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.