A bright blue vintage car pulls in front of me as I walk my dog in the park today. It has just arrived, to join a classic car show that is getting underway. The dreamlike moment sets me thinking, about how the state of your dream car may be richly symbolic. It may reflect the state of body or soul, of work or relationship. Your car may be your Ka. It may represent what gets you around.Its condition may remind you to check your engine, or replenish your energy.
The dream car may be your literal car, on a road you'll take in the future. It could be a time-travel machine or an energy vehicle that can take you to worlds of wonder and adventure. If it's a convertible, it may reflect your ability to change your life. If is's a 4x4 or an ATV, it may reflect your ability to get off the maps and make your own path
Dream automobiles are not confined to ordinary rules of the road. One dreamer shared an adventure with me in which she is riding in an open cabriolet, through a pleasant countryside. They mount a hill, and cross a high plateau that ends abruptly. A voice tells her, "You can make it different."
She finds herself suspended in mid-air, above the ocean. There is a moment of fear. Then the car shapeshifts into a sea plane. She enjoys the exhilaration of flight, then realizes she does not need borrowed wings in order to fly. She swoops and soars, then plunges deep into the ocean and feels herself absorbing deep powers of healing and remembering. In the ocean, she now recognizes a pattern of islands, and comes to realize that this landscape is vitally alive. Each island is also an "I-land", representing someone who has touched her life. There is a profound and joyful sense of unity,of the ability to connect with anyone and everything in this vital panorama.
All starting with a car. There's a clue to magic in the type of car: a convertible. The word speaks of the power to change, to shift, to convert one's attitudes, one's way of getting around, one's life style.
The dream car may of course be a regular car, and when there are problems on the roads of dreaming, and the car seems to be the familiar one, we want to check right away on whether those problems could possibly play out in ordinary life. To my certain knowledge, I was spared from possibly fatal road accidents on three occasions by dreams in which I saw myself driving into collisions - and was able to harvest specific information from the dreams in order to avoid those collisions.
Our car dreams can show us such nitty-gritty things as whether we need to get the brakes checked, or the oil, or the tires. When car dreams are as literal as this, we may notice that the symbolism comes in with the waking situation more than in the dream. If your dream warns you of a possible future collision, in addition to doing the survival stuff by avoiding that collision, you may want to reflect on where different aspects of your life, maybe relationships or obligations, are coming into conflict. If the theme is a flat tire, maybe you want to ask yourself how to avoid becoming over "tired".
One of the few kinds of automobile I was ever truly passionate about was the old Jaguar XJ6. I owned one in England and bought a used model when I first started living in the United States. That undermined my waking passion for Jaguars, because that 1973 XJ6 - bought from a dealer in New York City! - was off the road more often than it was on it. The only mechanic I could find to work on it when I was living out at Sag Harbor was a German mechanic who would bawl at me whenever I brought the car in, "Once again you bring me this British piece of shit! Why don't you understand that the English can't make electronics?"
So I gave up on Jaguars in regular life, but in dreams I found I was still often driving one. I dreamed I was driving a racing-green XJ6 at high speed, taking a corner at over 100 m.p.h., when everything stopped abruptly. I got out, dazed but unharmed, to inspect the car, and found that a man in a white doctor's coat was there before me. Under the hood, looking over his shoulder, I saw what looked like a set of medical gauges for things like heartbeat and blood pressure.
The medical mechanic turned to me and said, "This is a beautiful vehicle, Robert. If you smash it up, don't think that you'll get another just like it immediately. Watch how you use it."
I got the message! I started paying closer attention to how fast and hard I was driving my body.
These days, when I dream of a car that seems to be an analog for my body, it is most often a vintage Rolls-Royce - a bit chunky, showing its age and its British antecedents, but all in all not a bad ride.
In the English language, "car" sounds like "ka", the Egyptian name for an aspect of soul that operates like an energy double, travels outside the body in life, and continues with a life of its own after death that requires care and feeding. So when I hear about dream cars I often ask whether the dream is also about soul, and the care and feeding of soul.
A dream car, for me, may also be a time travel machine. I've been picked up by drivers in vintage cabriolets and grand touring cars who have whisked me off on adventures in past eras worthy of Indiana Jones.
Suddenly the memory comes to me of driving with my father a year or so after his death. It was hard to see much through the windows, so I opened the door, to encounter a great roaring wind, and realized we were flying higher than an airplane through an area of turbulence. I closed the door in a hurry. We got to a place where my father wanted to show me things about his new life.
So the dream car may also be an energy vehicle, something that helps you to travel to other dimensions, your modern (or not-so-modern) version of the vimanas, the chariots of the gods.
Feel like a spin?
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