Dreams About Falling: Here’s All You Need To Know

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🌙 Written by Stefan Zugor, international lucid dreaming expert and teacher. Learn how to lucid dream in 7 days or less.

A very common dream is to be falling through the air, and this normally instills feelings of fear, panic, and terror as you frantically try to stop falling towards the ground.

It’s such a common dream that we felt it needed an entire post written about it, to help you understand why you might be having this type of dream, what the different types of falling dreams mean, and also how to stop having these dreams.

Before we go any further, here are a few quick links just to help you. If you don’t know what Lucid Dreaming is, read our Introduction to Lucid Dreaming.

What Is A Falling Dream?

A falling dream is where you find yourself tumbling through the air, usually from the top of a cliff, or most commonly, a skyscraper.

It can actually be difficult to remember how you started falling or what you fell from in this type of dream, because often you become aware of the fact you’re falling halfway through the free fall. This makes it almost impossible to work out why you fell.

Falling in a dream can be scary

If you wake up in the morning, or in the middle of the night if it really disturbed you, then you may find you remember just falling, and maybe seeing things around you rushing past you at eye level. This is the most common description of a falling dream..

Just becoming aware halfway through falling and not being able to stop it, just plummeting to your death, or, waking up when you hit the ground.

Every person will experience a falling dream about 5 times in their life on average.

This makes it a very common dream, and some people experience them a lot more than 5 times in their life. For some people, the nightmare of falling through the air is actually a recurring dream, and they experience it most nights, making healthy sleep difficult.

This can be linked to insomnia, and unhealthy sleep patterns. For now, let’s look at what falling dreams are trying to tell you..

What Do Falling Dreams Mean?

Dreaming about this type of thing could mean a number of things, so to work out what they mean we need to look at the type of falling dream.

The more you know about the dream and the symbols and dream signs, the more accurately you can work out what it means, but generally speaking a falling dream means a lack of control, or a perceived lack of control in your life or one or more elements of it.

There are many different types of falling dreams, and it’s important to work out which one you’re having. There are several different types of dreams about falling and each one means something slightly different, it all depends on the action of falling and what you’re around, who pushed you, where you’re falling etc.. let’s explore it a bit more..

People falling with you? People Pushing You?

Are there people falling with you? Or maybe some other people are pushing you in the dream. If you are falling with people, for example, family or friends it could show that you are losing control and feel like the people you’re falling with are in the same situation.

It could mean you feel the people with you are in the same situation, for example maybe you and your co workers feel helpless in the work environment.

Someone Pushed you?

The person who pushed you is likely to be the person in your life that you feel is taking control away from you. For example, if you’re pushed by your boss, this suggests that you feel your boss is taking your control away from you and making you feel helpless. It could mean this temporarily, this is important to remember.

Just because someone, your boss for example, pushes you, it doesn’t always mean you think he/she ALWAYS takes control away from you, it could just be your feeling on that particular day/night. It’s important to consider that dreams are very subjective, and their meanings vary enormously from person to person.

You just lost your balance and fell..

Losing your balance and falling is an easy one.

This suggests that the problem is within you. You feel like you’re not confident or grounded enough in your own life and therefore you should probably work on this in waking life. If you’re not confident in your waking life then your brain could be relaying this back to you in a falling dream by making you lose your balance.

This is interesting because dreams show us our ‘residual self image’ just like in teh Matrix, where Neo is bald and in rags, then he enters the dream or the Matrix and is wearing a suit with perfectly styled hair. Our brains store an image of what we think we look like.

This residual self image also stores our perceived character, skills and abilities. The way you think you are is projected back in a dream, It’s all in your mind.

This is why Lucid Dreaming can really improve your waking confidence and skills because it requires you to believe you can do more than you’re used to. Anyway back to the falling dreams, the fact that you’re losing balance means your residual self image is showing you that you’re not confident, and that you don’t trust yourself enough.

Holding onto something and then falling

This is probably the most serious type of falling nightmare. This is also almost always the most scary and vivid. The act of desperately holding on to something, a ledge, rail, cliff face etc and then losing grip and falling.

It’s a serious dream and it’s saying something to you which you must take note of. It suggests that you’re trying your best to fix something even though you have no control over it.

This is a dangerous type of fear, because if you have no control over something, there’s no reason to stress about it. You should always do your best, and when you can do no more, don’t stress about it. When it’s beyond your control, it’s beyond your control. This type of dream shows that you are worrying about something which you can’t change.

Try meditating and focusing on your life as it is. See what is there in your life and then when you realise there are some things that you have no control over then you won’t need to worry about them any more.

There will be more on this in a minute, as falling dreams can be easily stopped and changed into flying dreams!

Calling out for help as you’re falling

This suggests that you need people in your life to support and help you, and that you could have a slight dependency on others to support and help you through life. This could also mean that you need to work on becoming more independent and moving forward with what you want in life, and not depending so much on others.

How To Stop Having Falling Dreams

No one really wants to dream about plummeting to their deaths, unless you’re a skydiver and you like the sensation of falling at terminal velocity.

It is really exhilarating, but if you’re not used to it or you don’t want it, we can help you stop having these types of dreams.

There are a couple of different approaches you could take to this, or you could do everything at the same time, it’s up to you. To stop having dreams about falling, you could do one or more of the following.

Adopt a really healthy sleep pattern

This is important for correcting nightmares and getting positive dreams about the things you want to experience. Make sure you go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day.

That’s sleep patterns in a nutshell, consistency. As long as you wake up at exactly the same time every day, your body will make sure you fall asleep at the right time the night before.

Learn and perfect your Lucid Dreaming techniques

If you’re really good at controlling your dreams, then falling dreams won’t be a problem. Being Lucid allows you to control your dream and guide it in any direction you wish.

Learning to Lucid Dream will help you remove your nightmares and dreams about falling.

Dreams about falling usually indicate a loss of control or a perceived loss of control. This means in order to stop having falling dreams you should either learn to stop worrying about things you have no control over, or become so good at Lucid Dreaming that you can just turn it into a flying dream.

Remember that if you have a dream that keeps occurring, you can use that as a reality check/dream sign and use it to trigger for lucidity. Happy Dreaming!