Life & Wisdom Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s line flatters you with a cosmic pat on the head, then quietly exposes how desperate we are for one. “Flying dreams” are the perfect New Age proxy for meaning: private, unverifiable, and conveniently immune to fact-checking. They’re also a pop-cultural cliché with a long shelf life, which is exactly why Coupland can weaponize them. He takes an experience most people have filed under “weird brain cinema” and turns it into a moral dashboard light: if you’re airborne at night, you must be living correctly by day.

The intent feels both comforting and faintly mocking. Coupland, the chronicler of post-boomer drift and consumer-spirituality mashups, understands that late-modern life rewards metrics: steps, calories, productivity streaks, “alignment.” When traditional sources of authority (religion, institutions, stable careers) lose their grip, we start scavenging for signs anywhere we can get them. Dreams become a kind of outsourced conscience, a mystic algorithm issuing a thumbs-up.

The subtext is the trap: “doing the right thing with your life” gets smuggled in as a singular, legible outcome, like there’s a correct route and your sleeping brain provides GPS. Flying, in dream-logic, is freedom without consequences: no fuel costs, no gravity, no bureaucratic friction. It’s aspiration purified of the boring parts. That’s why it lands. It offers a dopamine hit of self-authorization while sidestepping the harder question Coupland’s work keeps circling: what if meaning isn’t something you can diagnose, even in flight?