The Car, The Ego and the Self

The Ego’s Vehicle

Cars often appear in dreams when something is being shown to us about the way we are travelling through life.

No dream symbol has one fixed meaning, but cars often seem to represent the ego: our known identity, the part of us that gets us through the everyday world and tries, more or less successfully, to keep us on the road.

The car carries us, rather as the ego carries the soul through the journey of life. It also protects what is inside, although some vehicles offer more protection than others. A solid, well-maintained car may suggest that we feel reasonably equipped for the journey. A battered car, faulty brakes or an unreliable engine may suggest otherwise.

The Car as the Body

Cars can also represent the body. We speak of running on empty, overheating, breaking down and needing a service. A car that will not start, keeps stalling or is almost out of fuel may reflect exhaustion, illness or a sense that we have pushed ourselves too far.

The details matter. What sort of car is it? Is it old or new, expensive or modest, reliable or falling apart? Does it belong to the dreamer, or has it been borrowed? Is there enough petrol? Are the headlights working? Is it the right car for the journey?

Status, Persona and Identity

Cars can also say something about status and persona: the face we show the world. A flashy car may speak of success, ambition or the need to appear successful. An old banger, a borrowed car or a car that does not feel quite right may raise questions about the identity we are moving around in.

Whose car is it? Does it actually feel like ours? Or are we trying to live a life that belongs to someone else?

Who Is Driving?

One of the most useful questions is: Who is driving?

Sometimes the dreamer is confidently at the wheel. Sometimes someone else is driving while the dreamer sits beside them, or in the back. The driver may represent another person’s influence, but it may also represent a part of the dreamer: a fear, an ambition, an old habit, a complex or a condition that has taken over.

The Road Ahead

The road matters too. Are we on a motorway, a narrow country lane, a dangerous mountain road or going round in circles? Do we know where we are going? Have we taken a wrong turning? Are we travelling too fast? Or are we stuck in traffic, unable to move at all?

A car with no brakes may suggest that something has gathered momentum and become difficult to stop. A car that will not accelerate may reflect frustration, lack of energy or a feeling of being held back.

Freedom and Independence

Cars can also represent freedom and independence. Learning to drive is often an important step into adulthood. It means being able to leave, choose a direction and get somewhere under your own steam. A dream in which the car is damaged, stolen or inaccessible may therefore touch on a loss of freedom or agency.

Who Is Travelling With Us?

Passengers can be important as well. Who are we carrying? Are they welcome? Are they distracting us, criticising our driving or demanding that we take them somewhere? They may represent actual relationships, but they can also represent responsibilities, younger parts of ourselves or aspects of our life that have come along for the ride.

Dreams of Losing the Car

Another very common dream is that of having lost the car.

The dreamer may be wandering around a huge car park, unable to remember where they left it. Or searching unfamiliar streets, becoming increasingly anxious. Sometimes they return repeatedly to the place where the car ought to be, only to find that it has gone.

These dreams may arise when we have lost touch with our familiar identity. We no longer quite know who we are or how to move forward as we once did. A role, relationship, career or way of living that used to carry us may no longer be available.

This can happen during illness, bereavement, retirement, divorce, redundancy or any major transition. We know we arrived in the car, so to speak, but we cannot find it now.

At other times, it may simply reflect exhaustion or overload. We have been so busy attending to other people and getting through what needs to be done that we have lost track of ourselves.

There is an important difference, though, between a lost car and a destroyed one. If the car is lost, it may still be found. Perhaps the identity we once relied upon has not vanished altogether. Perhaps it is simply no longer where we left it.

Stolen, Damaged and Unparked Cars

A stolen car may feel rather different. It may suggest that our sense of freedom, identity or direction has been taken from us. A damaged car may reflect an injury to confidence or to the way we are managing in the world. Being unable to find anywhere to park may suggest difficulty finding a place to stop, settle or belong.

My Dream of the Blue BMW

Many years ago, when I was seriously ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I had a dream that I was travelling up a motorway in my blue BMW.

It was unmistakably my car and therefore, in the language of the dream, my life and my known identity. But I was not driving it. I was sitting in the back seat.

At the wheel was someone who was disabled, although the nature of the disability was unclear. The car was weaving across the motorway, apparently out of control. Yet we did not crash.

At the time, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome had left me seriously disabled and would continue to do so for several years. Looking back, the dream seems painfully clear. My illness was driving my life. I was being carried along by something I neither understood nor knew how to control.

The Motorway

The motorway is significant too. It is not a quiet lane where one can easily stop, turn round or pull over. A motorway has speed and momentum. Everyone else appears to be travelling purposefully towards somewhere, while you are trapped in a vehicle that is not responding as it should.

I was in the back seat, with no access to the steering wheel, brakes or accelerator. That image says something about the helplessness of serious illness. The life I had known was still moving, but I was no longer in charge of its direction.

The Disabled Driver

The disabled driver might be understood as the illness itself. But the driver was also part of me. The dream did not place the disability outside the car or at the side of the road. It was inside, at the controls.

That does not mean that I had caused the illness, or that it was “all in the mind”. It means that the dream used the fact of my disability to show me how completely my relationship with life had changed.

The BMW may also have represented the identity I had known before becoming ill: successful, capable, independent and used to moving at speed. The car was still recognisably mine, but I was no longer in command of it.

We Did Not Crash

There is another detail I find moving: we did not crash.

The journey was frightening and chaotic. The car was weaving across the road, and my conscious ego was no longer in control. Yet something held.

I could not drive myself out of the illness, but neither was I destroyed by it. The car remained on the road. The journey continued.

The Colour Blue

The colour may also matter. Blue can suggest sadness, depth and the inner life. It may have carried something of the sorrow of my condition, but also of the inward journey that had begun, although I did not yet know it.

Before my illness, I had lived a fast and outwardly successful life. I was used to making things happen. I knew how to push, organise, persuade and perform. Then the body intervened. The identity that had carried me so effectively could no longer function in the old way.

The dream did not explain any of this. It simply showed me the pattern: my familiar vehicle still intact, but driven by disability while I sat helplessly in the back.

Questions to Ask of a Car Dream

A car dream might therefore invite us to ask:

Who or what is driving my life at present?

Am I in the driving seat, the passenger seat, or the back seat?

Is the car going where I want it to go?

Am I following my own route or someone else’s?

Am I moving too fast, or unable to get moving at all?

Do the brakes work?

Is there enough fuel?

What condition is the vehicle in?

Who else is travelling with me?

Have I lost the car altogether and, with it, some familiar sense of myself?

And what, or who, is being carried inside?

The Journey Continues

We need an ego. We need an identity, a vehicle and some protection as we travel through life. But the ego is not the whole self. It is the car, not the journey, and not everything contained within it.

Sometimes we are driving. Sometimes something else has taken the wheel. Sometimes the car tells us we are exhausted or in need of repair. And sometimes we cannot find the car at all.

The dream may then be asking not simply how we can get the old vehicle back, but what has changed, what has been lost and what kind of journey lies ahead now.