Falling

Falling is among the most commonly reported dreams across all cultures. Folk tradition holds, incorrectly, that dying in a falling dream will cause the dreamer to die in sleep; in fact, many dreamers wake just before impact with the famous hypnic jerk. Jungian analysis reads falling as the ego losing support — sometimes grievously (loss of a job, a relationship, an identity), sometimes generatively (a surrender into depths the waking self has been resisting). Notice what you fall from, what you fall toward, and whether there is anyone to catch you. A fall into water is usually a fall into feeling; into darkness, into the unconscious; into earth, into embodiment. Dreams of endless, weightless falling often accompany periods of genuine transition where the old ground has gone.