"Dream of Flying": Drawing your dreams

(Dream art on the internet, anonymous)

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I dreamt that I was going to a dance. I am in a town shopping, looking for something to wear. I’ve been in this town in previous dreams, along the main street; it reminds me of Lighthouse Avenue in Monterey. It is dusk and I am with my sister. We are going from shop to shop looking for dresses. I am in a dress shop, looking at skirts, there are other women in the shop as well looking for dance clothes. I can’t find anything that looks right. I am with a group of people in a large ballroom with a high ceiling. A man who looks like Johnny Depp is teaching us to fly. It feels great, so free and easy. I look at the wings and they are snowy white, just like a bird’s wing. We are back in town, time is running out and I feel under pressure to find an outfit to wear. I am looking through racks and racks of clothes. Finally I select a black skirt but I am not happy with it. The man comes into the shop and says that we must have a mask sewn to our face. Two girls begin to sew a clear plastic mask to my face. They make a face and they are apologetic. I tell them it is worth the pain to be able to fly.I am out on the street with the man and other people who are going to the dance. We are ready to fly to the ballroom for the dance. I look in the distance and I can see the ballroom. It is along the coast and it looks like the ballroom at the boardwalk. I feel something on my face and discover that I am bleeding from the sewn on mask. The man tells us it is time to go and I take off right away as I am anxious to fly. I rise quickly and lose sight of everyone. There are power lines to clear and I fly higher to try to avoid them. The higher I fly the more lines appear and it becomes dark and foggy. I fly higher and higher.

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The image certainly adds to the story, which is powerful in its own right. Dreams are often not pretty, or even easy to listen to, yet the expression of them is very important to the psyche and the paths on which it is moving.

Not everyone is this talented as this artist, yet at whatever level of art, drawing a dream is an important way to honor the importance of the dreaming process, and a path to healing.

Why do narcoleptics fly?

Clear-cut cataplexy coexisting with excessive daytime sleepiness points directly to the diagnosis of narcolepsy. The other 2 classic symptoms found in narcolepsy are sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations. In sleep paralysis, a patient becomes transiently unable to move before sleep onset or just after awakening. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are vivid, frightening dreams, often with a sensation of flying, that similarly occur at the time of transition from sleep into wakefulness or the reverse. (Mayo Clinic)

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In sleep paralysis... most sleep-related hallucinations are visual and incorporate elements of the actual environment. For instance, individuals may describe objects appearing through cracks in the wall or describe objects moving in a picture on the wall. The hallucinations may also be auditory (e.g., hearing intruders in the home) or kinetic (e.g., sensation of flying). ( American Psychiatric Association)

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So what is the explanation for why people with narcolepsy often experience sensations of flying, particularly at the beginning or end of the episode?

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Links

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Narcolepsy: New Understanding of Irresistible Sleep

http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/inside.asp?AID=1144&UID=

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Diagnostic Criteria for Narcolepsy

http://www.mindsite.com/dsm_iv/narcolepsy

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Source of Image

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http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/narcolepsy04/index.html

Swimming in the Sky

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Posted on the internet by klynslis

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According to my sample of flying dreams collected from interviews and by reviewing cases in the scientific and popular literature on dreams, it is not uncommon to experience one’s self airborne in a dream while moving the body in a swimming motion…
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The German astronaut Ulrich Walter (1007) noted that the waking reality of weightlessness matched exactly the flying dreams of his adolescence. He asks how the body is able to imagine something it never experienced….
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The sleeping body seems to provide the feeling of weightlessness which the dreaming mind illustrates in different ways.
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in
FLYING (HUMAN) BODIES IN THE FINE ARTS - DREAMS AND DAYDREAMS
OF FLYING
Rainer Schönhammer
School of Art and Design, Halle/Saale, Germany
Paper presented at the 16th Congress of the international Association of Empirical Aesthetics, August 9-12, 2000, New York

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Schonhamner article

http://psydok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2005/550/pdf/Schoenhammer_FlyingBodies_NewYorkPaper_2000.pdf

From Daedalus to Daedalian

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Emanuel Swedenborg;......... .. Emanual Swendenborg, age 75

The Daedalian, A Machine for Flying; 1714

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Swedenborg was a scientist, philospher, theologian and mystic. This flying machine, about 32 feet wide by 24 feet high, had a basket for the operator at the center, used beating blades for propulsion and had landing gears. It was, essentially, the first flying saucer.

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Twenty years after designing this machine, he became increasingly interested in spiritual matters and became determined to find a theory which would explain how matter related to spirit, how the soul was connected to the body.

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In 1744, he began having strange dreams and visions. He kept a journal of 286 of these dreams, one of the first dream journals.

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Flying in dreams, like the angels, has a spiritual dimension.

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Wikipedia

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg

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Emanuel Swedenborg's Journal of Dreams

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http://www.ralphmag.org/AG/swedenborg.html

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Angel flying too close to the ground, Willie Nelson
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3DxVVfTifg

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Angel from Montgomery, Bonnie Raitt and John Prine

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St9RvdtvLeE
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Description and details of the Daedalian

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http://greyfalcon.us/restored/Swedenborg.htm

Flying in Dreams and the Myth of Icarus

Jacob Peter Gowy; The Fall of Icarus; 1650

One of Jung's approaches to dreams was to amplify them through association with mythology. An association to flying in dreams is the myth of Icarus:

Icarus' father, Daedelus, a talented craftsman, attempted to escape from his exile in Crete, where he and his son were imprisoned at the hands of King Minos , the king for whom he had built the labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur. Daedalus, the master craftsman, was exiled because he gave Minos' Daughter, Ariadne, a clew of string in order to help Theseus survive the Labyrinth. Daedalus fashioned a pair of wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Before they took off from the island, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the lake. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun which burned his wings. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms. And so, Icarus fell into the sea in the area which bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.

(From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus)

Are flying dreams about longing for sexual performance?

Marc Chagall; Au dessus de la ville; 1924

...In dreams the wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance. This is an early infantile wish... Whenever children feel in the course of their sexual researches that in the providence which is so mysterious but nevertheless to important there is something wonderful of which adults are capable but which they are forbidden to know of and do, they are filled with a violent wish to be able to do it, and they dream of it in the form of flying, or they prepare this disguise of their wish to be used in their later flying dreams.

Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund was obsessed with sexuality. It was extremely unfortunate for psychology that it was his model that predominated for much of the twentienth century, rather than the much more balanced approach of Carl Jung.

I dreamed I could fly

Jonathan Borofsky (1942); Undated drawing of a dream

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Jonathan Borofksy; 1970; Acrylic and charcoal on canvas

Jonathan Borofsky; I dreamed I could fly at 3088747; 1989

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For a while in this blog I will be posting images of art that was drawn or created on the basis of a dream. Sometimes there will be commentary, sometimes quotations, sometimes links to web material, sometimes just pictures.

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Today's factoid:

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People who dream of flying are not neurotic and like to play instruments:

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Despite the fact that flying unaided is not possible in waking life, flying dreams have been reported fairly often. Over the centuries, a large number of scientists have speculated about the etiology of such dreams. Their occurrence in a student sample (N = 444) was related to low neuroticism, openness to experience, boundary thinness, dream recall frequency and playing an instrument. The findings of the present study indicate that psychological factors play a role in the explanation of flying dreams. This does not completely rule out any of the physiological theories. The traits associated with flying dreams positively support the continuity hypothesis at the level of emotions.

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Personality Characteristics of Dreams

Imagination, Cognition and Personality

Volume 27, Number 2, Pages 129-137

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Michael Schredl, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany

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www.borofsky.com/

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Borofsky

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Personality Correlates of Flying Dreams

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http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,3,5;journal,3,104;linkingpublicationresults,1:300311,1