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It started sometime earlier this year. I was contemplating why my martial art techniques didn’t work in my dreams. I always fell prey to the assumption it was just part of the dream – something to be interpreted.

It was a recurring “theme” – trying to hit someone and having no impact, or manipulating someone’s joints and not getting the desired effect. For some fleeting glimpse I approached it as if it were a problem experienced in an awakended state. If it was a “real” situation, why wouldn’t the technique work?

That brought an amazing, or at least interesting insight. The simple answer was I wasn’t breathing properly. It was almost like I wasn’t breathing at all. And in fact, since I was asleep, I wasn’t. In fact, without the drag of real time, it is possible I acted out an entire fight in one breath.

Just in case I lost the reader, let me point out that I use advanced (yet incredibly simple) martial techniqies that require almost no physical force – just focus and breath. Without proper breathing, the techniqies will not work, as in the dream.

ANYWAY, a bit more recently, I’ve been considering levitaion and flying, a recurring theme in my dreams as with many people, but in mine it is all about the effort and techniqie of flying and not related to the “story line” or any emotional content.

Analyzing the “body-feelings” of levitation in the same way as I did with fighting, I have realized that levitation is simply unrooting, if such a thing is possible in a gravity environment.

But what does it all mean? There is a certain fear of experimentation, for on the rediculous chance that I would unbind my weight, how would I control it without floating off into the sky or uncontrollably crashing into something or resuming connection with gravity from a tragic height?

And if it has been done before, I confered with my wife as to the potential social result and we were in agreement. Such a person would be killed out of fear or hurried away by the government never to be seen again. So the question is far more complex for me than mechanics and theory.

Regardless, unfettered by the gravity of realism, my imagination has nonetheless produced little technique or direction by which to explore this phenomenom in an awakened state.

HOWEVER, one of my students commented on not being able to root in water. I did not see how the conclusion followed logicaly from the lecture and practice at hand, but I realized that the sensation of weightlessness did seem to interfere with the ability to root – to connect with the ground. And I admitted that I myself found it difficult (or impossible, the more I recall) to root while in water, even in a calm pool.

Think. Think. Think.