Wednesday I flew to NYC for a meeting. Yes, just for the day; my employer paid $500 for a ticket a week ahead of time to give me a 17 hour day two-thirds of which was spent in cars, airports and planes.

Of course, as one might guess from the title, that’s not the subject of this post.

On the flight back, we were right up in the midst of some huge cummulus clouds. It was nearly impossible to judge their size, but at one point I saw another plane which was tiny against the cloud we were flying around and it seemed clear they were thousands of feet across. They seemed to have very sharply defined edges and texture. It looked like you could have stepped out of the plane and taken a nice spongy walk on them. They created a fantastic landscape of soaring mountains and deep valleys. Occasionally we would pass over a flat, cottony plain as well that would end on an sea that looked down upon the ground.

I’d been reading The Light Ages by Ian MacLeod which has a definite magical, dream-like quality to it at times and drifting in and out of sleep. My mind could not help but imagine a world up here in the cloudscape.

Deeps mines in the mountains, towns along the rushing rivers and streams of the valleys, farms in the fertile plains, and fishing villages along the deep, dark seas. What myths might they have about the ground-dwellers – about the people who lived under their seas and mountains?

Eventually we passed though the clouds and shortly after began our descent into Columbus. As we did the spell faded above and behind us, and the mundane world brushed its remains aside. I didn’t think about this at the time, but I wonder now how many other people’s minds took off on even vaguely similar imaginings. It feels to me like I’m the only one, but I suppose that’s just a natural side-effect of building a world in one’s mind. So, I can’t help but wonder who else was creating cloud-worlds that day and what those worlds were like.