Falling is one of the most commonly reported dreams. In a survey of 1,181 Canadian university students, 73.8 % said they had ever dreamed of falling, making it the third most common of 55 typical dreams. It is also one of the first dreams people remember. No study shows that a falling dream predicts anything or has one fixed meaning.
In the Typical Dreams Questionnaire study (Nielsen et al., 2003), 73.8 % of 1,181 first-year students said they had ever had a dream of falling: 73.0 % of men and 74.0 % of women. Only being chased and sexual dreams were reported more often.
That number is how many people have ever had the dream, not how often it happens. Checklist rates like this are much higher than what people write in dream diaries night after night.
It often starts in childhood
When the same students picked the earliest typical dream they could remember, falling came second (16.8 %), after being chased. Of the 888 who could date that first dream, most placed it at ages 5–6 (32.5 %), 7–8 (26.8 %) or 9–10 (16.6 %).
Why do we dream of falling? What the theories say
One theory, threat simulation, proposes that dreams rehearse dangers so we are better prepared for them. It is a theory, not an established fact, and tests of it are mixed: in one study, 66 % of recurrent dreams contained a threat, but fewer than 15 % showed realistic, probable situations (Zadra et al., 2006).
What a falling dream does not mean
Dream dictionaries give falling a fixed meaning. Research doesn't support one meaning per dream: what the studies show is how common a dream is and what it goes with in the people studied.
Questions
Is it normal to dream about falling?
Yes. In a large student survey, about three in four people said they had ever dreamed of falling.
What does it mean when you dream you are falling?
No study shows a fixed meaning. Researchers have measured how common the dream is; theories such as threat simulation offer explanations, but they are theories, not facts.
When do falling dreams start?
Often in childhood. In one survey, falling was the second most common "earliest remembered" typical dream, and most people dated their first typical dream to between ages 5 and 10.
Sources
Nielsen, T. A., Zadra, A. L., Simard, V., Saucier, S., Stenstrom, P., Smith, C., & Kuiken, D. (2003). The typical dreams of Canadian university students. Dreaming, 13(4), 211–235. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:DREM.0000003144.40929.0b
Zadra, A., Desjardins, S., & Marcotte, E. (2006). Evolutionary function of dreams: A test of the threat simulation theory in recurrent dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(2), 450–463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.02.002
81.5 %said they'd been chased: the top dream of 55
18.8 %said they'd dreamed of losing their teeth
67.1 %said they'd dreamed of school or studying