Car

In the interpretation of dreams, Car is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as control and direction of one's life journey, and who is driving.

Common readings

A vehicle is frequently read as the course of the dreamer's life; who holds the wheel, and how the car handles, are taken to show how much control the dreamer feels.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The operative questions are who is driving, whether the controls answer, and where the car is going. Being a passenger while another drives, brakes that fail, a wheel that will not steer and a car that runs away downhill are the standard variants, each read as a different relation between the dreamer and the course of things. The car's condition and ownership are weighed too, a borrowed car, a childhood family car or a vehicle in ruin each shifting the sense. The road it travels borrows besides from the older symbolism of the way.

No ancient handbook reads the motor car, which is precisely what makes it useful: the car shows dream symbolism being made in the open. Within a generation of the automobile's spread it had become one of the most frequent objects in collected dream reports, and the content analysis tradition founded by Calvin Hall, counting the elements of thousands of dreams, found vehicles among the standard furniture of modern dreaming. The continuity hypothesis in dream research, that dreams work over the stuff of waking life, needs no better exhibit.

The car did not arrive without ancestors. The older literatures read the chariot, the carriage, the horse and the ship by the same questions interpreters now put to the car: who holds the reins or the wheel, does the vehicle answer, where is the road going. The chariot of the soul in Plato's Phaedrus, with reason driving two unruly horses, is the image's philosophical grandparent, and the ship's helm served the old handbooks as the standing figure of a life under or out of control.

The modern readings follow directly. Driving, being driven, brakes that fail, a wheel that will not turn: interpreters across schools read these as the dreamer's report on agency, on who is steering a life and how well the controls answer. The reading is recent, its logic old.