Dreaming About a Car

Cars are among the most frequently reported objects in modern dream accounts, and the interpretation rarely depends on the vehicle. It depends on where you were sitting. A car is taken as the way you are moving through a stretch of your life, and the first question an interpreter asks is who was steering.

The seat you were in

• Driving. Taken as being in charge of your own direction, for better or worse. Confident driving and reckless driving are both you at the wheel.
• The passenger seat. Commonly linked to a period when somebody else is setting the pace, which may feel like trust or like being carried along.
• The back seat with nobody driving. One of the more unsettling versions, usually connected to a situation running along without anyone visibly responsible for it.
• Parked and going nowhere. Read as readiness without a decision, the engine on and the handbrake up.

Brakes, fuel and the condition of the car

Brakes that do nothing when you press them come up so often that they amount to a small genre of their own. The usual interpretation is the sensation of having lost the ability to slow something down: a workload, a relationship moving quickly, a plan that has gathered more momentum than you wanted. Running out of fuel belongs to the same family and quite often maps onto the simplest thing in the world, which is being tired out. A car that will not start sits beside both of those, and a badly damaged one is generally about how battered you feel rather than about any actual vehicle.

What the car meant to you

Vehicles carry a great deal of personal weight. If the one in the dream was a car you owned, the car you learned to drive in, or a car belonging to somebody who is no longer around, the dream is almost certainly working with that memory rather than with a general symbol of progress. People who drive for a living dream about cars the way other people dream about their desks, and that alone accounts for a good share of these dreams.