Dude, Where’s My Car?

A frightening recurring dream becomes reality.

Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

I paid my first visit to a new ophthalmologist last month. Her office was in the suburbs, in a sprawling office park of identical, square, red brick buildings surrounded by parking lots. To distinguish one building from another, they were cleverly named I, II, and III. I was looking for II.  I followed the signs that pointed me to I and II. Then I saw only signs for I, so I followed them and eventually stumbled upon II. I parked and entered.

I emerged 90 minutes later with a new prescription, dilated eyes, and plastic sunglasses perched uncertainly over my regular eyeglasses. I remembered that I had parked at the end of a row, so I strode confidently across the lot to find…nothing. My car was not there. I looked at the ends of other rows and …still nothing. Panic descended on me, along with a powerful sense of déjà vu. “Oh no!” I thought. “It’s that dream, only this time it’s real!”

Swiftly followed by a second thought: “Damn! Is this dementia?”

I’ll return to that dream in a moment. But first, to cut to the chase, it is not dementia. It’s just my inherent disability when it comes to navigation. I get turned around easily; just ask my wife and kids, who have seen the proof on road trips. The basic problem this time was that I had entered the building from the front but  exited from the side. Ergo, wrong parking lot. Once I recognized the front of the building and the closest lot to it, I found the car at the end of a row, right where I left it. Huzzah!

Now, about that dream.

The Lost Car Dream

It is a recurring dream that I have had often, for many years. I am about to drive somewhere but I can’t find my car in the parking lot. For the remainder of the dream I desperately search other parking lots, and in some versions an impound lot, but my car never shows up.

Clearly, I’m not the only one having the lost car dream. A Google search turns up more than a dozen websites offering interpretations of it. Here are some possible explanations from the Dream Catcher Dictionary:

• You are highly stressed – perhaps you have trouble coping with obligations and roles you are expected to play.

• You lack control in your life – life is taking you places you didn’t anticipate.

• You are unsatisfied with the direction of your life – perhaps you subconsciously fear growing old.

• You need to slow down – you feel stuck and unable to move forward. Maybe you need to take a break and reflect on what you’re doing.

• You are searching for something (or someone) – perhaps you are on a quest for answers to life’s big questions, or a life partner, and you still – haven’t found – what you’re looking for.

• You have experienced a loss – the parked car may symbolize the loss of someone important to you.

• Your approach to life may be immature – you don’t take obligations and duties seriously, and the lost car is the result.

• You have unfulfilled goals and desires – you could have done more with your life, but your secret desires have not been achieved for lack of self-confidence, motivation, or drive.

Reading these fortune-cookie-style interpretations, it’s obvious that the dream may mean any of these things, or none of them. The exact meaning depends on who’s doing the dreaming. What the lost care means in my dream may not be what it means in yours. The best clue seems to be the emotions we feel as we experience the dream: Are we anxious? Confused? Frustrated? Angry? Adventurous?

Having said that, however, in general terms the dream is about not having control, feeling lost in life, or lacking the ambition to fulfill one’s own goals. My conscious and subconscious need to schedule a conversation about that.

An App for the Inept

Meanwhile, back in the waking world, I may never suffer from misplacing my car ever again. My more tech savvy friends tell me that if I open the Map app when I park the car and touch the dot that indicates my location, on my return it will give me clues (Am I warmer? Colder?) to steer me to the car. I plan to give it a try next time.

For those of us like myself with navigational disability, it is comforting to know that a satellite orbiting miles above the earth can find my parked car when I, at ground level, cannot.