Driving
There are two major conditions in life. One is being in charge of your life in a reasonable degree and making your own decisions. The other is being directed by your fears, lack of confidence or other people’s pressure or manipulation. Being in charge and directing your life is being in the driving seat. Being influenced by other people is being a passenger.
Being in the driving seat is a state of mind. It is nothing else. IT IS NOTHING ELSE! See Avoid Being Victims
Dreamer driving: Being independent and confident. It also suggests making your own decisions and being responsible for your own life direction. See The Driving Seat
Car driving carelessly: Lack of responsibility socially or sexually and need for more awareness. It also suggests you are not really in charge of your life in any positively aware way. There may be an over-riding feeling such as anger or frustration that is eating away at you and causing the carelessness – or are you exhausted?
Car driving without license: Feeling guilty about your way of life or social conduct. Or perhaps you do not dare to test out your quality against social standards, therefore may hide your sense of inadequacy. This might also point to a conflict with social rules and regulations – the social norm. See: Conflicts.
Car drunk driving: Not in control of your life; occasionally refers to spiritual influence leading you to do things that are not rational; or perhaps alcohol is dominating you.
Basically this is about losing real awareness and control of a situation or relationship – and especially your ability to direct your life well.
Useful questions:
If I am not the drunk driver, what or who is irrationally influencing me?
Have I been acting out of careless or irrational feelings or ideas lately?
Am I losing my hold on what is happening in my life?
Car not in control of: This often relates to strong feelings or impulses that you find difficult to deal with. Or if there is a mechanical problem with the car it could suggest that your usual physical and/or psychological checks and balances are not working properly, and so, as with a woman experiencing mood swings during menopause, perhaps you need to find ways of helping this. See Being in Control
The dream might also depict that in some way you are either not watching what you are doing, or are feeling anxiety about not being in control of things.
Car with one other person in: Relationship with that person. What is happening between you and the other person gives a clue to what this is about. So if you are driving somewhere it suggests you are in a relationship with the aspect of yourself depicted by the person, or with the actual person, in which you have a common direction and are linked in some way – emotionally, sexually or because of common aims.
Useful Questions and Hints:
How well was I driving in this dream?
Am I in control of the car?
Where am I going or what am I doing?
What are my feelings as I use the pedal, and what are they showing about how I drive myself? Try using Secrets of Power Dreaming – Plot of the Dream
Drivers seat: Perhaps more than anything else this suggests responsibility and personal decision making. It can also point to the attitudes that direct 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.
Being in the driving seat is a very special situation, whether it is a car, a plane or a rocket. Every tiny shift or thought, of motivation or doubt redirects where the vehicle – you – are going. So it is very important to clarify your feelings and state, as with the example below.
Example: Dreamt about being in a large removal van with a woman sat on my lap. I held her breasts with pleasure. Don.
In exploring his dream Don found that holding the woman’s breasts showed how he was holding onto and held by sexual pleasure. Holding the woman made him a passenger, and not directing his life. But when he let go he could be the driver. This led him to realise that he was tied to his sexual need like a dependency – a dependency that directed his life.
Being in the driving seat also means you can see all the instruments on the driving panel. This means being in an observing situation with yourself. You can if you wish, observe all the instruments of your being. You can watch and acknowledge what is happening to you sexually, what is happening with your fantasies, what is going on in your physical body – am I tired, am I relaxed, am I stressed, am I confident? You can observe all this in the driving seat and you can make changes. From the observations you can slightly shift, change, make adjustments, and so keep balance and direct the process of interaction and where you are aiming to go in life. This self observation also means you can more easily observe others and understand their needs.
Driving from another seat: This is about being able to ‘stand up to the plate’.
It is an American term and it is about whether you are ready to take command, to show your skill, to be in charge. See http://dreamhawk.com/poems/the-plate/
Are you in fact facing a situation which needs you to be responsible for the directions you are going in life, the decisions you make and take responsibility for who you are and are capable of being?
Try using http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/ and imagine placing yourself in the driving seat in one of the dreams.
Useful Questions and Hints:
If I am in the driving seat what are the attitudes and feelings hat are directing me?
Where is it I am actually taking this vehicle or my life?
If I am not in the seat, what are the skills or failings that are influencing my direction?
Try using Being the Person or Thing – Easy Dream Understanding
Another person driving: This might suggest you are being passive or are in a learning situation with the other person. Perhaps you are being influenced by the opinions or emotions or desires of someone else, or are ready to allow someone else to make decisions for you. The other driver might show you are dependent on someone.
It could also show another aspect of you driving your decision making, so make sure the direction is to your liking. For instance anxiety or emotional pain may lead you to make many decisions, so they are then the driving force in your life, rather than what might be more satisfying.
See car.
Idioms: bottle drive; drive a hard bargain; drive around; drive it home; drive me batty; drive me crazy; drive me to the edge; drive me up the wall; drive standard; drive you; drive you nuts; drive you to distraction; drive you to drink; test drive; in the driver’s seat; take a drive/trip.
Useful questions:
Is this about being caught or avoiding notice?
What feelings are evident in the dream and where do you meet them in waking life?
If it is difficult to get a license, what are the barriers or difficulties?
See Control; Avoid Being Victims; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Comments
i often dream i’m driving up a mountain, curving and a little out of control. this time in particular i realized i was not only driving too fast but tho i was driving the car forward, i was actually facing backward. it has stumped me bc in waking life i was hopeful about a new lease i was taking hold of in my life. i made myself wake up so i could take back the steering wheel more safely, facing forward.
Hi – It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/news/summing-up/ and also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ which has so much information in.
Nothing can replace your own ability to understand your dream. With a little effort you can do this by practising what is described in – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/getting-at-your-dreams-meaning/
Tony
Eliza – You are not in the waking world with its rules and laws, because the dream world is a totally different dimension in which things work differently. You came about from an egg/seed planted in your mother’s womb. You mother didn’t create you because the processes of Life did the huge detailed work, but your mother provided an environment and food, water and air.
You are the product of an egg and a sperm that are the descendants of other cells that began when life on Earth began with single celled creatures, so your seed is in a sense, immortal. But no plant or tree grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So you have a very long history and of course memory.
This suggests that in fact your personality is only a small part of a huge memory, memory people call the unconscious. In fact you were not born with a personality already in you, but it develop out of the new memories and experiences gathered by the new brain in your new body, but beneath that were influences gathered by a long line of seeds, which gave rise to the miracle of your body, the memories of which are only available if you dig deep into your mind or through dreams.
Okay, your dream shows that you are really trying develop a better life; the mountain in dreams depicts something big in ones life and a move toward reaching a wider awareness of your life or situation. Growth is an innate urge in us. If we stop holding it back we will emerge from childhood and our countless justifications. You are holding yourself back by holding onto the belief that you must always be in control of our life. Controlling our urges is a necessary part of growing up, but if we do not also have times where we drop the control, we can become unhealthy. For example you have no control of your digestive process, your heart beat, the process that pushes you through the ageing process as you pass through childhood, adolescence, the mature years and on to old age.
Each of us are immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to your old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this is a force of growth and change; and is fought like hell by many as we are afraid of such changes, especially getting old and facing death. We cannot know where we are gong because real growth confronts is with the new. Of course we can decide a direction, but we have to leave room for life itself to have some say.
See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/life-will-and-conscious-will/ – http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/lifes-little-secrets/
Had a strange (as usual) dream, I was in my parents backyard, but in dream there was a narrow driveway there, with two walls next to it. I was in the car in the drivers seat, and my dad was in the passenger seat. My dad wanted to me to take the car to the ‘repair shop’ to get something fixed on it (not sure what). I had to look out the window and look in the side view mirrors to back out with the walls so close. Once I did, I did a 180 degree turn really quickly, like a stunt driver can do when going really fast, but I wasn’t going fast. My dad got out of the car and said to take it to the garage to get it fixed and gave me money for the repair. The next thing I knew, I was on a bicycle, it was night time and there was slushy snow all over the road. I had to go make a turn and go up a hill.
My dream consisted of me driving and taking an alternate path to the left when somehow I knew I usually took a right. (This was not an area familiar in real life). Well I somehow knew I had taken the left before, but had gotten lost. I still decided to explore and felt I had the time to find my way (to wherever I was going?) if I got lost again. After I took a left, I noticed a large metal industrial looking object coming up from the side of the road with white paint wearing off of it as if it was no longer being used and hadn’t been for awhile. I decided to peak over the edge and I discovered a whole deserted town. I was so excited because I love things like that and urban/ rural decay. I then saw what looked to be a young deer walking around in water in the deserted town like it was lost. Then, unfortunately, my alarm went off. In real life, I have been struggling to make a decision between taking a new job or staying where I am, so I don’t know if this has something to do with it or life in general…It makes me kind of scared to take the job. My feelings in the dream were a mixture of curiosity, excitement, and worry for the deer.
Georgia – The alternative path is certainly an encouragement to go a direction you haven’t used often. It could also suggest doing something you have little awareness of, so a new part of your potential.
Getting lost in the past probably indicates that you had not really explore the possibilities that were before you in the past. But this time you pressed on despite your feelings of being lost in this endeavour.
The deserted town seems to me to be about a project that you developed a long time ago but deserted. Yet it is still there for your to put life and colour in it.
Of course the dream is about your real life. Everything we are deeply involved in is felt by our deepest and highest self. Dreams are comments from a wider field of reference. And the young natural deer is yourself feeling slightly lost. Try imagining yourself as the deer and also the town. Use http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson to help you understand your dream and move around in it to discover its hidden wonders.
Tony
I didn’t think of the deserted town in that way, but could be. The deer still worries me in that whatever the town does represent, I would be “lost” if I explored it. What is weird is a couple of days after the dream, on the way to work, I saw a deer off to the side of the road that had just been hit by a car (I know sad), but it reminded me of the deer in my dream. It’s probably silly to compare the two. I just hoped it wasn’t a bad omen. Anyway thank you so much for your response and insight. Everyone I’m close to just kind of blew it off. But sometimes there are dreams that just feel like regular dreams and there are some that you feel like are trying to tell you something.
Georgia – If I understand you correctly when you say you would feel lost if you explored the deer in your dream – it isn’t like that. Dreams are not a set piece, but are all the time responding and are an expression of what you feel, think and believe and intuit. The dream is not saying you are lost, but that at the time of the dream you felt what you associate a deer in a drab environment would feel.
Dreams are in no way similar to waking life, but are a wonderful mirror to all that you feel, fear or even hope for. In fact they are everything you can imagine and are so fluid and changeable just a shift in your feelings can change the whole dream. To give an example a woman dream she was walking along a street and a huge gorilla confronted her. She felt terrified, but then felt sorry for the creature, whereupon the gorilla changed into a man who obviously needed her love and support.
Dreams are not a set piece, so if you explored you dream with an open and inquisitive mind, realising that all things in your dream are an expression of your own moods and emotions and can be changed.
The question is – do you want to feel lost? If not you have a wonderful world of insights in you. Please read http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/questions-2/#Summing – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/association-of-ideas-with-dreams/#Working – http://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/edgar-cayce-and-the-cosmic-mind-superminds/ –
I know that is a lot to read, but I would give a lot more if it would help you to see what a wonderful person you are.
Tony
Wat does it mean to drive off a building
Wat does it mean when I dreamed of driving off of abuilding
What could it be if I’m driving the same stretch of road or roads over and over again?