The dreamer's use of space.

The dreamer often portrays wishes, conflicts, or current problems in terms of visual-spatial representations and metaphors. The spatial dimensions of dreams frequently signify important affective themes of the dream. In doing so, they serve to continue or reflect processes of self-recognition in relation to the environment, processes that began in early childhood, when the developing child's experience of movement through space played a central role in organizing affect and motivation systems that contribute to emerging schemata of the self.

Motor action, emotion, and motive.

The experience, imagery, and fantasy of self in motion play a central part in the dreams, aspirations, and affective life of individuals, and in their growth. Human infants are supplied with an intrinsic drive to move to, with, and against forces and objects in the natural world, for that action maps a developing self into the world. This striving is not derivative from some other drive; it is a motivational force in and of itself intertwined with other essential strivings of the developing individual.

Escaping gravity. Movie magic and dreams of flying.

When movie-goers are thrilled by cinematic imagery portraying transcendent motor action, they are drawn into a world of imagination more often inhabited only in dreams of flying or of perfectly executed motion. The drive toward free and expansive movement which such dreams portray doesn't require explanation in terms of symbolic links to other aims, as has been common in the literature. The aim to achieve mastery in the locomotor sphere of action is a basic aim, in itself, integral to ego development.