An Account of one Very Unhappy Dream

Why is this the first dream that I can remember in the past year or so?


Me, my mother, my father, and my sister are all in a car on a road trip. We're driving along some old highway through some mildly hill-y terrain, much like that in Idaho, for a couple hours, just enjoying the view. The entire time we sit in complete silence.

We finally get somewhere. It's a fantastic view; an impressively tall, yet surprisingly low-energy waterfall sits above a beautiful lake, spewing out its water to the placid surface below. We get out and just relax for a little bit, then change into our bathing suits.

After we're all changed, we go up onto the river that is feeding the waterfall, and splash around for a bit, when suddenly we realize we have slid down to the mouth of the waterfall. We stop for a short time, just sitting at the edge, water rushing all around us. From our viewpoint we can see the rolling hills for miles and miles around, and then some craggy mountains off in the distance. My mother is sitting near the middle of the waterfall, with me on her left side and my sister on the right. We're preparing to jump. I look over at my mother.

"If we jump, we probably will die," she tells us, rather emotionless.

I say, with a look of determination in my eye, "Well, we'll see. I'll see you on the other side."

"Really?" She says to me in a manner obviously doubting my intention to jump.

We then start talking about something else and lose track. We sit, just enjoying all that is around us, and the good company. Then, out of the blue, my mother vaults herself off of the cliff. She lands in the water head first, her body in kind of an "L" shape. She hits the water, and floats, face-down for a moment, still in her position, and then rolls over onto her back, obviously dead. Her eyes are cold and motionless. Her body stiff and unyielding.

Me and my sister sit there for a moment, in shock. I remember a distinct lack of emotion. There is a slight something tugging at our hearts, but nothing enough to stir us.

Then we're in the car, driving. All of us, now down to me, my father, and my sister, sit in silence, just as we did on the ride there; except now the silencing factor is something much different than the view of the countryside.

My cellphone rings, then it hangs up. For a split second, I expect it to be my mother; I even check my call history to see. I see my mother's name attached to one of the incoming call's numbers, and I get excited for just a moment at the prospect of it all having been a terrible mistake. Maybe we just left her there, right? But then I realize that the number I had seen was two down from the top, a call from yesterday.


What gets to me about this whole thing is how calm everyone was the whole time. We all seemed to kind of understand. We were shocked, but we kind of just understood. She knew she was going to jump when she did. She wanted to be free; liberated.

Me and my mother have been having difficulties getting along for quite some time now. Just the typical kind of teenage/mother rift-forming from me wanting independence in my life, and her still trying to help me succeed. I'm having a really hard time at that whole succeeding thing lately. It kills her, I know, and she thinks that I believe it's all her fault I'm not succeeding. There's a terrible amount of issues between us right now, too many to explain in this post at least, but that's the gist of it. I haven't been handling it well, and she really hasn't either.

She is usually (meaning when we are not fighting, which seems to be most of the time now) happy, but lately I fear, not actively or probably logically, that she might be having problems that none of us are seeing. After that dream, I really began to fear that she could be struggling with something that none out of the lot of us know. Was this a premonition dream? I sure hope not, but it was giving me chills all morning. Every time I thought about my mother, or somebody even mentioned the word "mother", I felt instantly terrified. My heart rate sped up, and my mind froze in a panic. I, for those moments, felt terror like I have never felt before in my life. I had to remind myself that it was just a dream, and then it went away; but still the sentiment lingered.

Is it maybe symbolic of our drifting apart? Like she's becoming lost to me? I feel it's more of this, but then again, that tiny little part of our brains that whisper fears into our conscious keeps telling me that she's going to die. This is not a happy thought.