Originally published on The Hairpin
Dear Satya:
I was driving and suddenly I could not control the speed of the car or stop it. I could steer, but that was all. I made a wrong turn and entered an on-ramp to an elevated road. The road got higher and higher as the car went faster and faster. The road became extremely curvy with the curves getting sharper and sharper. There were no guardrails. Steering consumed all my attention. As I came to a particularly sharp curve, I suddenly lost my eyesight and went completely blind. I felt the car going off the road and falling. I woke up in a panic.
This dream recurred many, many times until one night when, as the car went off the road, I did not wake up. As it was falling, my eyesight suddenly returned. I looked down and saw that we were falling into a body of water. I did not want to be trapped in the car in the water. I opened the car door in mid-air and jumped out, trying to get as far away from the falling car as possible. The car and I hit the water at the same time, separated by several yards. I surfaced and swam safely to the shore. After that, I never had the dream again.
Dear Dreamer,
Thank you for sharing this series of recurring dreams. Like a labyrinth in which you're trapped, you encounter the same dead ends over and over again until one day, all of a sudden, you discover the way out. Out of the nightmare of the Groundhog's Day curse, you wake up, never to have the same dream again. How and why does this happen?
The dream of driving and being out-of-control is a very common one (perhaps in particular in our culture), and it's a common dream to return repeatedly for dreamers too. Maybe you can imagine why. Dreams in which cars are featured rarely feel sluggish. Instead, they often represent some aspect of the manic nature of the society in which we all live. Everything is moving too quickly; you're barely keeping it together and staying alive. Indeed, much of the dream's message can be found in our language: think of the state of being "asleep at the wheel" and "driving blind." Dreams like yours often indicate a life situation around which the dreamer needs to develop greater awareness, as if their life is happening without their conscious participation.
When I have a client with a driving dream of this kind, I highlight the grave necessity of their increased attention--some might say mindfulness--to their day-to-day actions. The dream is indicating a state of mind or emotional life that can put a person in actual danger in the physical world. One might, in fact, be in danger while driving, but also while crossing the street, or in arguments with their partners, or at work, as they're not as aware as they should be, possibly wreaking havoc on themselves and those around them in ways in which they're unaware.
Cars tend to represent the social persona of the dreamer. They are the armor and structure we use to travel through the world. Questions of relevance to these kinds of dreams can be: Whose car is it? Who's driving? Where are you in the car? Again, consider our language: "who's in the driver's seat?" It's an image that is easily understood. In this case, I'm going to assume it is your car and, as you indicate, you are driving (or trying to).
I would venture, as I've expressed generally, that during the time you were having these recurring dreams your life felt quite out of your control. It may have been a very private experience. It's quite possible that you appeared on the outside absolutely put-together and in control, you may have even felt that you were handling everything pretty darn well, but your unconscious was mirroring back to you a private sense that you were overwhelmed, exhausted, terrified, and in actual danger. One's public persona can very often fool everyone, even the individual, which is why dreams provide such a helpful lens into one's actual well-being--just like a microscope can pick up on an infection that is otherwise invisible to everyone.
Now the progression of your dream is fascinating, and a wonderful window into the forms of resolution that these dreams can take. At first, you were driving and everything was getting faster, curvier, higher… manic. There were no guardrails, no backup plan, no safety or external support around you. All you could do was try to stay in control and keep moving forward. Then, suddenly, just as you were barely managing to survive, your eyes fail you. You go blind. You can no longer even rely on your sight to survive. Things are getting worse, and fast. I wonder two things here: one, was your actual life situation continuing to spin out of control and your dream was working to reflect that to your conscious awareness? Again, we can be remarkably blind sometimes (pun intended) to the chaos of our own lives, believing we're far more in control than we are; I also wonder, however, if you were being pushed towards a state of relying on other aspects of yourself to navigate the world. I'll take this back up in a moment.
In the dreams, you feel that you are falling and wake up panicked. Try to read this symbolically. While you literally wake up, you also metaphorically wake up. These dreams are getting your attention, raising your consciousness to your inner life. Nightmares can work as a psychic immune system: the more out of touch you are with yourself, the graver your nightmares may get. If one can't wake you up with a whisper, they may finally succeed with a loud shout and a shake. Nightmares often arise when we're psychically out to lunch and, for our well-being, in needing of being shaken awake again. Which, I would venture, is just what happened for you.
Recurring dreams stop recurring when there's some internal resolution; their very recurrence is indicative of a story seeking its conclusion like a record skipping until it can get back on track. At the conclusion of your dream series, you stayed conscious within the dream. This is a beautiful detail. Your eyesight returned as you were falling and you saw that you were heading towards the water. You did not want to be trapped so you thought ahead and opened the door, moving away from the car, you got safely to shore. Your awareness of your situation certainly improved, and your sight--again awareness--returned. Something major must have changed, or been about to change, in your life.
You state in your dream that "we were falling" which makes me quite curious who "we" are. This pronoun, as well as the overall tone of the dream, makes me wonder if you were trapped in some kind of toxic relationship at the time of these dreams. The manner in which you leave your car, swimming away completely and as it is buried in the water, indicates to me a total separation from a former way of living. Like a hermit crab shedding its shell, you were molting, abandoning an old life in search of another. Perhaps you gained the courage and the in-sight — the internal sight, the wisdom—through the crises you endured to be able to handle the external situation in which you were feeling trapped and out of control. Just like a baptism, a part of you died in the water when you were immersed, and a new life was gained when you reemerged and found your way to shore, reborn.
Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!
Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).
