Dream: The Bird-Man Escape

Dream 20030728, 12:00 PM:

I am at the Kingwood house; it seems like I’m a prisoner, although I don’t really have a sense of whether there’s a war going on, or what. I’m held in the back of the house, or in the front bathroom – it seems like I move between the two. There are men in brown uniforms who watch us carefully. There are a bunch of people here, but not all family or friends of mine. I watch the patterns of the guards, and figure out that if I time it just right, I will be able to get out the front door and have a chance to make a run for it.

I wait until just the right time, and make my escape through the front door and down the street, running fast. I take off into the air, flying away. I decide that it will be much easier to remain hidden if I stay off of the big streets, and fly through cover of the trees among the smaller streets. I go over toward where Aunt M.’s house is, and hide up in a tree. I know that there is a hunt chasing after me.

I see the men coming to find me; I’m standing up against the tree’s trunk on a big branch, and I’m terrified, because I know that they could see me if they came this way. I watch as a man with an alligator on a leash runs down the street; I snicker to myself, thinking that they’ll never find me with the alligator, because I’m in the trees. I wonder if they don’t know I can fly. Then, however, I see a group of men with special night-vision looking binoculars, and they are sweeping the yard where I’m hidden. They come right beneath the tree, but they see a statue in the yard that apparently makes a shadow that looks like me. They investigate, and once they figure out that it’s only a statue, they are no longer interested, and start to leave. My foot slips, and pushes a little branch down, though, and they find me. One man jumps up into the tree and grabs me, another aims a compound bow at me. I feel very scared. There is conversation, and somehow I make the man who is holding me move as if he were trying to jump, and the man with the bow shoots him. I laugh, and say something about how they always shoot a moving target, and then I take off before they can get me again.

I travel through quite a bit of area, flying tree to tree, mostly in subdivisions. I get to an area like Highland Park, with big houses. As I’m pausing at one big tree, I think to myself, how long will it be before I’m not afraid to fly across the fields again? This must be how the swallows feel – afraid to take to the open sky.

Then, I’m looking at a bunch of big, old houses, trying to find a good place to hide. Several of them have big canopied port-cocheres, and I know that if I can find one that is sufficiently concealed, the hunters won’t be able to see me. I find one that seems like it will work, but the canopy isn’t very stable; I try another, but it doesn’t have a high enough lip, and I can see the street over the top of it. I finally find a third which seems like it will work. *end*