Why do we dream of flying? I don’t mean the get-in-an-airplane kind, where they make you take off your shoes and search you for toenail clippers. I mean like Daedalus and Icarus, soaring majestically through the air, gliding and swooping and skimming the treetops on our way to alighting down softly in a sun-dappled meadow. I mean that kind of flying.
There never was a time, as far as I can figure out, when our ancestors had the experience of flight. Perhaps we are playing out a deep-buried memory of our ape forebears swinging through the trees. Or perhaps it is just a trick of the inner ear. What I do know is that from time to time I get flying dreams – often on a night when I’ve had a Tequila drink, oddly enough. In my flying dreams I am generally doing my majestic swooping and gliding in the neighborhood around my parents’ house – where I lived when I was growing up from around the age of eight.
There is never any sense of danger. In my dream I’ll be walking along and then suddenly it will occur to me that it would be a lot easier just to lift up my feet and skim along above the ground. Sometimes I wonder whether my transition to flight will unnerve passers by, but nobody ever seems to mind. Pretty soon I’m high in the air, and that’s when the fun starts. It always fascinates me, every time, that flying toward houses and buildings holds no danger at all. As I near a building, I automatically just rise up and clear it, just as easy as stepping over a log. Clearly I know what I’m doing!
I’m guessing that some of the above will seem familiar to you. Many people have told me that they have had such dreams, although I suspect everyone’s experience of dream-flying is unique. And it is certainly an experience that is well represented in the popular culture. It can show up anywhere from Mary Poppins to Brazil (both fantasies by Americans about the Brits, interestingly enough). Where does this come from, this virtual skill? And why do so many people have their own version of it? In what universe that we all seem to share, what universe not of this physical world, do we fly?
I think man has always looked a birds and it seemed like a really fast, cool way to travel. Plus, since we can’t do it, we want to.
I’ve never dreamt I could fly. I’ve only dreamt of falling. 🙁
leave it to me to concoct a mundane explanation.
we fly in our dreams because our brains need to explain how we are simultaneously upright (in our thoughts) and there is no pressure on our feet (because we are lying down in bed).
Excuse my Freudian interpretation, but last I read, flying in one’s dreams represents sexual desire, passion, etc., etc., etc., Need i say More?
what Andy said it might be wright but its also a part of our brain that activates dreams when in subconscious before we go to sleep we see something or do something or wish for something so that could have a connection with the flying dreams