I remember that, in the first few years I went up in airplanes, and lasting well into my early twenties, I was amazed by the tops of the clouds visible through the airplane windows – and responded to them with fascination and flights of imagination, and couldn't quite understand why other people didn't watch them for the whole flight. They look like something you could travel on, they look like... well, a sort of heaven of course, certainly a complex landscape of hills and valleys. Since we grew up near Dulles Airport, perhaps Saarinen's famous building helped out a bit (we were between Dulles and National Airport, now disgustingly renamed after a dreadful president – one of the symbols of the greedy decline of America, for me at least).
After a few years I noticed I didn't have so strong a reaction, and they had become just clouds. But I kept watching, wondering why that ecstatic amazement had gone away, and trying to respond. There was certainly something resonant about the things I was imagining at the time – my poem Airports refers to something very important to me, though it probably just confuses other people.
More significantly, there have been many airports (and some docks and even bus stations, just for variety) in my dreams; it seems that they have come to mean, for me, death and some sort of transition – there are dreams where older friends such as Susan and Philip are solemnly leaving and I am full of anxiety, trying to stay behind; there are others that are more cheerful, with strange airport shops and crowds, but just as mysterious, where people old and young are lining up with me to board.
All of which means that tonight's airport dream comes as no surprise. I have no dreams that clearly show my mother as a distinct person, now just over a week since her death (although she has appeared in many dreams before her death, recently even in one where she is talking to her own mother); but there is a sense of her and/or her death in the background, as the context for the dream. And in this one I'm trying to stay on a plane home, though I don't have the right ticket, and odd things keep happening among the people who are gradually boarding....
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