose you think I could come up with something less arcane and more compelling—or actually informative—to write about, since it’s only twelve times a year. I won’t disagree. Unfortunately, the grease-stained muse of aviation prose takes August off and I’m pretty much out of Schlitz, inspiration-wise. I don’t know how the other guys do it. Better column next month, I promise. But please continue.)

Beyond our well-founded objections to the relentless use of cliché, we complain that what’s usually being described is actually mere daydreaming. The kid in the cornfield, the upwardly gazing caveman, or perhaps the fellow who is thinking about building an RV-6 or resuscitating a Cub are all daydreaming. They’re not on a vision quest, or achieving Nirvana, or making a solemn pact with future generations. We just don’t want to use the phrase “daydreaming of flight” because it sounds too much like lollygagging, which reflects badly on the pilot population in general. A daydream suggests slacking off—in the sense that maybe it would be far more productive to mow the lawn or fix the roof than to build an airplane. A true “visionary dream,” however, transcends such mundane projects with utopian ambition beneficial to all. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King. There’s a Dream, capital D. He wasn’t just lollygagging, or drooling over a rivet-gun catalog, and Coretta certainly wasn’t yelling at him to get all that airplane crap out of the garage. Note the difference?

Also make the distinction between the cliché “dream of flight” and the much more interesting “flying dream.” In a flying dream, meaning the kind that usually happens at night, you might be copying an endless clearance from ATC in what sounds like Medieval Lithuanian, or flying like a bird yourself, or scrambling to jump clear of the Hindenburg. In an aviation daydream you are mostly in the world, and only a little bit out. You are held responsible for your actions and are expected to be at least marginally rational. In a “flying dream” you are irresponsibly zonkers and editorially unrestrained. My wife tells me that over the last year or so I’ve become an extreme, physically active dreamer. (“You’re thoroughly obnoxious,” was one way she put it.) I wake up screaming, “The bunny rabbit, where’s the bunny rabbit?” I live in Boston; a bunny would get mugged. My wife fears for her safety and longs for a little more REM sleep. She believes that my dreams are largely aviation related, but the connection is difficult to confirm, because they usually vanish when she wakes me up. Yet sometimes I do remember. My favorite is the repeater that started in childhood, in which I stand in the back yard, look up, and they’re holding an amazing old-time airshow, apparently just for me.

Here’s an aviation dream that survived the dawn. It belongs to a distinguished author (“Astonishing … A breathtaking performance” – Washington Post.) who is also a pilot. We turned off the gyros and flew aerobatics together recently. He had the following dream that night. Here’s the extract from his email:

“I can’t sign off without telling you about the dream I had last night. I was flying along while lying back on what seemed an awful lot to me like a mattress, and a phone rang. I answered it to find that it was “Sherry, from across the street.” I have no idea who “Sherry, from across the street” is, but I said it was good to hear from her, and that if she would hold on a second, I would pull back the throttle to reduce the engine noise so I could hear her better. As soon as I did this, the nose of the mattress turned straight down, and I found myself in clouds, very aware that the gyros of the attitude indicator were caged. I told Sherry VERY quickly that I would have to call her back, and then I began monkeying with the controls to try righting myself. That was the end of the dream, or at least all I remember.

“Gee, I wonder where the idea of pointing straight down, and having caged gyros on the attitude indicator could have come from?”

The above is a great example of how dreams process, and mangle, the events of the day. Elaborate dreaming is actually quite common after the first aerobatic flight. And I also like it when mysterious women show up in the neighborhood. Did this Sherry person leave a number?