The roadtrip to Markiplier's house. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm about to start to go on a winter road trip with my parents. We're just about to kick off the trip and drive to our first site when my dad stops at a local Safeway and orders a platter of cheese, which he eats very, very slowly. Just when I think he's done and we can move on, he orders a different platter of cheese. This delaying of the exciting stuff that makes life worth living feels so typical of him, and I'm pissed off. 

Then we get on the road and we stop when we reach a frozen lake. We walk onto the lake. I'm very concerned about the thickness of the ice. I can see where it's not frozen. There are water bubbles that form under the ice when I walk on it. However, I don't see any fish or other animals, and it really surprises me. I wonder if the lake is sick if there's no wildlife. I think to myself that if this was California, there would surely be visible fish in the water. Then I see a large fish speed by. And I see another large fish. I love that they're here.

I look back at my parents and realize I've only worried about myself this whole time. I haven't been worried if they'd fall in. I've only been wondering about what I would do if the ice cracked under me and I fell in.

Then we start driving towards a relative's house, and my father just... veers into the left lane of traffic and off the road entirely into another lake that isn't frozen over. Everything is in slow motion as the car's trajectory gets farther and farther off of the correct path. I get a sense that this is something very fated and inevitable as he drives us to our watery doom. It's like I knew he was going to do this eventually, and it's a relief to stop worrying about it and having so many anxious fantasies about it and just know with concrete experience what it's like to actually have it happen. 

The car turns upside down in the lake, but we all manage to escape. We arrive at my relative, Markiplier's, yellowish house--drenched. 

INTERPRETATION

I went on a couple horrible road trips with my parents as an older child. It angered me that my father would refuse to plan these trips. He would say that there's no point in planning anything because we could never know what would happen in life--a wild exaggeration of the lack of control we have over where we go and what we do on a vacation, or life in general, in my opinion. But perhaps his mental illness influenced that attitude about trip planning. 

How could he ever know if psychosis or a horrible, black mood would strike him down? I'm sure it shaped many of his major life decisions. My own life story has an abruptly-changing quality to it that would have been much smoother had I not been mentally ill. 

Walking on the dangerous, frozen lake reminds me of how when I was younger, I had a habit of wanting to wander away from my parents on our outings. Something about it gave me a feeling of wanting to be close enough for the comfort of having parents, but not wanting to have anything to do with them. 

And then my dad steers us way off-course in the car. He often had really bad ideas based on a mix of conspiracy theories and fundamentalist Christianity. It felt really frightening and unstable. He didn't take care of either his physical or his mental health, so I always felt prepared to lose him. So when he died, there was a a little bit of surprise and gratitude that he had lasted as long as he had.