Awakening is usually the moment we emerge from nightmares, rather than enter them.
But when 21-year-old Australian-born Richard Hillary regained consciousness on September 3, 1940, he found himself in freefall plummeting towards the North Sea.
Moments earlier, Hillary's Spitfire aircraft had become engulfed by flames during a Battle of Britain dogfight, and he had passed out before he could bail out.
Flung from the open cockpit, Hillary entered freefall 3 kilometres above the Earth before his senses returned in time for him to open his parachute.
"I was told later that the machine went into a spin at about 25,000 feet and that at 10,000 feet I fell out," he reflected in his memoir The Last Enemy, first published 80 years ago in the US as Falling Through Space.
"Looking down, I saw … that I was going to fall into the sea and that the English coast was deplorably far away."
With his face and hands horribly burned, Hillary was rescued and spent a protracted convalescence in the care of the pioneering plastic surgeon and skin-graft specialist Archibald McIndoe, who reconstructed the young pilot's hands and eyelids.
"Hillary was a good writer, and The Last Enemy was a way to use his experiences of fighting and the dreadful things that had happened to him to build on that," said cultural historian Brett Holman.
"Unfortunately, he never got a chance to continue."
Less than a year after the book's release, Hillary — who, remarkably, had returned to active service — was killed when the plane he was piloting as part of a night-flying exercise crashed in Scotland.
With death came immortality. At a time when Churchill's words about the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the debt "owed by so many to so few" were still echoing within the popular consciousness, Hillary was eulogised as the very essence of valour.
The image of the airman
Hillary had been born in Sydney in 1919 to a West Australian mother of English and Spanish ancestry, and a father whose Anglo-Irish forebears moved to South Australia from County Clare.
The Hillarys took up land at Carrieton in SA's north. They belonged to the rural colonial settler class but were no strangers to calamity.
After World War I broke out in 1914, three Hillary brothers joined up, and Richard's father Michael was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry.
Meanwhile, another brother, teenager Cornelius, was killed when he fell from a train near Carrieton in 1916.
Given his father's military service, and the family's move to England, it is hardly surprising that, in 1939, Richard — by then an undergraduate at Oxford — enlisted in the RAF.
Blond and dashing (his romances included an affair with Hollywood actress Merle Oberon), Hillary was the epitome of the Spitfire pilot.
"Was he representative? He has been chosen as a representative," Dr Holman said.
"The image of the airman in World War II was partly inherited from World War I.
"There was this carryover of the idea of the Knights of the Air — that the war in the air was somehow more chivalrous and gentlemanly and sportsmanlike than the mud and blood of the trenches."
Of poets and pilots
Even before his final crash, Hillary had become one of those figures whose lives are magnets for myth.
"In times of war the dead recede quicker and myths form faster," wrote the essayist Arthur Koestler.
"Already there is one growing around Hillary and it is easy to foresee that it will wax and expand, until his name has become one of the symbolic names of this war."
Koestler regarded this process as irreversible, even though he sought to counteract it by emphasising Hillary's youthful vulnerabilities.
If the tragic heroes of the last major conflict were the poets who produced elegies for doomed youth, Hillary was, in the public imagination, something of a spiritual heir.
This association — between poet and pilot — was made explicit by another essayist, Eric Linklater, who likened Hillary to WWI bard Rupert Brooke:
"Between each of them and his own age there was a consonance, of temper or predicament, and each by his genius gave voice and a little clarity to the demands and emotion of his time."
