What does it mean to dream about flying?
A flying dream usually pictures freedom, confidence, and the wish to rise above what hems you in.
Four ways to read it
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream.
Freud
Freud read flying as a buoyant, often erotically tinged dream of elation and release, the body lifted free. The pleasure of the rise is the wish at work.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung flying images liberation and a rising above limits, with a caution: floating too high can mean inflation, a loss of contact with the ground of ordinary life. Freedom and unmooring are close together.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Flying is among the most pleasurable common dreams and usually pictures freedom, confidence, and control. It tends to surface when the dreamer feels capable and unburdened, or wishes to rise above a situation that hems them in.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
To fly in myth is to share the condition of gods and souls: winged deities and messengers, the soul rising as a bird, the spirit-flight of the shaman. The lift into the air touches the realm beyond the everyday.
Bulfinch; Frazer.For writers
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out.
In literature
Barrie makes flight in Peter Pan conditional on a state of mind rather than on any mechanism, and children lose the ability as they grow, which is the sharpest observation anyone has made about the motif. The older folk tradition of night flight, the witch travelling while her body stays behind, treats it as something borrowed rather than owned. Both agree that flight in a story is a loan, never a possession.
Barrie, Peter Pan (1911), public domain; the European night-flight folk tradition.What it does in a story
Flight is freedom shown rather than described, and it is one of the few images that can convey release without a character explaining what they have been released from. Its narrative cost is that it must eventually end, and the ending is where the meaning is.
Genre conventions
Fantasy makes it literal and gives it rules, since unbounded flight destroys tension. Magical realism keeps it unexplained and unremarked, which is where its strongest effects live. Literary fiction usually confines it to dream or memory so the loss of it is available later.
How to subvert it
The expected feeling is joy. Try dread instead: a character who can fly and does not want to, or who finds the height a responsibility rather than a release. Making the freedom unwanted is a fast way to say something about a person that would take pages otherwise.
Try this
Write a character flying who is thinking about something entirely mundane throughout. Let the ordinary thought sit unbroken against the extraordinary action and do not have them marvel once.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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