The Secret Language of Symbols: Can't Help Falling...

Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

We fall in many ways—physically, emotionally, socially and symbolically. We fall in love, fall over, fall unconscious, fall into the abyss. We hope someone will catch us when we fall. We fall out of love, into despair, into depression. We fall back into old habits, fall under someone’s spell, fall into a trap. We fall from grace, out of favour, behind, into debt, from power and between the cracks. Tears fall, petals fall, shadows fall.

I could go on, but you might fall asleep.

We do not generally seek out the experience of falling, apart from that falling-in-love business. Falling suggests a loss of balance, control or position. Yet sometimes it is also a necessary readjustment—a counterpoint to inflation.

Like Icarus, we may be flying too high, too close to the sun, when a natural correction takes place and brings us crashing back to earth. The fall may be humiliating or painful, but it can also return us to reality, to the body and to the ground beneath our feet.

The central symbolic question may be this: are we falling because something has failed, or because it is time to surrender our old position and descend into something deeper?

Dreams of falling are common. When I was researching and writing my Master’s dissertation, I had recurring dreams of falling—off mountainsides, out of aeroplanes, from diving boards into empty swimming pools, from pavements as high as tower blocks, off bicycles. You name it: I was forever teetering on the edge of something.

The curious thing was that I never hit the ground.

That changed when I finally handed in the dissertation. For a while, my dreams became dreams of crashing to earth and feeling the pain of the impact.

Symbolically, this was rubedo: the final alchemical stage, in which something that has been worked on inwardly is brought into form and made real. The dissertation was no longer an idea, a possibility or a work in progress. It had landed. And so, in my dreams, had I.

Perhaps this is why falling dreams can be so unsettling. They confront us with the loss of our familiar position and the possibility that we are no longer in control. But they may also be asking us to come down to earth, to inhabit the body, to accept our limitations, or to allow something long held in the imagination to become real. The important question is not simply, “What am I afraid of falling from?” but also, “Where might this fall be taking me?”