Our fears of heights and falling, today and through the ages
I jolt awake, 3am on a Friday morning, heart racing and panting heavily, from a dream in which I’m falling to my death. It’s not a reaction I’m used to, even though it’s a dream I’ve had plenty of times before. Such was the shock to my system that it took me an hour to calm down and dose back off.
Falling dreams are among the most common. Contrary to the ridiculous myth, you won’t die if you don’t wake up before you hit the ground. But you might, and probably have at some point, experience the fright.
Freud would say I had the dream because of insecurities, instabilities, anxieties. Maybe I’m feeling a lack of control in my life, with nothing to hold onto, so to speak. Perhaps I’m experiencing a sense of failure or inferiority, or struggling to resist an urge or impulse that could send me on a downward spiral. A biologist would likely be much less psychoanalytical; the jerk I felt was simply an arousal mechanism that woke me instantly so I could deal with a threat in my environment.
I, on the other hand, suspect it had at least a little to do with my recent playing of the video game Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. You play as a parkour runner performing unlikely acrobatics across nondescript skyscrapers, every so often (if we are similarly skilled) falling to a grim death. You don’t get to see the result of the fall — the game conveniently fades to white and reloads the latest checkpoint a split second before the gruesome collision of flesh and tarmac.
While falling, we hear the protagonist gasp with an acute, total fear, as you would. The fear of falling to your death is a fear so remote, so horrifying, that the fullness of it is barely comprehensible to the human mind (maybe this is a simpler explanation for why falling nightmares are so common).
Let me be clear, I am not acrophobic. As one of the most well-known phobias, acrophobia is defined as an extreme or irrational fear of heights. That irrationality prevents people from driving over bridges, flying, or even taking an elevator in a tall building. I’ve skydived, bungee jumped, peeked through the glass floor of the CN Tower, stood a step away from death over the Grand Canyon and Icelandic cliffs.
Each time, I was apprehensive, suddenly and inexplicably unsure of my footing. But I wasn’t particularly scared. In the end, I came away having enjoyed each experience, using them as opportunities to reflect on the fragility of life and of my body against nature. I have never felt closer to death than in those moments.
Whether this qualifies me as having a ‘head for heights’ though, I’m not so sure. Such a quality, you could perhaps say being the opposite of acrophobic, is not something I associate with. I’ve flirted with the empirical sensation of falling to my death, but I don’t regularly seek it. Those who do serious mountain climbing, steeplejacks, skydiving instructors and other such daredevils — they have heads for heights.
Riding roller coasters or visiting the observation deck of the Empire State Building, on the other hand, does not mean you have a head for heights. You could argue those examples fall within the ‘lite’ version — a phony thrill of falling to your death from a great height for the masses.
Everyone has their own relationship with both the fear of heights and the fear of falling, which, I must stress, are distinguishable fears. The ‘fear’ of falling differs from the fear of heights in that it’s something all humans experience from birth (the only other fear we’re born with is of loud noises, apparently), whereas acrophobia reportedly only affects around 2% of people.
Some of us may have a head for heights, but no one has a head for falling, at least not without life-saving support or a suicidal objective. It is thought some are more scared of falling than others, with determining factors such as age, the kind of visual information the brain receives, and postural control, but we’re all at least a little bit scared. Go on, you can admit it.
Academics have argued, however, that we can’t accurately assert that what infants feel is a fully-formed ‘fear’ of falling. An experiment in New York using a ‘virtual’ glass precipice led researchers to conclude it’s not necessarily fear, but more the infant’s sense that their limbs aren’t capable of dealing with a given fall, that causes them to avoid it. Infants seem to have well-developed depth perception, meaning they can evaluate the danger of falling, but deeming them scared requires a small leap of faith (sorry).
Whether or not falling is a fear we’re born with, there’s little doubting it eventually becomes one. And it’s helpful to fear falling, obviously, hence it’s a trait that’s been passed down to us genetically, probably gradually enhancing itself over time. Consider that up until around 3 million years ago, early humans may have still been climbing, swinging from, learning to walk and even sleeping in trees. Their bodies were more suitably shaped than ours to perform such acrobatics, with upward-pointing shoulder joints not found in modern humans (in case you’re picturing Tarzan).
A recent study concluded that our famous ancestor Lucy, who died more than 3 million years ago, met her end by falling from a tree. Common as it could have been in those days to die in such a way, I can’t help thinking, was she scared? Did she inhale with desperate panic in a way akin to our Mirror’s Edge hero?
In my mind, this thought raises a chicken or egg dilemma: did we leave the trees for the savannah because we developed a fear of falling, or did the fear of falling begin to develop after we’d left the trees and shed the evolutionary advantages to skilfully climb them? A perhaps more sensible way to look at it is that from our millions of potential ancestors, those with a more intense fear of falling were less likely to fall from a tree before reproducing.
Whatever the answer, humans probably did develop a more severe fear of falling, and some of us a fear of heights whether the threat of falling was reasonably present or not. These fears, and our confronting of them, are revealed in tales both true and mythological throughout recorded history.
One of the earliest comes from Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, within the collection of medical works known as Hippocratic Corpus because of their association with the physician Hippocrates’ teachings: “He was, he said, not able to walk along the edge of a precipice or cross over a bridge. He would not dare walk over a ditch, regardless how shallow, for he would be afraid to fall into it.”
The Roman historian Titus Livius, who lived in the time of Christ, described how soldiers plunged to the ground while trying to climb the defensive wall of New Carthage, since the heights had veiled their eyes with dizziness. Nothing, he said, defended the city’s wall as well as itself.
In the 3rd century BC, during the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian military commander Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy to bypass Roman land garrisons and navy. This meant his army could take the fight directly to the Roman Republic, making it one of the great military achievements of ancient warfare. According to the writings of Silius Italicus in 100 AD, there was one stubborn enemy for Hannibal’s army to overcome during the journey to Italy: the dizziness they felt while traversing the high mountains.
That dizziness is what we now call vertigo. Not to be mistaken with acrophobia, vertigo is the sense that objects are moving when they’re not. It can be triggered by looking down from a height, which is why there is confusion between the terms. The Greeks and Romans understood that heights could cause vertigo, but the Ancient Chinese considered the life force ‘Qi’ the reason, a medical dogma that left no room for today’s accepted explanation that visual perception plays a causal role.
In the Metamorphoses, a mythological poem written in 8 AD by the Roman Ovid, the fear of heights is portrayed ironically. When the apprentice Perdix outdoes his uncle Daedalus in inventiveness, he’s thrown off the Acropolis in Athens, only to be saved by the goddess Minerva, who breaks his fall and turns him into a partridge. Despite being able to fly, “this bird does not raise its body high into the air, and it also does not build its nest in branches or on high tree tops. It flies close to the earth and lays its eggs in the bushes. Mindful of the old incident, it fears the heights.”
Man-turned-bird may have been wary of flight in Ovid’s poem, but history in reality shows we have been profoundly courageous in facing our fears of heights and falling. Through the ages, we have faced them by trying to learn how to fly.
Humans have always been able to observe birds, so the concept of using wings to fly is one we have always known. That’s why stories from the earliest legends depict men flying with birdlike wings, and why the earliest recorded tower jump, in 852 AD Cordoba, was by a man covered in vulture feathers with wings on each arm. In 1879, more than a thousand years later, the Biot-Massia bird-like glider flew briefly. That device now sits in France’s Musee de l’Air, and is thought to be the oldest man-carrying flying machine still in existence.
Leonardo da Vinci was interested in bird flight, and his studies of it helped him understand many principles of aerodynamics. In 1485, he sketched a pyramidal design for a parachute, which has since been proven to work by tests done in 2000 and 2008. In 1595, the Venetian inventor Fausto Veranzio, inspired by da Vinci’s sketch, created the now-famous Flying Man, a depiction of a man parachuting from what looks like the bell tower St Mark’s Campanile in Venice.
Parachuting isn’t flying, though, and eventually humans conceded that manpower alone could never be enough for us to fly like birds can. It wasn’t until 1905, the year the Wright brothers’ Flyer III aircraft flew 24 miles in just under 40 minutes, we could confidently declare humans could fly with control and without the immediate fear of falling to death.
It’s believed the Wright brothers put a greater emphasis on safety than other aviation pioneers, realizing the ultimate goal was to fly without unreasonable risk to life and limb. Fast forward to 2016, and the majority of us are able to sit on planes flying 35,000 feet up in the air with scarcely a thought for our mortal safety.
This ability to fly through the air with such indifference hasn’t resulted in a mass subduing of our fears of heights and falling. In fact, the past hundred years was littered with reminders that one of our few innate fears looms as largely as ever.
Just looking at Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the 1932 photograph of Manhattan construction workers eating their lunches while perched on a steel beam 800 feet above ground, is enough to induce vertigo in some people. And Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo plays on the fears throughout, with the ‘vertigo’ camera effect being used for the first time.
In 1974, Philippe Petit walked a tightrope unsupported between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City for 45 minutes. It seems impossible to watch the footage without feeling a personal connection to the feat. You might even experience a subtle tingling sensation in your feet or a slight feeling of nothingness beneath you as you contemplate the unlikeliness of ever attempting such an act yourself.
Twenty-seven years later on September 11, 2001, a photograph named The Falling Man captured a still-unidentified man falling to his death from the same building across which Petit had performed his incredible stunt. It’s believed he was one of at least 200 people who suffered the same fate that day. So harrowing is the image, and the feeling it evokes in those who see it, that newspapers received heavy criticism from readers just for publishing it.
It may not be until you reflect on the triumphant yet tragic history of our fears of heights and falling that you begin to realize how powerful our relationship with them is. It’s why Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk is one of my favourite works of art. It’s why we love stories of daring attempts to fly with wings and the Wright brothers’ courageous persistence to stay airborne. It’s why nightmares of falling can shock us from our slumber so violently, and why images like The Falling Man are so deeply affecting.
‘Head for heights’ or not, I’m of the opinion that no modern human can completely overcome the fear of falling. No matter how sure you are of your footing, however safe you feel or however skilled you are, you’re only ever a second away from death or crippling injury if unsupported. Acrophobia, the irrational fear of heights, is something we can train ourselves to get over, they say. The fear of falling, no matter how subtle, we cannot. Nor should we expect to.
Twitter: @adamwinfield
Blog: Palimpsest
