A flying dream - Part 1

The dream. It was a childhood nightmare. She had other dreams, of course, for who has only one dream in her life? There was the dream about her father, visiting from heaven or nirvana or wherever -he smelled of tobacco and coffee. His mouth didn't move, she heard his voice and hearing, could not distinguish one word from another, yet she was always comforted by the dream. An early experience with evangelistic sentimentality after his death left her always imagining he had wings in the dream, great, feathered wings which would carry them both into softness of clouds.
There was the dream about Ernest Hemmingway, tanned brown from baking in the African sun, the licorice smell of absinthe or lime and scotch held in his beard, bent in an indulgent, avuncular smile. He was her Virgil, taking her to foreign lands, far from her native Indiana, filled with pygmies, outlandish mythological creatures, and hills, mountains, gullies, ancient trees and monumental ruins.
The dream she first had a few weeks after her eleventh birthday. A confusing rush of falling, falling and caught by the image and ideal of Cary Grant, Tony Bennett, John Lennon, and Leonard Cohen amalgamated into some composite ideal of quality of voice, trueness of spirit, reassuring masculinity, and impassioned devotion. Falling, spinning, wondering if her father's wings could return her to flight, and waking up, covers kicked away, pajama bottoms tugged down and tangled around her knees, her body-length pillow clutched with one arm, the other pinned across her waist, ankles crossed tight. Panting, wondering if she was damned. If it was sin even though she hadn't meant to. Later that day her mother noticed a change, the precocious, energetic daughter had turned a contemplative eye at all things, inward and outward. For the first time, she spoke to her mother with the seriousness of the first, tremulous steps toward adulthood. They spoke about her father's death.
Her older sister, nineteen at the time and finishing a degree in social work, later consoled her and offered assurances about the naturality of her experience, that she was on the way to becoming a woman. She took her shopping and bought her a book on adolescent female sexuality written by a famous female sex-counsellor. Her sister threw her a menarche party two months later.
There were other dreams of course. Thousands forgotten, incorporated into a poem here or a sketch there or released like a well-loved bird to carry on to somewhere else, hopefully better but different at least. This dream, however, was more terrifying than usual. She and her father were flying, she had her own wings and the doctors held her down with the detachment of trauma surgeons. Their instruments were mercilessly sharp, clinically designed to do to her an act of pure torture with no physical pain at all.
As the surgeons explained that the operation went well, that her wrists and hands would require physical therapy, and that she might even be able to drive a car in a year or so, but so sorry, her new impairment would invalidate her pilot's license all she could see was a large cloud, falling like thousands of wide, moist snowflakes, drifting ever so slowly to carpet floor, trod upon and unseen by the doctors and nurses -feathers.