DreamloreDream dictionary › Common dreams › Falling
What does it mean to dream about falling?
The dream of falling, often ending with a jolt awake, is one both Miller and Freud wrote about. Their words are below exactly as printed, so you can compare them with what happened in your dream.
What Miller wrote (1901)
To dream that you sustain a fall, and are much frightened, denotes that you will undergo some great struggle, but will eventually rise to honor and wealth; but if you are injured in the fall, you will encounter hardships and loss of friends.
Read the full entry for “Fall” →
To fall while flying, signifies your downfall. If you wake while falling, you will succeed in reinstating yourself.
Read the full entry for “Flying” →
What Freud wrote
Dreams of falling are most frequently characterised by fear. … We have not yet exhausted the infantile sources of the dream of falling; nearly all children have fallen occasionally, and then been picked up and fondled; if they fell out of bed at night, they were picked up by their nurse and taken into her bed.
I therefore have good reason for rejecting the explanation that the condition of our dermal sensations during sleep, the sensations caused by the movements of the lungs, and the like, give rise to dreams of flying and falling.
Your dream is not a dictionary entry
A dream about falling comes with a place, other people and a feeling, and the old books read the same image very differently depending on those details. Dreamlore takes your whole dream, spoken or typed, finds the passages that fit it in Miller and Freud, quotes them word for word, and leaves you one question to reflect on. The journal stays on your phone.
Read your own dream in DreamloreFull dictionary entries
Questions
What does it mean to dream about falling?
Miller's 1901 dictionary reads a frightening fall as a great struggle followed by a rise, and an injury in the fall as hardship. Freud noted that falling dreams are most often marked by fear, rejected the idea that they are simply caused by bodily sensations in sleep, and traced some of them to childhood memories of falling and being picked up. Neither book can say what your dream means; they are material for reflection.
Where do these quotes come from?
They are quoted verbatim from public-domain books: Gustavus Hindman Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1901) and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (translated by A. A. Brill, 1913). Each quote on this page is checked word for word against the source text before the page is served, the same check the Dreamlore app runs on every quote it shows.
Other common dreams
Dream about teeth falling outDream about snakesDream about being chasedDream about flyingDream about water or drowningDream about deathDream about being pregnantDream about spidersDream about a houseDream about a carDream about fireDream about a babyDream about your partner cheatingDream about a weddingDream about school or examsDream about a tornado or stormDream about a dogDream about being naked
Dreamlore and these pages are for reflection and curiosity. The books quoted here are old — Miller wrote in 1901 and his entries read as omens, and many of Freud's ideas are disputed today. Take them as a starting point for thinking about your own dream, not as prediction or advice.