Flying

In the interpretation of dreams, Flying is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as freedom, transcendence, ambition, or escape from limits.

Common readings

Flight is usually read as a wish for freedom or release, an exhilarating rising above circumstances, though it can also mark a flight from something the dreamer would rather not face.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The texture of dream flight varies enormously and the readings vary with it. Effortless soaring, laboured flapping, flight that fails at altitude and flight used to escape something below are treated as distinct dreams; joy, strain and fear mark different relations to the freedom the image offers. Interpreters also ask what the flight is for, since rising above a scene to see it whole points one way and fleeing upward from a pursuer points another, and the exhilaration many dreamers report is itself part of the dream's meaning rather than decoration.

Dream flight is ancient material. Artemidorus gave flying dreams substantial treatment in the Oneirocritica, reading them, as he read everything, by the dreamer's circumstances: the same flight promised different things to the traveller, the slave and the rich man, and the details of height, direction and company all altered the forecast. That a person might fly in sleep was not strange to his world; what mattered was what the flight foretold.

Freud classed flying among the typical dreams and traced it, like falling, to remembered childhood sensations of swinging and romping, while noting the exhilaration that usually attends it. Jungian writers read ascent more symbolically, as transcendence, overview and escape from the earthbound, with the caution their tradition attaches to flying too high above one's own ground.

Modern dream research added a distinctive fact: flying is one of the commonest deliberate acts in lucid dreams, the dreams in which the dreamer knows the dream is a dream, and for many practiced lucid dreamers flight is the first thing attempted. That finding says nothing about meaning, but it marks flying as one of the few dream acts people pursue for joy, and any reading of a flying dream has to make room for the pleasure of it.