Dreaming about flying: what is known, and what is only said.

What has actually been measured

Falling and flying are the two dreams that appear near the top of every typical-dreams questionnaire ever run, across every country they have been run in. That near-universality is the interesting finding — a dream most of humanity has cannot be telling any one dreamer something specific about their life.

Flying appears disproportionately in lucid dreams, where the dreamer knows they are dreaming and can act deliberately. Outside lucidity it is simply a common motor fantasy of a body that is not currently subject to gravity or to its own muscles.

Flying ranks among the most commonly reported themes in typical-dreams questionnaires and is one of the small number rated as pleasant by most respondents.

• ✦Source: Nielsen, T. A. et al., “The typical dreams of Canadian university students”, Dreaming, 2003

What flying has traditionally been taken to mean

Flight has been read as release from constraint, ambition, spiritual elevation, or the wish to be above a situation. Difficulty gaining height was traditionally treated as significant, and remains one of the more commonly described variants.

That reading is reported here as tradition, which is what it is. It is centuries of accumulated association, it varies by culture, and it has never been shown to predict anything. It is worth knowing because it is the language most people already carry into the question — not because it is a finding.

The detail usually carries more than the symbol

In dream content analysis the verb is more informative than the noun: what was happening, who was present, and how the dream ended distinguish two dreams that share an image entirely. These are the variants people report most often.

• ✦Struggling to stay up — One of the most commonly described variants and the one the tradition makes most of.
• ✦Flying low over ground — Frequently reported by people who also report lucidity.
• ✦Falling out of flight — Links this entry to falling, which is the other half of the same theme family.

Questions that get further than a definition

A dream dictionary can tell you what an image has meant to other people. Only you have the waking context that makes it mean anything here. These are the questions that reliably produce something usable, and they work whether or not you find the symbolic reading convincing.

• ✦Did you choose to fly, or find yourself already flying?
• ✦Was it effortless, or did height take work to hold?
• ✦Were you being watched?
• ✦What did you feel on waking — loss, or relief?

What this entry does not claim

Nothing on this page predicts an event, diagnoses a condition, or reports anything about another person's intentions. Dreaming about flying is not a warning, a message, or a sign, and no study has ever shown it to be one.

What the research supports is narrower and more useful: dream content tends to continue waking concerns rather than announce future ones. That makes a recurring dream worth paying attention to as information about now — and worthless as information about next week.