I feel like when I was growing up, everyone had a dream car. As a kid, everyone was lusting after the Dodge Viper or Ford Mustangs. My friends would come to school with car magazines tucked between their math and science textbooks like they were sneaking in a Playboy. At lunch, they would gawk at Car and Driver and dream of driving right out of town and into the dream.

Our family car was a light blue Plymouth Voyager. One time, I got a Crash Test Dummy action figure and, in my rush to make it explosively dismember, launched its arm into the seat belt mechanism housing. Afterward, the seat belt would randomly lock up while we were driving. I avoided that seat whenever I could. The Plymouth Voyager was definitely not my dream car.

But I understand the appeal. The car as freedom. The car as potential. The car as the American Dream. A box of limitless possibility parked right in the driveway. For many, a car is a self-portrait in motion, a symbol of who they are—or who they want to be. Yet for me, cars are more compelling as artifacts than as aspirations.

Perhaps it's this escapist quality that draws me to both cars and dreams. We buy cars for the same aspirational reason we dream: to escape reality, to find our true selves, to arrive at some brighter future.