The bottom drops out of your dreams, you start to sink and there's nothing to hold on to. You're falling, falling, falling. Especially from a great height, the sensation can be terrifying. Or, it might be quite an exciting thrill. Even a short fall can be such a surprise that you jerk awake.

I suspect that loss of equilibrium became a critical problem for us, as a species, when we started to walk upright. Some say that fear of falling is a remnant of those times long past when remaining high in the trees was necessary for our survival. We do seem to have a well-developed awareness of the end of the bed, so that we don't tip over its edge every night. But that could be learned behavior since infants and toddlers sleep surrounded by barriers so they won't roll onto the floor. At its best, fear of falling serves as a very useful system, warning us about lack of balance in waking life. But if we take that fear into sleep, it can be detrimental to our desire to fly.

A falling dream can, of course, be put through the interpretation mill to find symbolic significance. But some falling dreams have no pictures attached! I think this is a case where it would be advantageous to start, not with the imagery, but with the feeling. After doing reality checks on falling dreams, I've concluded that I really can't appreciate the "meaning" of a particular falling dream unless I first track down whatever stimulated the sensation.

Falling dreams can be due to a replay of a vivid feeling that occurred during the day. Because of the sharp sensations involved, the intensity might not dissipate by the time we go to sleep. It might be a sensation occurring while we sleep. Or it can be anticipatory or precognitive of a possible event to come.

Replay of An Actual Fall

Biking, climbing, equestrian and aerial sports have quite intense feelings attached to them. Your falling sensation might occur if, during the day, you tumble off your mountain bike when it slips on some loose gravel. The experience is embedded in your body just like those pebbles are embedded in your knees.

In some cases, the memory of an actual fall can be so vivid that, when the experience is called up again, even the sensations come along for a ride. You fell down the stairs when you were younger. Today, when you find yourself teetering at the top of the stairway, your warning system turns on with a vengeance and doesn't turn off before bedtime.

Sometimes it's easy to link your dream with the fall, or its sensational memory, because the previous day's experience is so vivid. But don't forget the familiar sinking sensations of controlled falls. Did you ride an escalator or elevator yesterday? The fall or its recall doesn't have to impress your conscious mind much. It can be a peripheral event that is repressed or a subliminal event that is not fully recognized. If your attention is directed elsewhere when you quickly recover from a minor stumble, the tactile sensation of falling and your emotional reaction to it might not be allowed full expression. Until you go to sleep.

Pay attention to literal falling sensations during the course of the day. Process falling sensations by allowing yourself full memory of them just prior to sleep, then letting them dissipate.

Drawing by Suzanna Hart

Replay of Feeling Due To Loss of Control

If you have an empathetic personality, you experience whatever feelings would occur if you were in someone else's place. Whether you watch the movies on TV, read a book, create imaginary tragedies in your mind or listen to a lecture on a distressing topic, you can conjure up the feelings that accompany the story.

But most feelings of falling are your own. A teenager dreamt repeatedly that her car had no brakes. She went over a cliff and started to fall. She associated the dream with her new drug habit. This was an emotional reaction to a real experience, but one that had a sensation attached to it. Where biochemistry is involved, loss of balance can be linked with feelings of vertigo.

One woman had falling dreams after her husband received a promotion. He was on the way up, but she didn't have the same feeling of security about the situation. Quite literally, she "felt" the lack of the familiar sense of bonding, not as a concept, but as a sensation of being set adrift. A teenager with a Catholic background had a series of falling dreams after she started sleeping with her boyfriend. Her conscience bothered her and she felt uneasy. She was on her own, without the familiar "moral support." When you're stripped of defenses or secure structure, you really can "feel" like there's nothing to hold you up.

Often, such loss of self-control is linked with a sinking feeling. For the child whose parents were in the throes of separation, the sinking sensation came from feeling rejected. Another boy dreamt of falling down the school stairs the night after he presented a poor report card to his parents. His sinking feeling was guilt over past failings plus concurrent loss of parental love and approval. The sinking feeling can also be associated with loss of confidence, loss of status or fame, social mishaps, failure to complete goals, financial and property loss and loss of either faith or inflated pomposity.

Another woman dreamt she was entering her psychotherapist's office. As she stepped inside, a trap door opened and she was suddenly falling down into the sewers of Paris. When awake, she described the trap door as a kind of ambush carefully planned by another person, which put the victim in a completely different place. These ideas described her feelings about her analyst and the type of work he was having her do. She wanted to have a companion and guide to the dream underworld, rather than a person who would ambush her and take her, without her consent, into scary places, with no assurance of safety or security.

Play with the intensity of emotions and sensations by allowing them to flow, then stopping, then starting once again. A movie house is a good place to practice being enspelled by the emotions of the story, then pulling out of the spell to look around the theater, then allowing yourself to be drawn into the drama once again. Practice balance like children do. Walk a straight line on a sidewalk crack, fall backward into your bed, roll down a grassy slope or splash into a waterhole.

Concurrent Sensations

Illness, liquor, prescription drugs or changes in diet can induce interior falling sensations while you slumber. You might react to a dip in blood pressure, a glitch in the brain, the movement of fluid in the middle ear or a vague awareness of breathing. Relaxation followed by quick release of muscular tension, a downpour of previously repressed emotions or an orgasm, especially just prior to sleep, can provoke a falling dream.

A subliminal sense of external physical movement or lack of gravity can result in dream falls, too. My husband had a falling dream and awoke to find his feet dangling over the end of the mattress. I had a falling dream during an earthquake.

When he was a boy, a dreamer was sleeping in a bunkbed when he had a falling dream that ended with him bouncing off the ground. He awoke to find it coming true. He reacted so vigorously to the dream fall that he hit the bottom of his brother's upper bunk.

Shift biochemistry and bedtime habits. Re-imagine your falling dream with a new ending. Let yourself go and hit the earth. Convert falling into a delicious flying dream. Fly faster, slower, lower, higher.

Par For The Course

Feelings of falling may occur while you're abruptly shifting your state of consciousness. Don't be surprised if you experience these sorts of sensations -- many people do. It's just a bump on the journey. A quick switch from a lucid dream to the waking state can jolt you. So can a surprising image that flies towards you while you're watching the hypnogogic theater. You can come back from an out-of-body experience and land with a thump. The myoclonic jerk can occur as you sink into slumber. After all, it's called "falling" asleep!

Induce lucidity. Change your negative mindset. Think of falling not as a problem, but as ride in your inner amusement park. Cultivate a sense of humor.

Worries and Warnings

To fear criticism or failure or loss of status can invoke a sinking sensation. Your job is in jeopardy or your marriage is in trouble. Because you had a bad experience in the past, you have little confidence in the future and the anxiety churns up similar falling sensations. The worry can also be due to the fear of flying in an actual airplane or fear of falling down an actual ladder or cliff. Sometimes you'll acknowledge such feelings; sometimes not. Either way, your body feels it.

Dreamworker Ann Faraday dreamt of falling off the balcony of her new apartment. After she woke, she examined the guardrails and found them rickety and in need of repair. She'd seen the guardrails the previous day, but had been too preoccupied to notice their condition. In this case, the visual fact and the possible consequence registered on the back of her mind and was reintroduced in a dream.

Prevent imbalance by being proactive. Fix your tires, buy new shoes, get new glasses, repair your home environment. Look outward instead of inward. Imagine rescuing others who are falling. Make it less about you.

Psychic Resonance

Space shuttle tragedies and all manner of airplane disasters have been dreamt ahead of time; that is, the dreams were precognitive. Most of these were clairvoyant views, with the dreamer as an observer watching the events from the ground. I also believe it's possible to dream telepathically, from the point of view of the terrified victim.

However, not all psi dreams are negative. I dreamt of a tandem hang gliding flight several years before it came true. So did my sister, who was responding to an article I wrote about that flying adventure.

When I was younger, I had repeating dreams of being a passenger in a car that would slide across the road and fall off a cliff. That was the sensation I felt whenever my parents went out of control. Nobody at the wheel.

So, I wasn't surprised when, later in life, I dreamt of sliding across 5 lanes of highway. However, this occurred after I'd been doing quite of bit of psychological work to change parental programming. I'm happy to say that the dream had nothing to do with past family problems. Instead, the next day, as I was driving home, a freak storm came up with plenty of driving wind and torrents of water flooding the road. Because I wanted to get home quickly, I remained in the fast lane until I rounded a corner and came upon a place where converging traffic temporarily created 5 lanes of highway. The memory of the dream came rushing back. Immediately, I put on my blinkers and, as soon as it was safe, moved over to the right side of the road. And slowed down.

I consider this to be a precognitive dream. No, it didn't come true. Thank goodness. I didn't slide off the road, because I acted to change my future and control the drift. I was at the wheel of my fate.

Use protective psi measures. Incubate a new dream in which you'll face your fears.

References

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Delaney, Gayle. In Your Dreams. NY: HarperCollins, 1997.

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