Driving while dreaming: oneiric automobility

Abstract

This paper responds to the call made by mobilities scholars to deepen attention to imagination and imaginaries by proposing that oneiric experiences – nighttime dreams – be investigated as significant but under-examined artifacts of mobile cultures. Based on a long-term, ethnographically-informed study of the dreams of young adults in the US and grounded in both contemporary dream theory and the automobilities literature, I argue that dreams of car trouble serve to expose otherwise overlooked and taken-for-granted dimensions of waking-life automobility, automotive consciousness, and lifecourse transitions. Targeting two commonly seen themes within this subgenre of dreams – that of failed brakes and driving from the backseat – I argue that oneiric automobility draws on conceptual metaphors and waking-life automotive biographies. Such dreams, moreover, draw liberally from and comment on larger and often silenced dimensions of emerging automobility – the patterned processes and performances by which (usually young) adults habituate to their lives as drivers. Attention to the common experience of driving while dreaming, I argue, enhances efforts to theorize the multiple ontologies of mobile lifeways.

Keywords:

• Imagination
• mobility
• automobility
• dreaming
• young adults
• emerging automobility
• mobile ontologies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All participants were recruited via IRB-approved informed consent protocols, filed under numbers IRB6125 and IRB6855 at the University of New Hampshire. Research participants are identified with pseudonyms.

2 In her account of how automotive consciousness is described in novels and memoirs of the early twentieth-century, Pearce (2014) notes the salience of the car crash and its ties with ill-fated romance. We could speculate that literary as well as cinematic depictions of the theme have percolated up through the subsequent century to inform dreams like Tabitha’s. Yet Pearce maintains that early representations were inflected with humor; for Tabitha and her cohort, the romantic crash is deadly serious. I owe this connection to a sharp, anonymous reviewer.

3 Garfield similarly intuits that driving dreams are a metaphor for how ‘things are moving along in our waking state’ (Garfield 2001, 67). However, she proposes that dream cars are metaphors for the body. While this may at times be the case, I concur with Mageo (2006) and Hollan (2003), who maintain that the source domain (Lakoff 1993, 79) is the culturally constructed self. It is precisely because the self is more abstract than the body that its signification calls for a metaphor.

4 Zwick (2020) likewise invokes Lakoff (1993) for inspiration in exploring her car-trouble dreams, suggesting, along with Garfield (2001) that driving dreams ‘refer to movement through life’ (Zwick 2020, 111) and that oneiric difficulties reflect difficulties in waking life. Yet the connection between the two for the subject is only roughly sketched.

5 Byron’s distaste for autonomous vehicles was partly driven by the politics surrounding ‘beta testing’ and Tesla’s CEO. His fantasy of public transport in a German city is possibly well-informed. While declining auto use among young adults has been documented in the US, multimodal mobility among young people is more prominent in Europe (eg Buehler and Hamre 2015; Kuhnimhof, Buehler, and Dargay 2011). Byron’s use of the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is echoed by Hunecke, Groth, and Wittowsky (2020), who use it to describe the dispositions of highly-educated young adults who favor green multimodal mobility in the German city of Dortmund. Incidentally, their suggestion that young adults may be replacing the car with the smartphone as an emotionally salient symbol (Canzler and Knie 2016) would perhaps be supported by young Americans’ frequent dreams of operating smartphones as well as cars (Sheriff 2017, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on un-funded research.