When I was little I used to always have the dream of falling off a cliff, anyone knows what that means?
I've had dreams that put me in situations like buddy cop action/comedy movies like Rush Hour and Lethal Weapon. It plays almost like a movie trailer.
Within the past few years I've been having sequels to a dreams that I had when I was a young grade school kid more than 15 years ago. Like returning to a house that I visited or encountering a person that I've only seen in my the previous dreams. I'd also like to know what is going on with those dreams.
Almost everyone has had the falling dream. The explanation is pretty simple, and very interesting.
When you fall off something in real life, even fall very short distances, your body has an immediate precautionary reaction. It loosens all, or at least most of, the muscles and joints in your body to allow for more flexibility and lesser chance of injury when your bodily ultimately impacts. Its sort of like how buildings are made of flexible steel in order to be able to sustain powerful earthquakes.
Anyway, your body does this same reaction only one other time in normal every day activity: just before you fall asleep. Again, in order to prevent injury and allow your muscles to get the maximum amount of restoration, your body loosens your joints all over in preparation of rest. This happens pretty instantaneously, just before you are about to fall asleep. (Also, your brain locks control of your muscles after this as well, so you won't trash around while in REM sleep. People with sleeping disorders, or beginners at lucid dreaming can be witnesses to this after a bad wake-up. Sometimes they will wake up to a condition known as sleep paralysis where basically you are unable to move just about any muscle and your breathing is increasingly labored. Its scary, try never to end up in it.).
The falling dream normally happens when you still maintain some sort of half-conscious state as you are falling asleep (much like the state lucid dreamers train themselves to go into before every night they want to lucid dream, but you can fall into this state unknowingly as well). Since you are still at least somewhat awake and aware of the functions of your body consciously, when your brain instinctively slacks your muscles, your half-awake mind rapidly searches for the cause of this apparent effect.
And, just like how Pavlov's dog salivated merely to the ring of a bell, your brain finds the only cause that would produce this conditioned response: you are falling. Your brain goes wild, attempting to alert your whole body of the situation. By this time, you are normally totally asleep. At least for a few seconds.
Due to your brain's unfortunate leap of conclusion, you end up with the classic falling dream in which it not only looks and sounds like you are falling, but it
feels like you are falling too.
