When Flying Turns to Falling: Trust, Fear, and Gravity
I used to dream of flying—soaring over landscapes with the confidence of someone who had never doubted their ability to defy gravity, moving through air with the natural grace of a bird who had never considered the possibility of falling. But somewhere in the accumulated years of compromise and disappointment, my flying dreams became falling dreams, and I can’t remember exactly when I stopped trusting myself to stay airborne.
The flying dreams of childhood and young adulthood were pure freedom: launching myself into sky with intention, navigating through clouds with purpose, landing exactly where I wanted to be. In those dreams, flight was natural, effortless, a superpower I possessed without question or fear. The world below looked manageable from that height, problems appeared solvable, distance made everything beautiful.
But the falling dreams that replaced them carry different energy entirely—the stomach-dropping terror of losing control, the helpless acceleration toward impact, the desperate attempts to regain lift that fail every time. In falling dreams, gravity is not a law to be transcended but a sentence to be served, inescapable and increasingly urgent.
Maybe the transition from flying to falling dreams reflects what happens when possibility becomes limited by experience, when optimism gets weighted down by the accumulated evidence of difficulty. The child who dreams of flying has not yet learned that most attempts at flight end in collision with reality. The adult who dreams of falling has learned that lesson too well.
Or maybe it’s about trust—trust in yourself, trust in the world, trust that things will work out somehow. Flying dreams require the unconscious belief that you deserve to soar, that you’re capable of transcending limitations, that the universe will support your attempts at elevation. Falling dreams suggest the opposite: that you’re doomed to fail, that attempts at height will be punished, that gravity always wins.
The lost wings mourn not just the end of flying dreams but the end of the person who could dream them—the version of yourself who believed in their own power to rise above circumstances, who trusted their ability to navigate obstacles, who had not yet learned to expect descent rather than ascent.
But maybe the wings aren’t permanently lost—maybe they’re just forgotten, waiting for the return of the trust and hope that made flight possible in the first place.
