Back to a favourite topic - dream flying (and proving it)

I don't know why, but I have been remembering dreams more often lately, even though with the cooler weather I have been sleeping with less interruption than I usually have in summer. 

The levitating/flying dream has made a welcome return.   The only thing is, as I explained in two posts way back in 2006,  my variation of the dream usually involves great interest in, and satisfaction at, being able to prove it is real (such as by being videoed while off the ground, or having a sufficient number of witnesses that I think that, surely, they must be believed.)  My elation in the dream is not just with the pleasant sensation of being able to think my way into the air, but with the intellectual knowledge that this is revolutionary for science and humanity, and people will see it is real.

Of course, that then makes for a somewhat disappointing sensation on waking up into the more mundane world.

Anyhow, on the whole "why do we dream we can fly" issue, I see now that there was an article about that appeared in 2016 in Slate (and Atlas Obscura), and I'm pretty sure I had missed until now.  

It would seem that the dream is virtually universal (although I am still pretty sure there are people who claim never to have had it), and an interest in what it means, or what causes it, has been around a long time.  Some extracts:

Psychologist Dr. Rainer Schönhammer has compiled scientific flying-dream explanations going back to the early 19^th century. Many of the earliest guesses were physiological—1860s German psychologist Karl Scherner thought that the rising and falling of the chest inspired dream flight, while his peer J.E. Purkinje believed that the relaxation inherent in sleep makes dreamers feel like they’re floating. The more Freudian Paul Federn pinned it on nighttime erections, which, author Diedre Barret explains, he “viewed as an overcoming of gravity,” but this theory has since been discounted. More recent theories have focused instead on the brain stem and the inner ear, which controls balance.

Although he doesn’t knock the potential physiological causes of dream-flying, Dr. Michael Schredl, a psychologist with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, is more interested in what such dreams and such distinctions might say about the dreamer. “Flying dreams are a fascinating topic,” Schredl writes in an email. In a series of studies, Schredl has sought to connect the prevalence of flying dreams with particular personality traits or life choices. By compiling dream data gathered since 1956 and performing both broad and deep surveys of his own, he has come to a few zooming conclusions.

First of all—anecdotally at least—”persons with waking-life flying experiences dream more often about flying,” Schredl writes. Hang gliding instructors, for instance, often practice their professions in dreams, only without their equipment. And the fact that the frequency of flying dreams has picked up since the 1950s suggests that more real-life airplane trips equals more somni-flight. This would be consistent with the “continuity hypothesis” of dreams, a somewhat controversial theory that posits that our dream experiences are just weird remixes of our waking ones.

To dig deeper into these hypotheses, Schredl analyzed the 6,000-entry dreambank of one particular anonymous subject, who has kept a diary since 1984. Schredl found that although this subject had more airplane dreams after his first ever real-life transatlantic flight, more creative flying dreams weren’t affected. The subject sometimes flew with the help of a house, a magical juggling ball, or a unicycle, and he did so in order to illicitly cross borders and to impress a girl (“and he succeeded!,” the study makes sure to point out).

Airplane journeys, Schredl writes, may be less important than general happiness. A broader Schredl-helmed study shows that overall, people with more “positive emotional states” while awake tend to get to fly in their sleep, too.

It has just occurred to me while writing this post:  did flying dreams have much to do with belief in witchcraft, such that it would have been dangerous in those days for a woman to admit to having a flying dream?  

Googling that topic has led me to a 2009 article in Folklore on this very topic:  The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible.   Those with knowledge of a certain site* might be interested to use this citation to read it:   https://doi.org/10.1080/00155870802647833

It turns out that the Spanish Inquisition (as well as other European inquisitors) was (and were) very interested in the question of whether witches really could fly.  Seems that for the most part, they were were actually pretty skeptical that there was a physical reality to it.    

Interesting!

* Sci-Hub