Dreams About Flying: What 4,000 Years of Human Records Tell Us

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Flying dreams have been recorded in every human society that has kept written records of dreams — and in many that haven’t. This is not a modern neurological curiosity or a cultural metaphor that traveled with trade routes. The sensation of rising, hovering, and moving through air without mechanical assistance appears in Egyptian papyri, Greek oneirocritical literature, Tibetan monastic texts, Indigenous Australian oral traditions, and contemporary sleep laboratory logs. What follows is an attempt to survey that record honestly, without imposing a single explanatory framework onto material that resists reduction.

The Statistical Baseline: How Common Are Flying Dreams?

Flying dreams rank consistently among the five most frequently reported dream types across large-scale survey research. The 1998 survey by Waterman, Ellenbroek, and Fiolet, drawing on a Dutch sample of over 1,000 participants, found that 77% of respondents reported having experienced at least one flying dream in their lifetime. The figure has been replicated in different forms across German, American, and Japanese samples, with lifetime prevalence estimates ranging from 65% to 80% depending on methodology.

For comparison, the other four consistently top-ranked dream types — being chased, falling, teeth falling out, and arriving unprepared for an examination — all share this universal distribution. Researchers studying cross-cultural dream content, notably the work of G. William Domhoff and the empirical survey archived at DreamBank.net, have noted that flying dreams show relatively low cultural variation in their reported phenomenology: the dreamer is typically the agent of flight, not a passenger; the experience is most often described as pleasurable; and the dreamer usually retains some awareness of the unusual nature of what is happening.

That last detail — the self-aware quality of many flying dreams — has specific significance for consciousness research, addressed below.

The Ancient Record

Egyptian Dream Papyri

The Chester Beatty Papyrus III (c. 1350–1200 BCE), housed in the British Museum, contains the earliest substantial written dream catalog in existence. Compiled during the Ramesside Period, it lists dreams and their interpretations according to Egyptian oneirocritic tradition. Flight appears as a recurrent motif, though its significance in Egyptian interpretation is more situational than categorical: a dream of flying over a city may signify something quite different from a dream of flying low over water or ascending toward the sun.

The Egyptian concept of the ba — the aspect of a person that modern translators sometimes render as “soul” but which is better understood as a person’s mobile, individuated life-force — was typically depicted as a human-headed bird. The ba was understood to travel during sleep, and dream flight was read within this framework not as wish-fulfillment but as a literal description of what the ba was doing while the body rested. This is a crucial distinction from many modern interpretive frameworks: the ancient Egyptian record does not ask what a flying dream means so much as what the flying entity is.

The Demotic Dream Book, a later papyrus from the Roman period, expands the catalog and shows some Greek influence, but maintains this emphasis on dream flight as ontological event rather than symbol.

Aristotle’s Observations in De Somniis

Writing in the 4th century BCE, Aristotle approached dreams from a naturalistic rather than divine framework — a remarkable departure from the dominant Greek tradition of seeking prophetic content in dreams. In De Somniis (“On Dreams”), he proposed that dreams arise from residual sensory impressions that persist after waking experience, agitated during sleep by the movement of blood.

Aristotle does not provide an extended analysis of flying dreams specifically, but his framework prefigures modern sensory-activation theories in important ways. He notes that during sleep, small bodily sensations can become greatly magnified — a slight warmth becoming a dream of fire, a mild dizziness becoming a dream of extreme height or movement. His student Theophrastus later elaborated on this idea in ways that scholars have connected to vestibular activation during sleep, discussed in the neuroscience section below.

What Aristotle does note explicitly is that dreamers sometimes recognize, during a dream, that they are dreaming — particularly when something impossible is occurring. This is an early observation of what we would now call lucid dreaming, and the impossible event he uses as an example involves movement that violates normal bodily constraints — an observation that fits well with the phenomenology of flying dreams.

Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga: Milam

Within the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions of Tibet, dream practice — milam — constitutes one of the Six Yogas of Naropa, a set of advanced contemplative practices transmitted through the lineage of the Indian mahasiddha Naropa (956–1040 CE) and systematized by Marpa the Translator and Milarepa. The practices were not developed as therapeutic tools for processing dream content; they were developed as methods for training consciousness toward recognition of the nature of mind.

Flying in the context of Tibetan dream yoga carries a specific technical significance. Practitioners are instructed to use dreams in which they fly as recognition triggers — the unusual quality of the experience should prompt the dreamer to ask: “Is this a dream?” This inquiry, if successful, produces what Tibetan teachers call “recognizing the dream as dream,” which is the prerequisite for advanced dream yoga practice.

The 14th-century Nyingma master Longchenpa, in his treatise Treasury of the Dharmadhatu, describes the development of dream clarity in stages, noting that flight experiences in dreams are often among the first signs that a practitioner’s dream practice is developing stability. This is consistent with the modern finding that flying dreams are the most common triggering event for spontaneous lucid dreaming in non-practitioner populations.

Importantly, Tibetan dream yoga does not interpret flying dreams as symbols of freedom, ambition, or spiritual elevation in any simple allegorical sense. The flying dream is significant for its epistemic quality — the question it forces — not for its content.

Indigenous Australian Dreamtime and Flight

The term “Dreamtime” is a translation convenience that inadequately captures the Yolŋu concept of Djanggawul or the Aranda concept of Alcheringa — the foundational ontological dimension in which Ancestral Beings moved across the land and established the patterns of existence. The relationship between night-dreaming (ngulaig in Yolŋu Matha) and the Dreaming is complex and has been frequently misrepresented in popular accounts.

Within specific ceremonial and narrative traditions, Ancestral Beings move between sky and earth — a mode of travel that is sometimes described using the same vocabulary as flying. The Brolga and various eagle-related Ancestral figures carry specific narrative traditions about movement between terrestrial and aerial realms. Scholarly documentation of these traditions is constrained by the fact that much of the relevant knowledge is restricted, held by specific custodians and not appropriate for general publication.

What researchers including Deborah Bird Rose (Nourishing Terrains, 1996) and Fred Myers (Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, 1986) have documented is that the boundary between dreaming, country, and Ancestral presence operates differently from Western assumptions about dream as private interior experience. Flight in this context is less a personal psychological event than a relational one — movement between registers of country and time.

Cross-Cultural Survey: Recorded Interpretive Frameworks

• Ancient Egypt (Ramesside Period): Flight as ba travel — the mobile aspect of the person moving through non-physical space. Not primarily symbolic; understood as literal activity of a real entity.
• Classical Greece (Oneirocritical tradition): Artemidorus (Oneirocritica, c. 2nd century CE) classifies flying dreams by altitude, direction, and ease of flight. High, effortless flight over familiar landscapes is generally favorable; flight that is labored, low, or toward unknown territory requires closer interpretation based on the dreamer’s life circumstances.
• Medieval Islamic Dream Interpretation: Ibn Sirin’s Tabir al-Ru’ya (8th–9th century CE) treats flight as potentially indicating travel, rise in social standing, or spiritual elevation, but insists on contextual reading — the same flying dream can bear opposite significance depending on whether the dreamer lands safely or falls.
• Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism: Flying as a recognition trigger for lucid dream practice; significant for its epistemic rather than narrative content.
• European Folklore (Medieval–Early Modern): Flying dreams frequently interpreted through the framework of night-travel beliefs, including the corpus of material around the striga, the Wild Hunt, and Sabbath-flight narratives. Carlo Ginzburg’s Night Battles and Ecstasies document how flight experiences in dreams became entangled with persecution frameworks during the witch-trial period.
• Chinese Classical Tradition (Zhānmèng): Flying in the Duke of Zhou dream dictionary tradition is read contextually. Rising effortlessly suggests advancement; being unable to sustain altitude suggests obstacles. The Liezi includes philosophical reflection on flight dreams as evidence of the mind’s freedom from bodily constraint.
• Dreaming of Being Lost: Disorientation, Identity, and the Unmapped Interior

The Neuroscience of Flying Dreams: Vestibular Activation and REM

Modern sleep laboratory research has produced a reasonably detailed picture of the physiological conditions that correlate with flying dreams, though causation remains contested.

The vestibular system — the inner-ear apparatus responsible for balance, spatial orientation, and the sense of movement — continues to receive and process signals during sleep. Several lines of evidence suggest that flying dreams involve atypical activation of vestibular processing during REM sleep. A 2004 paper by Voss, Holzmann, Tuin, and Hobson in the journal Sleep notes that the vestibular cortex shows activation patterns during REM sleep that differ from waking-state vestibular processing, and that subjective reports of movement, floating, and flight cluster in the periods of highest REM intensity.

The motor paralysis characteristic of REM sleep — the system that prevents dreamers from physically acting out movements — may paradoxically contribute to the flying dream experience. With the feedback loop between motor command and bodily execution interrupted, the brain’s sense of self-movement becomes decoupled from proprioceptive reality. A dreamer who “decides” to jump upward in a dream receives no gravitational correction, which the dreaming brain may resolve by generating the sensation of continued ascent.

Research by Hobson and McCarley on the activation-synthesis model of dreaming proposed that dreams are partially constructed from the brain’s attempt to make narrative sense of random neural activation — including vestibular activation. In this framework, the sensation of flying is not the dreaming brain trying to communicate something; it is the dreaming brain explaining an unusual somatic signal to itself using available imagery.

This does not, of course, exhaust what is interesting about flying dreams. The explanation of the mechanism by which they arise does not settle questions about their psychological significance, their role in consciousness research, or their cross-cultural constancy.

Flying Dreams and Lucid Dreaming

The connection between flying dreams and lucid dreaming — the state of knowing one is dreaming while the dream continues — is one of the most consistently replicated findings in dream research. Survey studies across multiple decades find that flying is the most commonly reported activity in confirmed lucid dreams, and that the occurrence of a flying dream is, for many people, the event that first prompts the recognition that they are dreaming.

Stephen LaBerge’s research at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory, conducted through the 1980s and 1990s using pre-arranged eye-movement signals to confirm lucidity from within the dream state, documented flying as a near-universal element of lucid dream reports. LaBerge proposed that the sensory peculiarity of flight — impossible in waking life, available without effort in dreams — makes it a natural trigger for what he called “state testing”: the spontaneous comparison of current experience against the expected properties of waking reality.

From the consciousness-research perspective, flying dreams are interesting precisely because they seem to be a naturally-occurring induction of a metacognitive state. The dreamer who thinks “I am flying — therefore this must be a dream” has, in that moment, become aware of the constructed nature of their experience. This is not trivial; most of the time, people accept the reality of their experience without examining its construction. The flying dream, by presenting something categorically impossible, creates a crack through which awareness can enter.

A Researcher’s Note: What the Record Actually Shows

Four thousand years of recorded flying dreams converge on a small number of consistent observations that survive translation across radically different cultural frameworks:

First, the experience is predominantly pleasurable — not universally, but with sufficient consistency that it has been noted across Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, and modern Western sources. This is unlike most other universally-reported dream types, which tend to be anxiety-laden.

Second, the dreamer is typically the agent of flight, not a passive passenger. The dreamer moves under their own power or intention, which distinguishes flying dreams from dreams of being carried or transported.

Third, the experience tends to produce a particular kind of attention — awareness of the unusualness of what is happening. This is why flying dreams are disproportionately represented in reports of lucid dreaming, and why they appear as recognition triggers in contemplative practice traditions that are otherwise quite different from each other.

What the four-thousand-year record cannot tell us — and this is worth stating plainly — is what any individual flying dream means for the person who dreamed it. The interpretive frameworks surveyed here are products of their cultural contexts: the Egyptian reading assumes a ba, the Tibetan reading assumes the value of lucid recognition, the Aristotelian reading assumes a somatogenic origin. None of these frameworks is wrong exactly; all of them are partial. The dream itself predates all of them and will outlast all of them.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Aristotle. De Somniis (On Dreams). Trans. J.I. Beare. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Artemidorus of Daldis. Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams). Trans. Robert J. White. Noyes Press, 1975.
• Domhoff, G. William. The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis. American Psychological Association, 2003.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Hobson, J. Allan, and Robert W. McCarley. “The Brain as a Dream-State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process.” American Journal of Psychiatry 134.12 (1977): 1335–1348.
• LaBerge, Stephen. Lucid Dreaming. Ballantine Books, 1985.
• Longchenpa. Treasury of the Dharmadhatu. Trans. Tulku Thondup. Shambhala, 1989.
• Naropa. The Six Yogas of Naropa. Trans. Glenn Mullin. Snow Lion Publications, 1996.
• Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.
• Voss, Ursula, et al. “Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming.” Sleep 32.9 (2009): 1191–1200.
• Waterman, Derk, et al. “Dream Experiences and Ego-Disturbances.” Dreaming 8.4 (1998): 211–222.
• Wente, Edward F. “Mysticism in Pharaonic Egypt?” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 41.3 (1982): 161–179.

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