A Kind of Bird That Don’t Have Legs

As I watched and read butterfly-heath-2039‘s dream (please see below), I was reminded of all the flying dreams I’ve had over the years.  Each time, I share our dreamer’s feelings:  “…it was absolutely beautiful.”

It’s the strangest thing: I never land in these flying dreams.  I never land!

And this reminds me of a bit of a play by the playwright Tennessee Williams, in which the drifter Val Xavier says,

‘You know they’s a kind of bird that don’t have legs so it can’t light on nothing, but has to stay all its life on its wing in the sky?… They sleep on the wind and never light on this earth but one time … when they die.”

The play was made into a film called The Fugitive Kind starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, directed by Sidney Lumet. Here is the bit about the wingless bird:

It seems Williams is referring to the mythical martlet.  In English heraldry, the bird is depicted without feet and represents a younger son, who supposedly has no ancestral footing in the land. For Williams the bird is a symbol of the wanderers and renegades who never settle in one place, of which Brando’s character is one.

In the Dream Visualisation created by the Dreamshare Seer, the dream feels continuous.  In fact, it does the same with all the dreams in the Seer. They loop.

Is this how your dreams feel?  Mine never have a beginning or an end exactly.  But rather, they remain on the wing, always in flight… never landing on some solid meaning or conclusion, never beginning at a set point.

As we sleep at night, are our minds the wingless birds?