Flying dreams meaning: what the way you flew can tell you

Why do we dream of flying?

Nobody can say exactly how the brain produces that weightless feeling. What we do know is that dreams can happen in any stage of sleep, and that the most vivid ones, where you move through a whole scene, tend to come during REM sleep.

The theme itself has been measured. German dream researcher Michael Schredl and Edgar Piel asked large representative samples whether they remembered flying dreams. In a separate study, Schredl counted the flights in one person's diary of several thousand dreams. This work describes how often people fly in dreams and what those flights look like. None of it assigns flying a fixed meaning.

One thing is better established: what happens during the day can feed the dream. A plane trip, a film or a video game sometimes supplies the raw material for a flight before any symbolism comes into it.

What a flying dream might be about

No dictionary can tell you for sure why you dreamed of flying. Some links do come up often, though, when people compare the flight with what they're living through at the time.

Freedom or relief

This is the best-known reading, and it fits best when the flight felt good and you were choosing the direction. Look for a concrete change: a decision made, a load getting lighter. If you can't find one, don't force it.

Wanting some perspective

Flying over a familiar place lets you see all of it at once. The dream may come during a period when you're looking for the bigger picture on something that feels too close. Which place were you flying over, and what's on your mind about it?

Ambition, or being seen

Climbing fast and high can go with a project you care about or a new role you have to grow into. If people were watching you, the real question may be visibility: did it feel good or exposing?

A dream journal example

Fictional example: it shows how to keep what happened in the dream separate from a possible link to your day.

• Dream: "I took off from the office parking lot and flew over the city. Above the train station I couldn't get any higher. I was brushing against the power lines."
• Emotion: "Euphoric at first, then a tight feeling in my chest."
• Recent context: "I just got the job I wanted. The first team meeting is on Tuesday."
• Question to keep: "Do I lose height in other dreams, before other new starts?"

One entry proves nothing. Links become visible when you note the same details over several nights, including the nights you don't fly.

Joy, fear, frustration: why the feeling matters

Two people can fly over the same skyline in a dream and wake up with opposite impressions. The emotion is often closer to waking life than the scenery is.

• Joy or relief: what exactly set it off? Gaining height, choosing your route, leaving a danger behind?
• Fear: it may come from the height, the thought of falling or a flight you weren't steering. Look for its cause inside the scene before giving it a bigger meaning.
• Frustration: if you couldn't climb, what stopped you, and how did you react?

The feeling can also shift mid-flight. Pinpoint the moment it turned: losing altitude, someone appearing, an unfamiliar landscape. Control is a separate question again. You can choose your route and still be scared, or be carried along and love it.

Is a flying dream a lucid dream?

Not necessarily. A lucid dream is one where you know you're dreaming while the dream is still going on. Steering your flight is something else. A French study of university students (Ribeiro, Gounden and Quaglino, 2016) asked about awareness and control separately, and the two didn't fully overlap.

So you can pilot a flight without realizing you're dreaming, or know you're dreaming and still struggle to get off the ground. In your journal, keep the two apart: "I knew I was dreaming" and "I chose where I flew" are different observations. If flying comes up often for you, it can become a cue to ask yourself "Am I dreaming?"

Can you have more flying dreams?

No method guarantees one, but a Canadian experiment offers a clue. Picard-Deland and colleagues (2020) had 137 participants fly through a virtual reality simulation. Before the experiment, 1.7% of the dreams they recorded at home included flying. In a lab nap after the simulation, it was 7.1%, and more than 10% on the first night back home.

That shows a striking daytime experience can find its way into dreams. It doesn't show that flying has one meaning, or that you should disrupt your sleep to chase it. If you want to try your own low-key version:

• In the evening, picture a specific scene: a familiar place, the takeoff, a turn, the landing.
• When you wake, write it down right away without tidying it up: takeoff, route, landing, feeling. Nights without a flight count too.
• Don't set extra alarms or cut your nights short for the sake of a dream theme.

If flights keep turning into nightmares, with falling or being chased, and those dreams are wrecking your sleep or leaving you anxious during the day, talk to your doctor. Our guide to nightmares also covers ways to calm them.