Driving blind

The dream dictionaries reach for the steering wheel first: you have lost control, you cannot see where your life is going, you are anxious about the road ahead. The reading is not wrong so much as it is finished before it begins — it converts the image back into the worry you brought to bed. But driving blind is not one image. There is the car whose windshield has gone dark and the car you steer with your eyes shut; the wheel that will not answer and the wheel you have simply stopped watching; the terror of the unseen road and the strange calm of arriving anyway. The tradition does not treat the blind drive as a synonym for fear. It treats the car as a question about who, exactly, is doing the driving — and blindness as the moment that question can no longer be dodged.

Begin with the machine. James Hall, cataloguing the recurring furniture of dreams, makes the automobile a precise instrument: “Automobiles and other modes of travel are other images that seem to indicate ego structure or the way in which the ego moves through the various activities of life” (Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation, 1983). Where you sit decides everything. “A similar significance attaches to the position of the dream-ego within the automobile. The most appropriate position would generally be the driver’s seat” — and a car can even “stand for self-esteem.” So the dream of driving blind is not vague. It is a report on the steering, on whether the part of you that thinks it is in charge can still see the lane it is in.

The unsettling discovery the tradition presses is that the seeing driver was always something of a fiction. Murray Stein, mapping how consciousness actually runs, uses the highway itself: “If you drive a car on a familiar route, the ego’s attention will frequently wander… You arrive safely at your destination, having negotiated traffic lights and numerous hazardous traffic situations, wondering how you got there! The focus of attention was elsewhere, the ego had wandered off and left the driving to non-egoic consciousness” (Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 1998). This, he says plainly, is “a mild and nonpathological form of dissociation.” You have already driven blind, awake, today. The dream only stages what is ordinarily hidden — that some other intelligence keeps the car on the road while the ego, the supposed driver, is somewhere else entirely.

Jung had watched this exact scene in a patient’s sleep. A man dreams of driving “furiously over a beautiful, broad straight road,” then the motor dies; a mechanic finds the fault in the magneto, whose revolving part “had exploded.” Jung will not let the dreamer keep going as he was: “he is really driving on the right road. For a moment he doesn’t continue on the right way, the individual way, and at that moment the heart explodes.” The magneto is no mere part. “In psychological terms, it is his individuality, his individual monad, from which all the regulating functions of life take their origin” (Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930, 1984). The breakdown is the dream insisting the driver has lost the thread of his own way — that the center which times the whole machine has split. The car stalls so that the man cannot keep speeding blind down a road that is no longer his.

The Greeks gave this blindness a name and a divine address. Ruth Padel traces it back to ate, the older word Homer uses for a mind gone dark: “a disastrous state of mind: inner confusion, delusion, ruinous recklessness.” It is personified as a goddess who “runs through the world damaging human beings, blinding them mentally and morally” — “Ate, who blinds all” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 1994). Crucially, this blinding is not chosen and not quite owned. E. R. Dodds is exact about its strangeness: ate “is a state of mind — a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness… a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external ‘daemonic’ agency” (Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951). To drive blind, in this register, is to be driven — by something sent, something that took the wheel before you noticed your hands had left it.

And yet the same tradition refuses to let blindness collapse into mere catastrophe. The blinded one is, in the oldest stories, the one who finally sees. Liz Greene, retelling Oedipus, sets the crash at a crossroads where the man “smote his father dead,” not knowing whom he struck — sight intact, utterly blind — and then names the counter-figure: Teiresias, “a blind seer, renowned for his insight and judgement,” the one “who warns Oidipus that the accursed thing which has polluted Thebes is the king himself” (Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984). Padel finds this knot everywhere in Greek thought: the seer “often work[s] from a muchos, ‘recess,’ or are blind… In darkness we see what we cannot see in light” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 1994). Losing the outer road is, sometimes, the only way the inner one becomes visible.

So before you decide the dream is warning you, ask what kind of blindness this is. Is it the driver who has forgotten he was ever steering, running a familiar route while attention drifts elsewhere? Is it ate, a darkness sent, a recklessness that is not yours and yet bears your name? Or is it the seer’s blindness — outer sight shut precisely so the polluting thing, the king who is the curse, can at last be seen? Hillman would remind us, gently, that in the dream you are not the owner you think you are: “during the night the dream had you in its possession. Just because something comes to you doesn’t make it yours” (Hillman, Mythic Figures, 2007). The blind drive may be the soul dispossessing Captain Ego of the wheel he never really held. The dream is not telling you to grip harder and switch on the lights. It is asking whether you can bear to be driven for a while — long enough to find out who, in the dark, actually knows the way.