As a young man, I loved the songs delivered by Paul Simon (with and without his partner, Art Garfunkel). One of my favorite songs contained the phrase “I dreamed I was Flying.” I especially resonated with this phrase because I was often flying in my dreams. I simply had to lift up off the ground and would soar around the Mid-West home where I lived during my late childhood. In the Fall, I could glide over trees of beautiful Autumnal colors. In the Spring, I loved to linger above the gardens to be found in our city park.
There was nothing quite as wonderful as gliding by my neighbor’s home or even taking flight in my living room or school room. These were some of my favorite dreams. I would fall asleep hoping for flight rather than fright. I could escape from the monsters that stalked around my bedroom at night and appeared in my dreams. I could soar away or even swoop down to give the monster a kick. I would then swoop away.
Sexuality and Flying
We all know that flying represents repressed sexuality. This is what books about dreams tells us. Obviously, I was an adolescent with budding sexual desires and could only express these desires in a disguised manner through the act of flying. As an American boy raised in a law-abiding family during the 1940s, I was not allowed to have sex with some “loose” young woman – or even have “dirty thoughts” about sexual encounters. So “I dreamed I was flying” rather than dreaming I was making love to someone (however this was supposed to occur since I was not supposed to read about “these things” until I was older). Clearly, I was experiencing sexual arousal during flight. Furthermore, the release of tension when lifting off the ground is analogist to experiencing an orgasm. So, I was getting it all wrong. First, the orgasm and then the arousal!
As an adult, I no longer dreamed of flying. Was this because I was finally actually making love to someone about whom I cared. Or was it simply because sexuality was now “OK” to think about and enact. That which is no longer forbidden becomes the focus of one’s waking life rather than one’s life during a dream. This would seem to be the nature of dreaming—at least from what might be considered a “psycho-dynamic” perspective as first introduced by Sigmund Freud and later expanded by his acolytes.
