DRIVING WITHOUT GAS

 

I'm in a crowded gas station in a large old car waiting to gas up.  My father is driving and I am sitting in the backseat observing.  The wait seems interminable.  Finally the crowd clears and there are many pumps available.  Dad starts the car and pulls past the empty pumps and glides effortlessly out of the station and up a small hill.  I rebuke him saying, "You want gas and all those pumps are free yet you drive out of the station without gassing up.  Are you crazy?"   When we get up on top of the hill I show him how empty the station is.

 

 

COMMENTS

 

Dreams contain many layers of meaning and can be interpreted in many ways.  Sometimes, because the dream closely parallels events in ‘reality,’ one focuses on the dream’s relevance to a practical situation, an illness for example, and one misses the deeper meaning.  At first this deceptively simple dream seemed to be addressing the long journey I was about to undertake and the new chapter of my life that it would lead to. Or it might be commenting on my relationship to my physical father. But I never had any issues with my father so such an interpretation seems unlikely.

Dreams in which familiar figures or objects appear are usually not discussing the dreamer’s relationship to the person or object. Invariably the Self uses the physical person, object or situation as a symbol of the dreamer’s relationship to the various aspects of the dreamer’s psyche or the relationship of the dreamer to the Self.  When I looked at this dream more carefully I could see what a possible spiritual meaning.

 

The large old car is me.  I’m large and getting old.  It is crowded with thoughts and feelings (about an upcoming change of life) and takes a long time to clear. The gas station is the mind.   Only when it is clear (concerning my intention) does the car leave the station.  The car, which is often a symbol of one’s life journey...because it moves through time and space like one’s consciousness moves through various experiences...is driven by my ‘father.’  The Self is commonly called one’s father.  “I and my Father are one” means that the individual and God, the Self, are non-separate.   Like the physical father the Self is our origin and protector.

When the Self is in control one’s vehicle moves ‘effortlessly’ without gas.  ‘Gas’ here means the mind.  One is not motivated by personal thoughts and feelings, one is motivated by Spirit, the Self.  “Not my will but Thine.”   The ‘me’ sitting in the back seat is probably the ego/intellect, the watcher, the one who constantly worries and makes comments, the one who is insistent that things be logical and consistent and follow their stated aims.  It seems crazy (‘are you nuts?) to the ego to move without an idea motivating it.  The dream’s basic message is: when the mind is quiet, the Self takes over and life flows effortlessly along.