Of all the typical dreams, flying is the one people tend to wish would come back. In a 2003 survey of 1,181 Canadian university students, 48.3% said they had dreamed of flying or soaring through the air. It is also one of the themes with a clear difference between the sexes: 58.1% of men against 44.4% of women.

The folk reading. For once the dream books are cheerful. Felix Fontaine's Golden Wheel Dream-book (1862) calls flying "a very excellent omen": a lover will be true, and a married dreamer will have many happy children. Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, offered a different origin. He traced flying and falling dreams to childhood, to the games in which an adult runs a child across the room with arms outstretched or swings it high, and he also gave many flying dreams a sexual reading. Freud also reports that an earlier writer, Strümpell, had blamed the rise and fall of the lungs during sleep.

What research says. Not much about meaning, and it is honest to say so. The Sleep Foundation notes that research in the 1970s linked flying dreams with a desire for freedom, but a 2004 study of typical dreams concluded that what these themes mean, and how they connect to waking life, had not yet been answered. What is clear is that flying is a favourite of lucid dreamers, people who realise they are dreaming and can sometimes steer the dream. The Sleep Foundation says about 55% of people have had at least one lucid dream.

Flying dreams are rarely distressing. But if dreams of any kind are frequent, upsetting or getting in the way of sleep, talk to a doctor or a mental-health professional. This page is educational and is not a diagnosis.