Dreaming about
an airplane

For most of us an airplane is a strange mix of freedom and helplessness. It can take you across the world in a few hours, but once the doors close you sit strapped in a seat, unable to steer, trusting a pilot you'll never see. Dreaming about an airplane usually plays on that mix. It tends to be about a plan, a project or a life change getting off the ground, and about how much control you feel you have over where it's taking you.

What happened on the flight decides the reading. A smooth take-off with the city lights falling away is a very different dream from turbulence over the ocean, and being in the cockpit is different again. And your own relationship with flying counts, because a nervous flyer, a pilot and someone who flies for work every week bring very different feelings on board.

What dreaming about an airplane means

Airplanes go up, they cover huge distances, and they ask you to hand over control. Each of those gives a reading, along with a fourth that comes from what you take with you.

A plan taking off

English talks about projects as if they were planes, which get off the ground, take off or never leave the runway. An airplane dream often comes when something you've been working on is starting to move, like a business, a move abroad or a new relationship. A smooth climb points to confidence, while a plane that won't take off points to a plan that's stuck on the ground.

Trusting someone else at the controls

On a plane, someone else flies, and you can only sit and hope they know what they're doing. A dream of being a passenger is often about a situation where your future depends on other people, a boss making decisions, a doctor treating you, or a partner whose choices affect you both. How calm you felt in your seat says how much you trust them.

Moving between two lives

Planes take us from one life to another, from home to a new city, from a holiday back to work (with a tan that fades by Wednesday). An airplane dream often comes during a transition, when you've left one place (a job, a relationship, a stage of life) and haven't landed in the next. If you were in the air for the whole dream, you may be feeling suspended between the two.

What you're carrying

Airports and planes come with luggage, and emotional baggage is an idiom for a reason. If your bags mattered in the dream, because they were lost, too heavy or full of the wrong things, ask what you're bringing from your past into your next chapter.

Dreaming about being on an airplane

Being a passenger, with no drama, is the most common airplane dream. It's often simply about travel, especially before a trip, since dreams pick up what's on our minds.^[2] When no trip is coming, it's about being carried toward something new. Did you know where the plane was going? And who was sitting next to you (someone you know, or a stranger with their elbow on your armrest)? A plane full of strangers can mean you're heading into a new environment where you don't know anyone yet.

Dreaming about an airplane crashing

The crash is by far the most searched airplane dream, and it has its own page. In short, it's about fear of a plan or a change going badly wrong, often one that's already in motion and out of your hands. It doesn't predict a real accident, even if you're about to fly. Many people have it before big decisions, when the stakes feel high.

Dreaming about an airplane taking off

Take-off is the moment of commitment, when the plane leaves the ground and there's no going back. A dream about it often comes at the start of something, like signing a contract, moving out or saying yes. If it felt exciting, you're ready. If you gripped the armrests, you've committed to something you still have doubts about. And if the plane kept taxiing and never took off, it's the frustration of waiting for something to finally start.

Dreaming about turbulence

Turbulence is the plane being shaken by forces you can't see, and in a dream it usually stands for a rough patch in an otherwise sound plan. Things are moving in the right direction, but it's bumpy. How did the other passengers react? If everyone stayed calm, the dream may be saying the bumps are normal. If people screamed, your anxiety may have caught on to the worries of the people around you.

Dreaming about flying an airplane

Being the pilot puts the controls in your hands. If you flew well, especially without ever having learned, the dream is about confidence, a sense that you can manage something big. If you didn't know how to land, or found yourself in the cockpit with no idea what the buttons did, it points to responsibility you feel unprepared for, a promotion or a new role as a parent or carer. It's a close cousin of dreams of flying on your own, which nearly half of people have had.^[1]

Dreaming about an airplane flying too low

A plane passing so low over your house that you can read the writing on its side is a very common and unsettling dream. It's usually about something big that's come too close, a change, a problem or a person that feels like it might crash into your private life. Often it's a feeling of being threatened by a situation that's not yours, someone else's crisis passing overhead.

Dreaming about an airplane according to Jung and Freud

Planes are too recent for the old dream books, and the two men have nothing on them to quote. Their ideas still apply, and that is what follows.

Jung: the dream that balances the day

Jung saw dreams as making up for what a waking attitude overlooks, so an airplane dream asks what your waking life leaves out.^[5] If you plan everything and hand nothing over, a dream in which you sit strapped in while someone else flies is the other half speaking, since a flight is a journey you can't steer. If you always improvise, a calm, scheduled flight with a route and a crew may be what's missing, and his own rule was to ask first what flying means to you, holiday, work or dread.

Freud: the departure that hides an ending

In Freud's writing, a departure, a journey or a trip by train is often how a dream pictures dying.^[3] That doesn't make airplane dreams about death. But a departure in a dream can mark an ending of some kind, a goodbye to a place, a person or a version of yourself. He would also begin with yesterday, a booked flight or an airport on the news, the day residue the dream could borrow.

Other readings

Ernest Hartmann, a Vienna-born American psychiatrist who studied nightmares for decades, used the September 11 attacks to test how dreams handle a shock. With a colleague, he took 44 people who had kept dream journals for years and compared the last ten dreams each had before the attacks with the first ten after, 880 dreams in all. The main image of the dreams grew more intense, but airplanes and tall buildings turned up no more often than before, and not one of the 880 dreams replayed the planes hitting the towers.^[4] Hartmann's reading was that the dreams took in the feeling of being attacked, not the pictures on the news, which is a good reason to look at how a plane dream felt before asking what the plane was.

Questions to ask about your airplane dream

A few questions help find which flight your dream was really about. Missing the plane is its own dream, by the way, a close relative of the train you didn't catch, and it has a page on missing a flight.

• Were you a passenger, the pilot or watching from the ground?
• Did you know the destination, and was it somewhere you wanted to be?
• Was the flight smooth, bumpy or did it crash?
• Who was in the cockpit, and how much faith did you have in them?
• What in your life is taking off, or failing to?

Tell Oniri the dream and its first questions are about where you were flying and who had the controls.