“Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz” – A metaphorical analysis of a long term dream journalist and her troubles with vehicles

Abstract

Due to the loss of a very important person followed by a personal crisis I started the documentation of dreams and began to consult therapeutic support. In 163 dreams from 1999 to 2019 some kind of vehicle for transportation were involved. More than half of the time it was a car (100 dreams). Car trouble dreams were very frequent (77 dreams, 77 %) and showed themselves over the documentation time again and again. These dreams were accompanied with negative experience and emotion. Patricia Garfield (2001) assumes that these dreams do not reflect problems with driving a car while awake but are a metaphorical expression of having less control in life itself. She assumes that all nightmares, including those about trouble with vehicles, are coping attempts. Another study found out that the subjective stress and job satisfaction is correlated with the emotional tone of driving dreams of truck drivers (Schredl, Funkhouser & Arn, 2005-06). And for Lakoff (1993) powerful dreams are forms of thoughts that express emotionally powerful contents (desires, fears, solutions, fantasies...) by means of conceptual metaphor. Do our vehicle dreams show us how we run our lives?