According to the peer-reviewed research, flying in a lucid dream is the most popular thing folks want to do, even more than having dream sex.[1] It’s certainly true for me. But learning to fly is not as simple as you would think. There’s a delicate balancing act that we need to learn. That’s what this piece is about: the hidden initiation that waits for us when we lift our dream bodies off the ground.
TLDR: We have to be both willful and able to surrender to the dream’s energies in turn, and that takes some practice.
For starters, flying in a dream requires willpower, or volitional consciousness, just to get off the ground. But sometimes that willful push can meet resistance. In fact, one of the outcomes of a study Scott Sparrow and did recently on his mystical dreams was that all kinds of conflicts emerge when Sparrow tried to observe mystical light in a focused and controlling way. Suddenly, characters coming out of the woodwork that were “getting in the way,” or being confrontational, or even kicking him out of the dream through emotional dyregulation.[2]
We can see this sequence of willpower and dream reaction really clearly in lucid flying dreams. I have l had dozens of lucid dreams where I try to fly and I get ensnared by briars or electrical lines, or people literally tugging at my feet to bring me back down to earth.
In one dream from years ago:
My childhood bullies emerge in a lucid dream, and I’m afraid. I escape from them and I literally defenestrate myself: I move through a window and fly away. I try to fly up into the sky but my energy is really lackluster. My flight is uneven and a struggle. I can barely make it up to a tree, and then the tree branches get in my way, holding me back. I am so frustrated.
Then I have an odd thought, a very lucid thought, and the thought is: what happens when I try to fly towards the bullies?
And as soon as I have that thought, I feel a surge in my dream body. I blast off into the sky in a huge arc above the globe, and then descend again. As I descend, I don’t know where I am going to end up because the dream at this point is essentially taking me someplace. I have surrendered to the dream’s energies. I land in a stadium, and to my surprise, am plopped down right next to the bullies. They are there sitting on the and they greet me with smiles, patting me on the back and laughing. We are equals. The we sit and watch the baseball game playing in the field beyond with a wonderful feeling of camaraderie.
I woke up from that dream feeling something had clicked. Something real had shifted in the way I see myself, and the world. So I would say that wielding volition — or what I call solar consciousness [3]— in a lucid dream is about creating order. It’s about asking a question, bringing in an intention, and focus your attention on something. It’s tricky and can be unstable, but it’s worth the effort.
But notice what happens when I align my willpower with the dream—something else is required to go further. This is the second skill in dream flight: knowing when to let go.. not in passivity, but in the shape of willing surrender. And then we wait to see what responds. This movement back to receptivity is just as important as the asking of the question itself.
When we don’t meet this challenge in the dream, we get kicked out of the dream, usually due to our own emotional dysregulation.
In a more mature context, lucid dreaming willpower is about creating a push of an intention and then a relaxation of intention to see what comes. How do we react? And then what happens next? This is a key metric in lucid dreamwork, noticing how the dream is co-created between the dream and the dreamer. The skill is ancient and it is alchemical. On this theme of dream flight, here is an alchemical description of solar consciousness that comes from the third century AD from the classic work Corpus Hermeticum:
Consider this for yourself. Command your soul to fly to India, and it will be there faster than your command. Command it to cross over to the ocean, and again, it will be there not as having passed from place to place, but simply as being there, command it even to fly up to heaven. It will not lack wings. Nothing will hinder it. Not the fire of the sun, not the ether, not the swirl, nor the bodies of other stars cutting through them all. It will fly to the utmost body. But if you wish to break through the universe itself and look up the things outside, indeed, if there is anything outside the cosmos, it too is within your power.”[4] (translation by Brian Copenhaver)
I love this because it’s from the third century and sounds so modern. It rings with authenticity. Whoever was writing as Hermes Trismegistus all those centuries ago, this was someone who knows the practices. To bring it full circle, our modern Hermes—Robert Waggoner—talks about this exact practice in his excellent book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. Just imagine being at a place. Sometimes we get caught up with the movement. What if we’re just already there? It’s very Dzogchen isn’t it? We’re already enlightened. We just don’t know that we are yet.
I have to admit, I am not as skilled with dream flight as a third century alchemist. It has not always been so easy for me. Take heart though: it hasn’t been easy for everybody for a very long time. Check out this 600-year-old dream where the Sufi mystic Shamsoddin Lahiji tries to fly and runs into some problems along the way. Notice how Lahiji describes his willful intention and how it emerges. The experience begins as he meditates at night:
Absorbed in ecstasy, I had a vision. There was a khanqah [Sufi lodge], extremely lofty. It was open, and I was inside the khanqah. Suddenly I saw that I was outside. I saw the entire universe, in the structure it presents, consists of light. Everything had become one color. All of the atoms of the things proclaimed “I am God” each in the manner proper to its own being and with the force particular to each. Having seen these things in my vision, an intoxication and an exaltation, a desire and extraordinary delectation were born within me. I wanted to fly in the air, but I saw that there was something resembling a piece of wood at my feet, and it prevented me from taking flight. With violent emotion, I kicked the ground in every possible manner until this piece of wood let go. Like an arrow shooting forth from below, but a hundred times stronger, I rose and moved in the distance. When I arrived at the first heaven, I saw the moon had split, and I passed through the moon. Then I returned from the state and absence, I found myself again present.” [5]
Again, I’m just struck at how modern sounding this account is. Did you notice how Lahiji shifts from a witnessing, prayerful stance to more of an active volition when his wish to fly emerges? He really has to make a push, and when he does that, an impediment emerges. He deals with that with another action, a concrete action, literally kicking away the boards of wood.
Also notice how there’s these little cause and effects that happen as we accentuate that volitional drive in a dream—it will be met again and again by the dream’s own energy. We need to be emotionally ready for that. With violent emotion, I kicked the ground. The conflict was not just structural: it stirred him emotionally when he was impeded from the dream flight. The rub can become quite intense and we feel it with our emotional dreaming minds.
This give-and-take is exactly what we discovered in the study of Sparrow’s mystical light dreams: that before there is an integrative moment, Sparrow was brought into conflict, and given an opportunity to work with that conflict. It’s an initiation of sorts. We have these experiences in every single dream, just as we face micro-initiations every single day in our waking lives.
Where do you want to go? What do you want to learn? Are you ready to show up truly to this moment as it presents itself? These are the questions to contemplate as you align your intention to have a lucid flying dream. Keep an open mind and be ready for something new when you are ready to fly. I can’t say what will happen next, but only that you will be richly rewarded.
Resources and further reading:
- Stumbrys, T., Erlacher, D., Johnson, M., & Schredl, M. (2014). The Phenomenology of Lucid Dreaming: An Online Survey. The American Journal of Psychology, 127(2), 191–204. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.127.2.0191
- Sparrow, G. S., & Hurd, R. (2024). The Antecedents of the Experience of Light in Dreams. Religions, 15(10), 1228. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101228
- This is an ancient alchemical concept, but I was inspired to apply it to lucid dreaming after reading Andrew Weil’s work (1980) The marriage and the sun and the moon. Rubin Naiman, Ed Kellogg, Melinda Powell and Athena Laz also have commented richly on this concept of alchemy in relationship to dreams and lucidity.
- Copenhaver, B. P. (Ed. & Trans.). (1992). Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation, with notes and introduction. Cambridge University Press.
- in translation by Henri Corbin, and cited from: Bulkeley, K (2008), Dreaming in the world’s religions. NYU Press.
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