Dreams

Took a nap this afternoon after my company left to recover from too little sleep and had a really bizarre, very long dream. It was so surrealistic that it made Salvador Dali, whose most instantly familiar painting is probably this one, look sensible and realistic. This one involved your dad and me, years ago when you guys were little, trying to drag order out of about three housefuls’ worth of furniture, clothing, kitchen goods, toolshop stuff, various family members’ heirlooms, etc., piled in every room in the house (I think the one in Fontana). Every time I moved something, he moved it somewhere else; and every time I turned around, what had been a clear pathway was piled with chairs and stools and things so that if I moved, I’d either fall or get tumbled upon by heavy objects.

Interspersed with this were efforts to root plants and get them in the ground outside, and every time I put one in the ground and turned around, it disappeared. Pots of plants inside the house disappeared when I went inside to get them, or they’d been moved far away. Things I stuck in the ground either withered immediately or turned instantly into big trees that instead of growing straight out of the ground, looped across the ground like pictures of the Loch Ness monster, or a dragon, since that photo doesn’t show the loops.

And you boys were wandering around through the whole thing, getting under stuff and getting hurt and requiring rescue. Northwood, you were about three in one spot and Dad had let you play in broken glass. I was trying to clean it out of your hand while you cried and wailed, screaming at your father the whole time. The next second you were perfectly fine.

Weird stuff. Probably fairly usual for most people’s dreams, but mine are usually pretty cohesive narratives.

Really cool dreams this week; I think I’ve correlated the terrific ones to days I accidentally skip brain pills. The dreams are so entertaining it’s almost worth it. 🙂 These are just the high points. They were a lot longer and more complicated than this.

Dream One: I was at a conference of some kind involving peace activists and speakers, in Singapore, I think, and lots of stuff was going on but the most interesting was the hotel. I was on the 11th floor and in an elevator going up when it turned into a flying cubic transport thing; not a bus, because it still had its elevator shape. It took me swooping along streets and over parks and residential areas. One park contained a lot of scrawny old wrinklies who were attempting to use resistance cords, like bungee cords, for exercise. Two of them had wrapped the cords around their necks and were trying to stop choking themselves.

Then I was in a store looking at things on shelves. One of them was a sort of chalice shape made of very thin, cranberry-red glass with a matte surface. Inside it were tiny red glass teacups and even tinier little plates; I wondered what they could be for and decided it must be sushi. The workmanship was amazing and I was afraid to pick it up because it was so delicate.

Also, I found a fountain pen in this store that was shaped like the body of an F-15, sans wings. The pointy bit of the plane was the nib, and it curved way over and down, almost like a claw or the Concord nose. This was kind of a mauve color (not my thing!) with airbrushed designs; very sleek and clean looking. You unscrewed it to get to the inside, and at the front was a smallish brass (gold? probably not, for the $10 price) tube with a little flip top that might have held a cartridge, but that gave me the impression that you dropped ink into it and the flip top sealed it like a cartridge. Cool system; I bet it would work.

Behind the cylindrical part (there was an amazing amount of room inside it) were tiny, tiny, about a centimeter diameter and two millimeters high little fluted candles. One was labeled “one,” another “two,” and one “after dinner.” I puzzled over this until I thought perhaps they were for neutralizing the stench from one and two cigarettes, and obviously for after dinner use. But I couldn’t find anyone to tell me what they were.

Dream Two: Last night. Long involved process as to how it got there, but there was a lion lying with a critter carcass at the entrance to a long dirt driveway leading to the house I was in. (Not mine, and for once the emphasis wasn’t on the house!) Someone was giving everyone in the house lion lessons, so if we went out we wouldn’t be eaten, but we weren’t supposed to go out. Of course, I did, and went down to look at the lion. A small guardhouse was in the middle of the road between the lion and the house, and I sneaked up behind it and peered around. The lion saw me, stretched lazily, got up and sauntered my way. I sidled around the other side, and as it peeked around to see me, I peeked around the other edge to see its tail. We kept sidling around the walls like this and I was wondering how I was going to get out of there alive, ’til I remembered that the anti-lion teacher had said, “Square your shoulders, walk tall and confidently, as if you own the world, and the lion won’t bother you.” So when I got back to behind the guardhouse, I did as told and strode off unhurriedly toward the house. The lion just sat there and watched me.

Later, some other woman did the same thing, but she got into the guardhouse and the lion poked his head inside. She started to shriek, high-pitched sounds like a dying rabbit (Chris!), and the guardhouse expanded and the lion came inside. The closer he got, the more walls appeared and the more she retreated behind and the higher and louder became her shrieking. The lion thought this sounded like lunch and kept coming. I think he eventually ate her, but don’t remember for sure.

Dream Three: I found Blue comatose on the couch in a house not mine, tiny and dark, no lights anywhere, with houses on either side that were equally tiny, dark and squalid, and peopled by humanoid creatures at whom West Virginia hillbillies would look askance. I took her immediately to the vet, who didn’t look much more competent than the hillbillies, and she made a hole in Blue’s back, put in a tube (sort of like for abscess drainage), and told me I’d have to feed in a couple of milliliters of a milky antibiotic she handed me about every hour for two weeks. Of course, Blue didn’t think too much of this idea and within about six hours I’d given up and squirted the whole supply down her throat. The tube had fallen out, too. And the rest of the dream was taken up with hand-wringing and worry about the vet’s $10,000 bill and how I’d ever get that paid off!

After a tiring trip (dream-wise-speaking) to Seattle, with Mogo alongside, I was induced to make some turns and re-turns without knowing why, and wound up at a big white condo building. It turned out to be occupied by Mogo’s son Brother Paul. We went in the front door and were confronted with a bed. This floor extended maybe 10′-12′ from the door and halted at a balcony-style railing. Going to the right through white carpet (!), you turned and came to a stairway that went down into what was the main level.

I couldn’t get down the final three or four stairs because a giant green turtle (smooth shell but lacking seaworthy legs—more like this but with a sea-turtle-shape to the shell and in deep green) was enthusiastically but clumsily trying to bounce up the stairs to greet me. It must’ve been five feet long from tip of shell to tail, and that doesn’t include the head. It turned out to be the pet of Paul’s roommate Una, who was very Eastern European and of very vague shape and outline (and who does not, to my knowledge, exist). He did have dark hair, though. I was surprised it wasn’t Paul’s. The turtle, I mean.

For some reason, the carpeted stairs prevented the turtle from going up the stairs. Una said that if the turtle went past me, though, I could just pick him up and bring him back down. (Yeah, all 300 pounds of him!) He was extremely lively, running and bounding around the hardwood floors like a puppy, with his claws clacking and his shell making thunder noises when it hit the floor. In the center of the large (probably 500 or more square feet) circular main room (like a kiva) was a circular structure that went from floor to about the level of the balcony. On one side, it contained cooking apparatus; the bottom half was covered in small, shiny white tiles, maybe 2″ square. It also contained other things (like a fridge), depending on what you were looking for or needed at the time, so it must’ve been magical.

No chairs or other things to sit on, but since I got the impression that Paul and Una were going to college (which he’s not quite old enough for yet—Paul, not Una, whoever he might be), this was expected. The turtle scrambled from one person to another, wanting its head and shell scratched. It seemed to like the particular area behind its ears that I scratched, because it snuggled up next to me as if it had known me since hatching.

It carried around squeaky toys and played fetch—a very dog-like turtle. To one side of the kiva-like room was a large oval container that looked as if it might be a turtle-litter box. On that side of the room, a one-step-down area maybe three feet wide and following the curved contours of the outer wall contained a sort of bar, topped with matte-black stone, and a few wooden stools. At the far end was a glass partition with a horizontal oblong-shaped hole in it, kind of like the mail slots in old houses, which connected it to the condo next door. Nobody knew why, nor had they ever seen anyone in the other place.

Paul’s mom Denise seemed to be there but was just in the background. His sister Eliza was there, too, and I pointed out to her that the tile surface on the circular structure would be great for drawing on with crayons, because they’d just wipe off and you could do it all over again. She was very intrigued by this and went about searching for crayons.

The sides of the kiva-like room were also done in white tile to about four feet off the floor, but I don’t remember what the rest of the walls were like. The ceilings were very high and sound echoed amazingly, unless you talked very very quietly. I really became very fond of the turtle.

I actually tried to go back to sleep to finish this one, but since it was raining alligators and the critters were all making it known that They Wanted Their Breakfasts, House Ape, And Now, it didn’t work.

I was in a large classroom full of first-graders, and somehow understood that I was actually in school and was to go through first grade with these kids. They were surprisingly quiet and well behaved for first-graders and seldom said or did anything that either was related to or impeded classroom progress.

In walked Mrs. Pairsh, my fifth-grade teacher, otherwise known as El Comandante because she was as martial and rigid as they come. As I think I’ve noted on these pages before, she made us turn in our seats, stand, and march in file to the lunchroom. And here she was, cheerful and effusive and sweet to these little kids, and to me! Most un-Pairsh-like. MOST unlike.

She started off by teaching us songs to sing. One had some sappy words put to a Mozart piece, I forget which one, and I felt ridiculously proud of being able to point out that this was actually a Mozart piece, thinking that put me ahead of all these little squirts (who never heard of Mozart, I’m sure). Mrs. Pairsh said yes, that was right, and started off on another song. Her method of teaching was to sing the song through once, and expect us to pick it up and be in full chorus by the end. A few of the songs were grade-school standards and others were re-hashes of 60s songs.

Next came writing, and she offered us all a selection of (very expensive) pens and pencils to use. I was astonished by the variety and quality of these tools—she had Auroras and Pelikans and OMASes and Viscontis, all among my favorites, and many of the top-end models. We could choose a pencil, ballpoint or fountain pen from the bounty. I selected one, brand unknown at present, that had beautiful shimmering colors all over it, mostly blues and greens, but they changed constantly with light and shadow. And I started to tell her all about the pens and manufacturers, amazed that she knew anything at all about writing tools. She told me to be quiet.

I went and sat in a corner to practice handwriting, and when I looked up I noticed a big display of fibers and yarns. I asked Mrs. Pairsh about it and she said I could select a yarn to examine. I noticed huge balls of various kinds of yarn on a shelf above, and thought that I ought to see about liberating a few of those to take home; with so much yarn there, she’d surely never notice (at least, not in her current cheerful incarnation). The display was one of those round turny things (kind of like wallpaper sample displays, only mounted on a rotating pedestal—I can’t find a picture), where every time you turn a panel, there are new things to look at. There must’ve been about 500 yarn colors and kinds.

When I’d picked out a yarn (brown and red together longitudinally—not something I’ve ever seen in a yarn and amn’t likely to, since they have to be twisted for strength) and she’d approved my taking it home (all two or three feet worth of the sample), I turned around and poof! there was another huge display of other things, I think hobby tools or something, or at least hobby tools were among the things hanging on the pegs. Looking all that stuff over, I thought she must be running a store in the classroom to augment her probably meager teaching salary, or else she was training us all to be Good Little Consumers from the get-go.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I remember. Too bad. If nothing else, I wanted to find out what kind of drugs she was on.

So I’m put in charge of cooking Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m about 10 years old and in my grandma’s kitchen. I decide a dip is a good thing to start with (I don’t know that I’d ever heard of “dip” at that age), so I put some cream cheese in a little 2-oz. bowl and start looking for things to mix it with. Pretty soon I add some tomato soup, but that looks funny, so I put in some mustard, and then some catsup, and the texture and consistency just aren’t working. I move it to a bigger bowl and start looking for other things to add. In go the contents of a fast-food mayo packet, some dried cat food that I have a lot of difficulty mashing up, the stuff under a dried crust of something I think is brown mustard in a little dish that’s been sitting around long enough to have dust bunnies on the top, some salsa, and some sour cream. Now it’s in about a half-gallon jar and looks very strange and has an equally strange texture. I don’t feel the least bit apprehensive about tasting it at any stage. Fortunately—very fortunately, I suspect—I woke up here.

I wound up on a flight to London with two families I didn’t know, both with very young children. We landed at Heathrow and I was really excited, since I hadn’t expected ever to make it to England. We got out of the parking lot by walking and the signs were really confusing, but we made it out and suddenly were in the city, which was composed largely of enormous apartment complexes, each with complete “neighborhood” needs—grocery store, pharmacy, hardware, doctors, clothing stores, everything you’d need.

This dream had incredible detail. The overriding sense was that nobody was ever alone in this city, and that if you didn’t already know your way around, good luck. Going up or down stairs, walking down the street, entering stores, whatever—the only place you could be alone was in your own space. Watching the passersby was fascinating; one woman rode by on a bicycle with 48″ wheels and two sets of pedals very near the top, the way the stirrups on racing saddles are up high on the horse. A frumpy grandma with a market basket, a family with a bunch of rowdy kids, all were quite interesting. I’m skipping a lot of detail and storyline because it would just take too long.

I looked in a phone book, which weighed about 80 pounds, to find some paper stores I knew about and wanted to visit. However, only one was listed, and it wasn’t one I knew about. I found it and went inside, and was astonished to find Cuzzin Joel selling paper through the place–brown textured paper that had the sizing of a table napkin! The woman behind the counter wasn’t interested in other American papers, either. I spent a lot of time looking for stores that I couldn’t find, and at one point the two young families and I crammed into a tiny minivan and I had the baby on my lap, but was very nervous because there were no seat belts.

We found good places to eat (not your standard Brit pub food, although we ate that, too), and took lots of pictures. There was a church service involved somewhere and I had a lengthy philosophical debate with a couple of people there, which amazingly didn’t become heated.

Eventually, this morphed into my cleaning a very old, cracked mirror in a tiny room just off the back door of a house I’ve never seen, though it was familiar to me. It had a bare light bulb in the ceiling and a flour sack or apron over the window, but I felt very at home in it and comfortable, and I didn’t want anyone to bother me.

Early this a.m., I dreamed that I’d gone to Granny Eileen’s along with several other people, all of whom I knew (probably all Grannies). Instead of the house she really has, this one was big and sprawling, way back in the woodsy mountains with no neighbors for 10 miles or more, in a big clearing with woods on the edges. It was a little dilapidated and, when several of us sat on a couch on one end of the living room, hubby Al told us to be careful—there was only 1/8″ between us and a big basement-like hole in the ground, something they were aiming to fix.

The house contained enormous amounts of furniture and all of it was covered with knitted things—coasters, placemats, mat mats, large mats, afghans and blankets—even the stairs to a lower level (well below the 1/8″, go figure) were covered with so many blankets that you didn’t walk down or up, you slithered or crawled. But everything had a comfy, cozy feel to it. Everyone was having a good time. Chocolates were being passed around, as was lots of other food; Eileen presented me with a big bag, separated into seven or eight compartments, each filled with chocolate. Picture this as a big horizontal Baggie with vertical seals making smaller compartments along the same plane, not like a grocery bag or purse with pockets. The chocolate was fudge-like, some with nuts, some with chips of something, some plain.

My two dogs were there, Bolt (a big, wolflike creature with brown/golden fur and a lion’s type ruff) and Buddy (smaller, younger, more like a terrier but with a smooth black coat). (Of course, I have neither of these dogs, nor is my present dog named Bolt or Buddy.) They were running around outside having fun in the grass and flowers, and we all went outside to join them. This required us to sort of rappel down from the porch to ground level.

I was off to one side and noticed movement; when I turned, two big moose cows, one with a calf, were ambling our way. Buddy frolicked over to them and began the doggie let’s-play move, with front feet out, hind end in the air, tail wagging. The moose cows looked at him, then at each other. The bigger one bent her head down and began to lick Buddy’s face. Buddy wriggled around, but the cow kept licking him, first over his head, then his shoulders.

“Uh-oh,” said Al, “if there’s two cows and a calf, a bull can’t be very far away. We’d better get inside before he comes along.”

Everybody scrambled for the porch, which now had a blanket-covered ramp that we had to slither up to get inside. There were suddenly so many people that I had to crawl over their heads and shoulders to get inside, but I was going in to get my camera, not to get away from the alleged nearby bull moose.

When everyone else was inside, I had already spent several minutes looking for my camera. Since three other people in the group had the same model, and several camera bags with lots of lenses, tripods, filters, and other gear were strewn around here and there, it was a frustrating search. I stopped and looked out a big northwest window at one point, and saw a huge, enormous, monstrous bull moose with a vast span of antlers, coming out of the woods and around the perimeter of the clearing, with a cow following him. Also, about four feet of snow covered the ground. The snow deepened as he walked, so he was pushing through about six feet of it within a short distance, and it was still only chest high on him.

I ran to the door to call the dogs in. Bolt came running, but Buddy wouldn’t, and Al pushed me away and shut and bolted the door so the moose couldn’t get inside. I was worried that the bull would pick Buddy up on his antlers and toss him into a tree, where he’d be impaled on a branch, but resumed my camera search, as did everyone else, because I didn’t want to miss this big moose, but my camera was nowhere in evidence.

Unfortunately, and as usual, I woke up before the end of this riveting tale. 😀

Walking uphill from a big-city downtown, headed toward home, I was carrying Tawie-zowie-wanda in my left arm and something else in my right. (Don’t know what.) Tawie got too heavy, so I put her down, but worried that she’d wander off or not be able to find her way home. Two people who were with me scoffed at me and said she’d be fine, she’d probably be home before we were.

Flash forward to home, which was a boxy apartment on the fourth or fifth floor of an old building. No Tawie anywhere, but the sidewalks were suddenly filled with dozens and dozens of cats and kittens of every size, color, and persuasion: stripey, calico, white, tabby, black, spotted, you name it.

I kept watching them, worrying because Tawie wasn’t showing up. The phone rang, and it was Vancouver General Hospital telling me Tawie was there. She’d gotten into it with a big tomcat, they said, and he’d torn a lot of her fur off. Poor Tawie didn’t even have any claws! I told them. Flash to VGH, where Tawie was in a small plastic incubator thing with half her fur gone and a ventilator tube down her throat.

The whole overtone of this dream was very sad, with lots of sense of loss. I was in Grandma Lawson’s house in Stillwater, with (initially) Mom and Dad and (later) Uncle Richard and Aunt Gloria. Or maybe they were all there initially and I just didn’t talk to all of them at once. Grandma’s house had become classic Craftsman in architecture (it really did have a few of those elements), though it remained very small (one BR, four or five rooms—a small table was in one end of the kitchen). The ceiling was gone, with the building open to the roof beams, and someone had tacked some sort of dark-colored gauzy fabric over the rafters so it billowed down between them. I made some comment about what an architectural gem the place was and what idjit had put the cloth up there, and we all pulled the cloth down. Interestingly, no dust was on the cloth. I do like the housekeeping aspect of dreams. 🙂

Someone told me that the house was due for demolition, that some development company had bought the land and was going to build on both it and Grandma’s big (probably half an acre) garden out back. I was incensed; destroying this architectural treasure would be an affront to history.

I went out back and got even more upset; the garden area had been dug up, foundation forms were all over the place, it was muddy and messy (with that indelible red Oklahoma mud), and 2x4s were scattered all over the place. I walked out that way, towards the northwest, and soon ran into mud and water—the lake had expanded so that the edge of Grandma’s property was marshy. (And somebody was building on that?) I got all teary-eyed, thinking that Grandma’s house was going to be gone, and the lake would probably swallow it if it kept rising. (Grandma’s did flood once, when I was about six. Rescuers took her and Grandpa out in a rowboat.)

Interestingly, this seemed to be Lake Carl Blackwell, which is outside of town, rather than the closer in-town and smaller Boomer Lake, which is IIRC (or was) the town’s water supply.

Going back inside, I realized I needed to find a bathroom. Grandma’s was evidently not functional or not there. Aunt Gloria said, “There’s one over here,” and took me out a door that hadn’t been there previously, right through the dining area (which overlooked the garden).

This turned out to be a huge, sprawling, ultramodern, ghastly addition with soaring beams and “architectural details” that were appalling, particularly in contrast to the simple elegance of the Craftsman lines. Hard to describe; huge curved walls, stairs in pointless places going to platforms; one enormous, double-gym-sized room with all this architectural junk thrown in, like a scrap heap of failed building projects that someone had foolishly decided to save. And painted in garish colors that just accented the ugliness.

We traveled around a large curved platform to the back, which had to have been farther away than the back of Grandma’s garden, and ran into a hallway that headed back toward Grandma’s house. I asked Gloria where this had come from and she said the new owners had added on to the house. It’s horrible, I said. It is, she agreed. Then she pointed to a bathroom door.

Going inside, I discovered a room the size of a gym, with more stupid architectural elements. A huge, curving platform atop which sat the toilet. To the left, maybe 3o feet away, was a bathtub—with someone in it. “Oh, excuse me!” I said, and rushed back into the hallway.

I waited and waited and waited (Gloria had gone), and stuck my head inside now and then to see if the person had left. To the contrary, he (or she, I never knew which) was lounging in the tub, reading a magazine, smoking a pipe (hey, you never know whether a pipe smoker’s male or female in dreams), humming happily to himself. Hearing a noise, I looked over toward the toilet, and a woman and two little kids were bouncing around on the platform playing ball. I went over and said, “Excuse me, I need to use the facilities,” and the woman shrugged and said, “Go ahead.” One of the kids was floating a toy sailboat in the toilet bowl.

I stood around and tried to loom at them and convince them to go away, but it didn’t work, and I really needed to go (no, I neither wet the bed nor had to get up and go, nor did any biological processes actually occur while I was on the dream-toilet—it transformed into a chair). I started to climb up the platform, and Ryan appeared to caution me about being careful and not falling, and he and Chris insisted on boosting me up over a ridge thing so I wouldn’t break my neck. Obviously, the two little kids turned into Ryan, and Chris, but grown up (or nearly so).

It turned out that RJ was planning to take a new job and move to some place in … Indiana? Not sure, but it was far away and sounded like the outer rim of earth (more so than North Dakota?!? sheesh!), and this made me very sad. I thought about my friends, and the Raging Grannies, and all the things I couldn’t take with; but I felt I had to go because I knew RJ wouldn’t enforce any sort of schedule or routine for Chris, and that Chris needed structure to manage life. At this point, the boys seemed maybe 10-ish.

Not long after, I woke up, and this is one of those dreams that’s continued to leave a wash of sadness behind it. No idea why; it’s a perfectly lovely day in the neighborhood and the birds are having a good time on the feeder. Well, those are dreams for ya, I guess.

Shoulda done this a couple of days ago when I had the dream, but I was busy getting an encyclopedia together to apply for a job. Which I have no hope of getting, despite being eminently qualified, but the worst they can tell me is no thanks, and I’m used to that.

I was in a cavernous, dark area with a cave ceiling but regular floor, walls, and school-cafeteria furnishings. Was with Patti English, my best friend from grade school from whom I’ve not heard for 30-some years (since shortly after we started college, to be exact). Lots of people in the area, some sitting around the tables, some lounging on couches and chairs, some lounging on floor. When we entered, the atmsophere was tense and agitated; we went to the back, where a group of younger people sat around a blanket that was spread out flat on the floor. It had a lump in the middle, and someone told us that the lump was some sort of magical mask, and when some person twitched the blanket off the mask and put it on, we were all to revolt against whatever governing authority was there (seems like it was a city, but dunno).

No one ever pulled the mask out, though there was lots of gossip and whispering and excited goings-on. Jack-booted-thug police types stomped around the place glaring and threatening everyone–probably the way it will be going to the grocery store in another five years.

Patti and I left, appeared in her house (though it wasn’t the one she grew up in), and her mother (who’s been dead for many years now) was there, crocheting. She had a huge quantity of crocheted thingies sitting around and was evidently selling crochet designs and making money hand over fist. (Which would be amazing.) One of them involved crocheting the shape of each state in the U.S. into a big map.

Took what I thought would be a short nap this a.m. to cure a sinus headache, and it turned into another marathon all-day snooze. Geez, where do these come from?

Anyway, dreamed that I had a small cage, with vertical bars only, like a birdcage only rectangular, or cube-like, or extended-cube-like. Do we have a word for a three-dimensional rectangle? Inside it, when I looked closely, was a tiny, bright-red flamingo or flamingo-like bird, with what should have been the pointy end of its beak flattened like a spoonbill. It was quite friendly and when I opened the cage, it crawled out on my hand and talked to me.

A bit further on, there were two huge (like four-inch long) bugs in another box. Iridescent black backs with horns and stickery things poking out. They were mating. Go figure.

Wonder if I was in a zoo? There were a few other weird creatures, and it was in a large, green field with trees surrounding it, under a soft blue sky with nice light but not brutal sunshine.

Can’t recall any of the rest of the dream, but I was in Venezuela for some reason and the people I was with decided to take a helicopter tour of some city. The pilot zoomed us up and down city streets for a while and we watched what was going on (daily life, that is) with excitement. Then he hit the “up” button and we soared straight up over the city, up and up, until we could see the outline of South America. He hovered here for a while, then took us up and up until we could see the outline of North and South America. I kept wondering how it was we could stay up there, because there certainly wasn’t enough air to hold us up. Eventually, he hit the “down” button and we zoomed straight down until he swooped us through the city streets again and onto a helicopter pad for a very ordinary landing.