What Do Falling or Flying in Dreams Mean?

Falling

The sensation of falling typically occurs at the beginning of the night during stage 1 sleep. It is associated with a muscular spasm of the arms, legs or whole body and is known as a 'myoclonic jerk', which is common to many mammals. Like yawning and hiccupping, it is involuntary, and yet undeniably under the control of the brain. Oswald (1959a) suggests that these jerks may be the outcome of an arousal response, since they can be elicited by sounds heard while dropping off to sleep, and are associated with small K complexes in the EEC These events are not normally associated with any coherent dream sequence, although they may be preceded by a feeling of floating (reminiscent of the 'aura' often experienced by people suffering from epilepsy, giving warning of an imminent convulsive fit). While analogous, in this sense, to an epileptic seizure, there is no evidence that these jerks have anything else in common with epilepsy. It seems likely that the sensation of falling is the outcome of cortical interpretation of the production of this innate response, rather than being intrinsic to its generation. Falling in dreams is quite common: surveys have found that between 50 percent and 80 per cent of subjects report at least one falling dream (Saul and Curtis, 1967). These dreams tend not to be about sudden drops or stumbles, but of long drops from high buildings or down deep holes, ending in collision with the ground, or perhaps with a miraculously soft landing.

Flying

In "The Interpretation of Dreams" Freud (1932) related how a patient regularly dreamt of floating a couple of feet off the ground. His interpretation was that this fulfilled her wish to avoid contamination from other human beings, and to achieve greater stature. (She was a very short woman.) More generally, he attempted to relate the sensation of flying during a dream to sensations from the ventilation of the lungs during sleep, or to childhood memories of being thrown in the air. At the age of nine, my son told me of dreaming of swinging violently in the hammock (something he did frequently during the summer) and falling out (again a frequent occurrence), but instead of landing on the ground he floated effortlessly around the garden, suspended above the ground. Although the hammock part of the dream is explicable in terms, of actual experience, the subsequent floating cannot reasonably be related to my son's usual fate when falling out of the hammock; such dreams, which are not uncommon, seem uniquely detached from any experience in real life. For Artemidorus all dreams were classified as either theorematic or allegorical. The former describes events that are possible if not mundane, while the latter are metaphors. In these terms, flying dreams qualify as more allegorical than most.

From personal experience and from reports from her subjects, Ann Faraday (1972) describes two types of flying dream: floaters, like the ones above, and ones in which the dreamer is at tree-top height. Flying dreams seem to be distinct from recollections of flying in an aeroplane — few people have flown in an aeroplane at roof-top height, and in any case the experience would be quite different from the drifting and soaring of the typical flying dream. If they are as divorced from experience as they seem, the only explanation for their regular occurrence in a variety of people must be either, following Jung, that they are archetypal dreams with some allegorical significance, or that they represent an attempt to make sense out of experiences that are really occurring during dreaming sleep — an attempt to make a coherent story out of some or other pattern from the highly active discharges from the hindbrain that are a feature of REM sleep. An unusual aspect of these dreams is the cautious attitude that dreamers tend to adopt towards flying - a rare example of commentary within a dream, of insight or lucidity. This is perhaps an indication of the forced nature of the experience - forced by a combination of the sensation of immobility of REM sleep and the rich visual experience offered by the overactive hindbrain.

When I conducted a phone-in on sleep and dreaming on a local radio station a few years ago somebody called in to ask what I had to say about flying dreams. 'Do you have them?' I asked. 'Yes.'

'Oh, so do I, aren't they fun?' I said.

'Yes, but how do you get the height?' he replied, 'Most of the time I just float two feet off the ground, and hardly ever get to fly at any decent height.'

This struck me very forcibly, as I too had had both sorts of flying dream, and while floating was quite enjoyable, flying at tree-top level was much more satisfactory. I could not think of any suitable advice at the time. That night I had a floating flying dream. Hovering in an upright position two feet or so above the ground I remembered the caller's problem and immediately found a solution. In my right hand was a small tray, and by tilting it in the breeze I found that I could obtain enough lift to get to any height I wanted, and was soon soaring into the air and travelling at will. When I woke up it was with the certainty that I had solved an extremely important problem, and was eager to try it out at once. It seemed incautious to attempt it indoors, and I was halfway out of bed to get a tray to take out into the garden before I realized the ridiculous nature of the enterprise.

Another solution to the problem of gaining height was told to me by one of my respondents, who had dreamt of climbing a high flagpole. When at the top he had been disappointed to find no flag, but with some cautious experimentation had discovered that he did not need to hold on to the pole - he could float. Once confident in his new power he had flown at flagpole height with the greatest of ease.