What are flying dreams about?

You can gain insight from thinking about any dream, no matter how strange. Only you, as the dreamer, have final say on what your dream may or may not mean. Each dream is unique.

The DreamWell dictionary provides information on how each dream symbol appears in dreams in general. Finding how experience flying in dreams can be a key to understanding its meaning.

Our emotions in dreams can help us understand its meaning. Pay attention to how you felt in the dream. Pay attention to how you feel about flying in dreams. See how you feel about flying now, in your waking life.

Flying is a common dream theme and has a variety of meanings. The most common are related to flying as an expression of “going somewhere” in your life. It expresses confidence and enthusiasm, or just pure happiness. It can show achievement and success. It’s a physical representation of a personal situation.

The symbolism of flying depends heavily on whether you fly under your own power or in a plane. Flying under your own power is often associated with ability to “soar” in your personal life and development. These flying dreams are common in people who are discovering their capabilities and developing their skills and intellect. Thoughts are sometimes said to soar, and intellect is associated with air, so flying under your own power can be a graphic way of representing the power of your mind.

Flying under your own power is associated with freedom. Like a bird, you are free. You can come and go as you please.

The symbolism of flying in a plane is discussed at length in the Airplane entry. But, quickly, the symbolism often relates to getting to a place you want to be in your life—a goal, ambition, aspiration, desire.

Flying is associated with “rising above” and gaining a broader perspective. See: Balloons

Flying can symbolize progress—personal progress, or just progress in general, such as toward getting a degree or reaching another sort of goal.

It can mean finding a way out of a tricky situation. When you fly away it means “goodbye.”

It can mean you wish to escape. See: Escaping

Flying is used to describe the feeling of being high on drugs, or just “in the zone” where nothing can stop you or hold you down. See: Floating

The flip side can be expressed through flying symbolism, too. If you are restricted you can dream about being unable to fly, or about trying to take flight but something stops you or shoots you down. You are not successful. You don’t have freedom. You are unable to rise above.

Inability to fly, or hindrance in flight, can symbolize limits that you place on yourself or that are placed on you. It can mean you’re having difficulty “taking off” or launching.

For example, a gay teenage female dreams about being trapped in a bird cage while seeing her love interest’s cellphone passing messages between that girl, who is a close friend, and a boy her friend likes. The bird cage symbolizes the dreamer’s sexuality limiting her. She can’t have what she wants, her love interest. See: Bird cages

A woman has a recurring dream about flying in which she launches into the air and feels exhilarated. However, how high she can fly is limited, as if she bumps into an invisible ceiling.

It’s tempting to interpret this dream as a metaphor for the “glass ceiling,” but it’s actually more personal than that. Really, it’s about accepting her own limits. Flying in this dream symbolizes her personal development. She is finding out that she has high capabilities. She can really soar and be successful. However, she is also finding out she has limits. They’re invisible in the sense that she doesn’t know she’s reached them till she’s actually there.

There is a saying, “The higher you fly, the more you must be grounded.” It means that the more success a person has, the more they need to stay in touch with everyday reality—especially important for highly intelligent individuals who might otherwise get lost in their heads. The psyche is a self-regulating and balancing system, and if any one part of it goes too far one direction, its complementary part will bring the person back to earth—sometimes with a rough landing! This female needs to learn how to ground herself more in everyday reality and in her body if she wants to expand her limits. See: Compensation

Distance in a dream can refer to emotional or personal distance, and in this sense, flying can be viewed as a means of quickly closing that distance. When traveling long distances, flying is the fastest mode of travel, which can symbolize the fastest means to get to a goal.

People who are afraid of flying or have concerns related to taking flights, such as how to handle small children on a plane, can dream about flying in connection with these issues. These are possible topics for dreams to explore through scenes of flying.

See also: Planes, Airports, Birds, Bird cages, Compensation, Embarking, Floating, Insects, Journeys, Rockets

This interpretation is from ""The Dream Interpretation Dictionary: Symbols, Signs, and Meanings" and is provided by J.M. DeBord aka "RadOwl". He is the author of several acclaimed books about dreaming, the host of The Dreams That Shape Us podcast, and is a moderator of r/Dreams, one of the largest dream sharing communities on the internet.