Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 41 — page 49: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION with shame and unutterable fear. Yes, it had been only a dream, hadn’t it? He laughed at his foolishness. But no, no, it was all too real. He had fallen from the ceiling. He had broken his bed by the fall. Trembling, he arose. He lit a match and held it above his head. The marks of his fingernails were there, in long, wild and hysterical gashes. The wind blew the match out. He stood in darkness. He could no longer laugh at himself. In the morning he’d barely awakened when he remem- bered . . . and shuddered. Hesitantly, he looked at the ceiling. He saw the marks there. He almost fainted. “But I still want to fly,” he startled himself by thinking. “J will fly!” He climbed resolutely from the broken bed and tried to levitate. ~ He failed. Why? WHY? he groaned. He’d been so sure, this time. And he had done it last night. 48 It all started with those old dreams, those so-familiar dreams of impossible things. Things like walking on the walls, or jumping from a ten- storey building and landing with a feather-soft tap on the ground, alive and unhurt. The old and humorously | silly dreams that he looked forward to because of their variety and imagination. And having dreamed, decided to do. “So many serious writers contend that these are racial memories of the days when the race knew the secret of self-flight, there must be some- thing to it,”’ he had told him- self. “Everyone, especially kids, dream of flying. If there’s nothing to it, why do we dream them so often?” He began to notice that the morning after each such dream he seemed to know more about how he did it—the actual technique. “Some day I’llreally get it,” he told himself. And he’d command his sub-conscious: “Next time you are to remem- ber in detail!” This was a good theory, a superb theory. Psychiatrists, he knew, advise it for getting connicloooks.comn