I am very suspicious of this late night theory. First, I believe that if a filter gets clogged, your engine won't overheat, it will just die.

As for sucking the air through the passenger compartment, I suppose it could work but all you will be doing is sucking air into the engine though the car's ventilation system and the air will still have a lot dust. Car engines use a tremendous amount of air and moving this through the passenger cabin won't be comfortable at best. Consider a 4 stroke engine with 3.0L of displacement running at 4000 RPM. That basically means some 6000 liters of air has to move through your passenger compartment every minute (4000/2 x 3L). That is 100 Liters of air or around 25 gallons every second.