Joan Seaman - Tom Philbin Interpretation:
Desire to achieve a psychic solution to a problem.
Accelerator: ability to govern one’s expression of energy. If pressing down on accelerator: desire to reach one’s goal or desire quickly; frustration; ability or “drive” to succeed. Lack of response from accelerator: no inner enthusiasm for tasks or goals. Alone in vehicle: independence; making decisions alone; feeling alone. Another driver: being passive; being influenced by the opinions or emotions of someone else, or one’s own secondary characteristics— i.e., anxiety or emotional pain may lead us to make many decisions, so be the driving force in life, rather than what might be more satisfying; dependence on another person. Brakes not working: might suggest high anxiety or losing control of a situation or events, thus may indicate a fear of taking chances or initiating things in case they get “out of hand”; difficulty in controlling sexual desire or emotions. Brakes: one’s ability to be in control of a situation. This might be control of anxiety or sexuality or emotions. Car body: dreamer’s body; oneself. Car boot/trunk: the memories, the karma, or influences from past actions and experiences we still carry with us; the “baggage” of anxieties and thoughts that might not be necessary; tools for dealing with difficult life situations. Car on fire: stress of some sort causing “burnout,” either physically or emotionally. Car parts: body parts, but also the function in oneself they might suggest—steering wheel, for instance, could suggest control over one’s direction or emotions. Car torn apart or dismantled: stress; failure to care for one’s body; self-destructive attitudes. Collision: possible conflict of opinions with another person; careless behavior leading to problem in relationship; painful encounter; careless driving in waking. Crashing vehicle: self-desired failure—perhaps to avoid stress or responsibility and change; fear of failure; failure in relationship; argument—you may be on collision course with boss or partner; occasionally psychological or physical breakdown threatened. If the vehicle crash has a sense of death in it, then the dream may be exploring the anxieties or feelings around death. This is not a prediction of death, but a meeting with whatever values and fears one has about it. It may, however, be warning you about activities having a negative effect on your life or health. See . Doors: your way of letting other people share your life. The passenger door in particular refers to the people you let near you. Driver’s seat: the attitudes directing how you live your life. Whoever is in the seat is influencing your life, either through your permission, through dependence or dominance, perhaps even fear. Driving carelessly: lack of responsibility socially or sexually; need for more awareness. Driving without license: feeling guilty about your way of life or social conduct; not daring to test out your quality against social standards, therefore may hide sense of inadequacy. Drunk driving: not in control of your life; occasionally refers to an influence that uplifts or changes you; alcohol is dominating you. Engine: energy; heart; central drive. Fuel: feeling drives; motivation; whatever has “fueled one’s drive.” Headlights off: loss of awareness. Headlights: being able to see what is happening in your life; what lies ahead; insight. If dreamer driving: being independent; self-confidence; being responsible for one’s own life direction. Mirror: looking back on what is “behind” you, what you have left behind, or what is approaching you from the past. Not being able to see through windshield: avoiding seeing something that is important to you. Not in control of car: usually a warning that we are not living life with due awareness or care. In some way we are either not watching what we are doing, or are feeling anxiety about not being in control of events. Old car, scrapped car: sense of old age; feelings about death; outmoded way of dealing with life. Overtaken: feeling of being left behind or not competing. Overtaking: getting ahead; immersed in rat race. Passengers: people important in your life; feelings about how you relate to others; people influencing your direction in life. Parking lot, car park, parking: a socially acceptable place to rest, to meet, to make some sort of change or exchange. The parked car might also mean you have stopped “going anywhere” in life, or that you have changed to walking—getting somewhere through personal effort. Or even that you have stopped “driving yourself”—relaxing. Can’t find parking place: perhaps you are finding it difficult to relax, to get out of the demands of the “traffic” of your life. Puncture: see Flat tire under car. Reversing: sense of not getting anywhere; feeling that one is slipping backward; reversing a decision; change of direction. Running over someone: “killing” some part of self through misplaced drive or ambition; aggression. Seat belt: sense of safety; caution; obeying or disobeying the rules. Sports car: self-image to do with being free, daring, unconventional, and high-powered; perhaps single. Steering wheel: decision-making; being in control; ability to choose. Towing, being towed: dependence if being towed. Looking after a dependent or needy part of oneself. Traffic jam: things in your life not flowing well; frustration; blocked emotions or finance. Tire: the attitudes and skills you use to smooth out the rough patches in your life. Flat tire: physical problems or injury; let down by something unexpected; unexpected delay in some area of your life; frustration or irritation. Windows, windshield: protection and your view of the world and other people. With one other person: relationship with that person. Idioms: backseat driver; drive at; drive away; drive somebody mad, round the bend, round the twist, to drink; what are you driving at?; taking someone/being taken for a ride.
Many dreams appear to extend perception in different ways. dreaming the future Just before his title fight in 1947, Sugar Ray Robinson dreamt he was in the ring with Jimmy Doyle. “I hit him a few good punches and he was on his back, his blank eyes staring up at me.” Doyle never moved and the crowd was shouting, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” He was so upset by the dream, Robinson asked Adkins, his trainer and promoter, to call off the fight. Adkins told him, “Dreams don’t come true. If they did I’d be a millionaire.” In the eighth round Doyle went down from a left hook to the jaw. He never got up, and died the next day. The problem is that many dreams felt to be predictive never come true. Often dreamers want to believe they have precognitive dreams, perhaps to feel they will not be surprised by, and thereby anxious about, the future. When the baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, and before it was known he was murdered, 1,300 people sent “precognitive” dreams concerning his fate, in response to newspaper headlines. Only seven of these dreams included the three vital factors—that he was dead, naked, and in a ditch.
Drugs such as LSD, cannabis, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, and opium can produce hallucinations. This is sometimes because they allow the dream process to break through into consciousness with less intervention. If this occurs without warning, it can be very disturbing. The real dangers are that unconscious content, which in ordinary dreaming breaks through a threshold in a regulated way, emerges with less regulation, and without the safety factor of knowing it is a dream. Fears, paranoid feelings, past traumas can emerge into the consciousness of an individual who has no skill in handling such dangerous forces. Because the propensity of the unconscious is to create images, an area of emotion might emerge as an image, such as the devil. Such images and the power they contain, not being integrated in a proper therapeutic way, may haunt the individual, perhaps for years. Even at a much milder level, elements of the unconscious will emerge and disrupt the person’s ability to appraise reality and make judgments. Unacknowledged fears may lead the drug user to rationalize their reasons for avoiding social activity or the world of work. See Dead husband in husband under family, family relationships; out-of-body experience.
Another way of explaining the theory is to say that while awake the forebrain has the function of sorting and bringing meaning to the multitude of sensory impressions we receive. Most of us have observed this concerning half-heard words or indistinct images that we interpret as one thing, only to find later that what we “heard” or “saw” was not what actually existed. Hobson goes on to say that while sleeping, brain signals are generated that excite many areas of the brain. These signals, Hobson and McCarley say, produce random feelings, images, and motor impulses. The faculties that bring order and interpretation to the sensory welter of impressions go to work on these random impulses and give them some measure of meaning, perhaps order them into what we call a dream. In this sense a dream is created out of chaotic or random brain activities. The dreamer may impose particular sorts of order on these brain activities. Such personal dreaming arises out of predispositions, fears, etc. While this certainly explains something of the way the mind does work at times, it doesn’t cover many of the aspects of dreaming. Things such as out-of-body experiences and gathered information beyond the ability of the senses are not covered by this approach. See the third example under the dream as extended perception in .
Modern humans face the difficulty of developing an independent identity and yet keeping a working relationship with the primitive or fundamental parts of their nature, thus maturing and bringing the primitive into an efficiently functioning connection with the present social world. The survival urge at base might be kill or run, but it can be transformed into the ambition that helps an opera singer meet difficulties in their career. Also, the very primitive has in itself the promise of the future, of new aspects of human consciousness. This is because many extraordinary human functions take place unconsciously—in the realm of the reptile/spine/lower brain/right brain/autonomic nervous system. Being unconscious, they are less amenable to our waking will. They function fully only in some fight-or-flight, survive-or-die situations. If we begin to touch these with consciousness, as we do in dreams, new functions are added to consciousness. See the dream as extended perception under . frog The deeply unconscious psychobiological life-processes, which transformed us from a tadpole (sperm) into an air-breathing frog (adult)—therefore, the process of life in general and its wisdom. The enormous information such symbols hold if we explore them gives them their power; meeting with what we find difficult or repulsive in life and ourselves, which if we can accept transforms into personal potential and power—the frog-into-the-prince story. It is often a form of love that transforms the dark sides of oneself, the toad or beast, into something that is life-enhancing; subpersonality, an aspect of one’s character that is usually unconscious, but occasionally shows itself in behavior; the frog has also been associated with the power of resurrection and renewal. Frog spawn: sperm, ovum, and reproduction. lizard Very much the same as snake, except it lacks the poisonous aspect; awareness of unconscious or instinctive drives, functions, and processes. Chameleon: either one’s desire to fade into the background, or adaptability. snake The Hebrew word for the serpent in the Garden of Eden is “Nahash.” It can be translated as blind, impulsive urges, such as our instinctive drives. The snake can represent many different things, but usually the life process. If we think of a person’s life from conception to death, we see a flowing, moving event, similar in many ways to the speeded-up films of a seed growing into a plant, flowering, and dying. The snake depicts the force or energy behind that movement and purposiveness—the force of life, the latent energy or potential within matter—that leads us both to growth and death, along with the passionate emotions and urges that drive us so powerfully. That energy—like electricity in a house, which can be heat, power, sound, and vision—lies behind all our functions. So in some dreams the snake represents our sexuality; in others the rising of that energy up our body to express as digestion—the intestinal snake; or as the creative or poisonous energy of our emotions and thoughts. In the destructive aspect the snake represents the poisonous thoughts and emotions that can destroy us. We tend to depict this snake attacking us, even though we have ourselves given rise to such poisonous emotions as fear, hate, and guilt. Because our life-energy flows into thinking and emotions, we are in this way directing the creative force of life. Directing it negatively has the power to bring illness and death, for we are dealing with the power of life and death itself. The opposite is also true. The power of life and death can be directed creatively. Then the snake is seen in its healing role in dreams, and in ancient times was shown in the form of the staff with two snakes coiling up it—caduceus—still used today as a symbol of the medical profession.